Joint Initiatives for Youth + Families (JI) is excited to announce that we have received two Community Innovation and Resilience for Care and Learning Equity (CIRCLE) Grants for building on workforce supports. JI houses Alliance for Kids, El Paso’s Early Childhood Council, under its early childhood department of Foundations. In partnership with the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, Early Milestones is leading the CIRCLE Initiative. This initiative will provide nearly $23 million in grants to child care providers and other community, education, or governmental partners pursuing innovative solutions to challenges worsened by the pandemic.
JI and the 1st CIRCLE Grant
Scaling a collaborative approach to Early Childhood Education (ECE) career navigation, Denver’s Early Childhood Council (DECC), the Early Childhood Partnership of Adams County (ECPAC), and JI/Foundations, created the Early Childhood Career Navigation Collaborative (known as the Collaborative) in 2021 through a Transforming the Early Childhood Workforce in Colorado workforce innovation grant. Early childhood educators often reference complex and confusing steps for entering and growing within the profession. Career navigation seeks to bring clarity to pathway options, provide relevant resources, and build confidence in early childhood educators to achieve their goals. Since summer of 2021, each council provided career navigation to support prospective and current early childhood educators to advance in their careers across early learning settings and formed a community to learn together and identify opportunities for policy and systems change. Activities planned are to build on successful collaboration and implementation and focus on cultivating new partnerships and expanding pipelines to recruit professionals, a dire need as communities work to build a strong workforce for the implementation of Universal Pre-K upon the heels of the pandemic. These collaborative activities will support systems-building efforts for creating a framework that would allow more Colorado communities to implement a career navigation model. Our efforts will also support advocacy for targeted statewide policy and systems development.
Studies demonstrate that high-quality early childhood environments, especially for children under five, support long-term brain development and kindergarten readiness. Qualified early childhood educators are the foundation of high-quality learning environments. The proposed activities will benefit prospective and current early childhood educators in Adams, Denver, and El Paso Counties with diverse backgrounds, particularly undocumented, immigrant, and dual-language child care professionals.
The Collaborative serves as the foundational tri-county partnership to align community-level efforts, while simultaneously informing possible statewide implementation. JI partners with the following local entities to support the Career Navigation Program:
- The El Paso County Workforce Task Force includes ECE providers, the Pikes Peak Workforce Development Center, Pikes Peak Community Foundation, School Districts, Pikes Peak State College, and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.
JI and the 2nd CIRCLE Grant
The second CIRCLE Grant, known as ECE Boost, funds implementation of a one-year pilot of staff and instructional supports that are responsive to individual teacher needs. Supports could include interns to distribute the instructional workload; substitute teachers for scheduled days off; overtime pay; and relevant professional development. The pilot enables ECE program owners to implement new ideas and, in collaboration with JI’s Foundations Partner Recruiter, assess the impact of these strategies on retention. ECE Boost includes strategies for reaching young people earlier in their career decision-making and expands career ladder marketing through branding, media, and videos. The demographic targets are youth and adults considering future careers or career development. ECE Boost will engage both middle and high school students in examining careers that benefit from ECE training and experience. Adults seeking a new or revitalized ECE career will benefit from an expanded media campaign with links to education, supplemental training, and career growth.
ECE Boost will create a regional marketing and outreach plan that incorporates new advertising and marketing materials. A marketing “toolkit” will be printed in Spanish and English and geared toward a diverse pool of candidates. The marketing and outreach plan created under this grant will direct the county-wide distribution of the toolkit, which includes digital media strategies and display ad opportunities targeted at individuals falling in target recruitment areas. Individual early childhood program providers can request the marketing “toolkit” to help with recruitment. The marketing toolkit will encourage and/or directly connect all individuals interested in the ECE field to visit a new career pathways web page, Jointinitiatives.org/ececareerpathways. This web page will guide individuals through an ECE career pathway and connect them with a Career Navigator.
The ECE Boost pilot project, plus the pipeline and career ladder innovations, will allow the community to stabilize, retain, and build the Pikes Peak Region’s ECE workforce. A new workforce database module will enhance data collection and disaggregation.
The ECE Boost project team is seeking lasting systemic changes that alleviate the ECE workforce shortage in El Paso County by promoting the career field, annually recruiting new candidates, and retaining professionals. Within the timeframe of the grant, the project team will engage in an outcome-based evaluation of the project.
JI’s work focuses on proactively filling the gaps and removing barriers to building a pipeline of ECE teachers through innovative new strategies for recruitment and retention of ECE teachers as we described above.
As mentioned in a Colorado Sun article published on September 16, 2022, Colorado is turning to “everyone from Gen Z to retirees” as it tries to staff up for expanded preschool in 2023.
The article states, “The new Department of Early Childhood does not know how many early childhood educators the state has or will need next fall and aims to secure those numbers by January.”
An estimated 66,000 4- and 5-year-old students will be eligible for the Universal Pre-K program, in which the state will provide at least 10 hours a week of free preschool to every child in the year before kindergarten. Anywhere between 60% to 80% of eligible children could enroll in the expanded preschool program, according to state projections, said Lisa Roy, executive director for the new Colorado Department of Early Childhood.
According to the article, there’s “a shortage of every kind” for employees across industries, including in ECE department.
“There’s going to have to be multiple strategies. We’re going to have to work with high school students and identifying high school students that have an interest. The use of a mixed delivery system actually will help us to get there a lot easier,” Roy said.
With a variety of early childhood settings taking part in the state’s expanded preschool program, including schools, child care centers and licensed home-based providers, Colorado stands a better chance of having an adequate workforce, Roy said.
Joint Initiatives (JI) the Colorado Springs-based nonprofit that focuses on early childhood, juvenile justice, and racial equity has been tackling the early childhood workforce crisis in El Paso County for more than a year, states the article. The organization, which will oversee the rollout of expanded preschool in El Paso County, is branching out to partner with school districts to expand high school class offerings that will set students on a path to become qualified to staff an early childhood classroom, according to Kelly Hurtado, JI’s Vice President of Programs.
The article states that JI’s work doesn’t stop with high schoolers. The organization is even reaching out to middle school students, attending career days to put early childhood education on their radar at a time when they’re already thinking about the kinds of careers they’re open to and the ones they’re not — and before the adults in their lives sway them away from teaching. It is critical to “try to influence that narrative at that point in a child’s development around their future potential,” Hurtado said, adding that the job of early childhood educators is often reduced to babysitting, which overlooks the profound effect it can have on children’s lives.
High schoolers, in particular, are “very invested in seeking work that aligns with their values or their own personal mission,” Hurtado said. “And so knowing that early childhood (is) such an important way to impact social change, we see them as a target demographic. It is the crux of what we need to address to make the rest of the early childhood system function,” said Kelly Hurtado. “If we don’t have a solid, stable, high-quality workforce, it’s going to be very difficult for us to offer high quality early childhood programming.”
For the complete article from The Colorado Sun, visit:
coloradosun.com/2022/09/16/colorado-preschool-teacher-shortage-education/