Making Connections Early Childhood Education Convening
Annie E. Casey Foundation, Baltimore, MD
April 27-29, 2004

NOTES

Decisions/Next Steps:

• Follow up on meeting with La Clinica – Promotoras project
• Hold meeting with Ruben Lizardo around parent organizing piece – Friday May 21 st, 2:30pm at California Tomorrow
• Get in touch with BAYCES about work on this with small schools
• Try to find a map of early childhood education funding resources
• Hold an immediate family event; plan family literacy and other work
• Send around overview from conference description as a piece for folks to work on
• Revise school readiness site description before sharing (to reflect Casey language). Kerry and Kathleen will help.

April 28, 2004

1. OPENING DISCUSSION:
   • Learning from the case study: What do we need to know in order to create an opportunity statement?
   • We would like to go home with specific next steps. Do we know everything in order to brainstorm what exists?
   • What are the local models that we could use?
     • Cultivate leadership skills of parents
     • Walkers and talkers model – for school readiness
     • Oakland Ready to Learn
     • EBAYC - parent organizing
   • Keep in mind the language challenges (many language groups)
2. OAKLAND’S STRENGTHS:
   • EBAYC parent leadership model (within schools K-8)
   • Two Even Start programs
   • Four Head Start programs
   • East Bay Perinatal
   • Community Health Clinic ( La Clinica)
   • Faith institutions (specific programs – New Hope)
   • Oakland Ready to Learn – City wide
   • Bananas – Parent Resource Center
   • First Five
   • School District language capability/translation
   • Book Mobile
   • Children’s Library
   • AECF
   • Parent Involvement
   • KQED First Book Program
   • School District Pre-School ( Hawthorne Pre- K, Centro Infantile)
   • Healthy Start infrastructure that was left
   • New Small Schools
   • OCC parent organizing
   • Private family day care
3. GOALS:
   • Promote advocacy and leadership of parents; build capacity to work with agencies;
   • Better communications and collaborations to address gaps, integrate;
   • Increase opps for early literacy opportunities parent-child reaching out to those not involved
   • Opps for families to extend literacy into homes
4. STRATEGIES:
   • Parent Leadership: through outreach, organizing ed-workshops, distributing resources, parent mentoring, small grants program; a second phase could be training select parents as literacy instructors.
   • Collaboration Network: hold a meeting of representatives, do joint training and outreach; a second phase could involve bringing in family day care providers and licensing child care providers.
   • Early literacy outreach events: relationship building; parent instructors leading activities in multiple languages
   • Extension of home visits with literacy activities
   • Discussion:
   • Need to provide or look at teacher training.
   • Remember that we are working towards schools being ready for kids as well as kids being ready for schools.
   • Data to inform goals and strategies? We used reading scores and literacy levels of parents; we met twice with providers. We need to check in with parents about the goals/ strategies.
   • We need to get parents involved K, 1 st grade schools district folks ( in addition to Pre-K folks).
   • Match/negotiate what we are interested in having kids learn (social, etc) in addition to the academic goals set for the child by the school district.
   • What are the state req’s for kindergarten? “A team of people working on it”
   • Need to find out: Who in school district is most involved in this?
   • Open Court is now getting into the Pre K curriculum development
   • Critical pieces:
     1. Families know where child is going, etc
     2. Content is appropriate
   • What the school readiness piece? Results based budget – could lend towards parent and advocate influence. The advocacy doesn’t have to wait for parent organizing.
5. OPPORTUNITIES
   • Results based budgeting with in school district
   • Parent Advocacy opportunity (look at small schools ready to learn convening City Policy efforts)
   • Training for teachers, principals, parents (USC, Census, Cal-Works, OUSD, FES Survey, Cross-Site Survey, Ch. Bruner paper, parents)
   • Fiscal Analysis
   • Supporting parent leadership activities
   • Small Grants program
   • Research/data- contract
     • USC, Cal-Works, Census, C.Brunner paper, parents, FES Survey, MC Cross Site Survey
   • Partnering with Health Promoters – linking early childhood with health
     • Creating shared agenda (also a challenge) Connecting with other work ( FES, organizing around different issues with different groups
     • KQED still has money for family workshop around “ New Americans”
   • Get in touch with BAYCES about work on this with small schools
6. CHALLENGES
   • Time
   • Meeting times
   • Creating a share agenda
   • Funding
   • Need for more involvement
   • Getting the right data
7. OPPORTUNITIES REVISITED:
   • Readiness Standards for Schools:
     • How do you build on these so that you don’t slide backwards with kids who are ready
     • Schools need to be ready for kids who come in ready
   • Oakland Ready to Learn:
     • Best convening people (school district, provider, etc.)
     • Trust ; willingness to share
     • Focused on service delivery, staying in a couple of neighborhoods to get results
     • Don’t have leadership capacity to do policy at this point due to constraints
   • Head Start Policy Council Parents:
     • Chair from Sungate; another from San Antonio CDC. This could be a void for policy change.
     • We need to do citywide policy advocacy; OFCY is disproportionately not funding early childhood.
     • Title 1: What are the possibilities for parent education? Other money sources? TANF? Can anyone provide us a map of funding resources?
   • West Oakland Parent Leaders Training:
     • Kids are taken care of by Oakland Ready To Learn. Could we use this model?
     • There is a multi-stranded approach -talking with parents about what’s needed; Strands include: 1) Research- numbers of providers, kids, what’s out there, whats the demand, how much are we currently spending? Who is in licensed day care (1/3 of kids)?; 2) literacy activites; 3) mini grant approach
8. NEXT STEPS
   • Data report – end of May
   • Look at FES results and cross site surveys
   • Make sure that La Clinica is looking at or thinking about early childhood in the Promotora project (linking early childhood with health)
   • More info from Denver on parent organizing
   • Plan events to bring groups together ( raise awareness)
   • Raise awareness of this work group to MC start with Head Start, Even Start moms and grow it from there – family events; build off existing efforts (Head, Even Start, Ready to Learn)
   • Build on OFTC activities where they pay parents to help make material for program
   • Focus groups
   • Create a work-group on this for the LSAC?
   • What about hiring an organizer/facilitator for the MC Initiative? (rather than an organizing entity)
   • It would be home–based, rather than school-based
   • KQED family workshops
   • Hold an event at Fairyland?
     *Junious will call Andrea to schedule next meeting
9. WHO DO WE NEED?
   • Parents
   • Teachers
   • School District
   • LLP (data)
   • Health Partners (La Clinca)
   • FES Partners
   • K-12 Learning Director
   • Corporate Sponsors
   • Public funding streams
   • EBAYC (Parent Organizing)
   • California Tomorrow
10. BROADER ISSUE
• There is a broader context that deals with issues like health, nutrition, economic, etc that relate to a families ability to be involved in early childhood education activities. We should engage in thinking about ways to take pressure off of parents so that they are be able to participate

April 29, 2004

1. OPENING DISCUSSION
   • How do we start organizing? Hire a full-time organizer? Keep in mind that if you don’t have to hire a full-time organizer, you should spare yourself the challenge.
   • General issue: children don’t necessarily go to school in their neighborhood
   • Want parents to be able to articulate what they want in a way that schools understand.
   • Home-based vs. school-based
   • Quality rating system
2. RESOURCES
   • OaklandNationalCenter for Family Literacy
     • Help communities figure out these programs
     • Parent-child literacy programs
     • Find natural leaders
     • Have appeal with funders
   • Success by Six
     • Partnered with Healthy Start and HANDS
     • Reached 200 homes – 150 read every other day 50 read every day
     • Utilizes paid resource mom
   • PTA or PTSA – Head Start
     • Issues with translation
     • School Site Councils
     • Title 1 Advisory Groups
3. GROUP DISCUSSION
   • Keeping connections with existing work – parents involved
   • Need capacity of organizers to work in different language groups
   • Send the health promoters project description to group
   • When we open to resident involvement and participation, they may change some of the agenda.
   • Replicating organizing model with another group; key is having 4-5 organizers – is this feasible?
   • Infrastructure / design issue
   • Is there a need for one central organizing body?
   • It is difficult to bring in and organizing group with and already existing model
   • Offering opinions on process
   • Louisville approach to organizing – opposite of consensus organizing
   • Have CTWO look at different organizing models and resolving differences
   • Could we build out the Promotoras model? Could we evolve it with more numbers of promotoras? On a temporary basis? Would give EBACY or CTWO do the training for the project?
   • We know we want to do outreach/education.
   • Create link with different scopes of work- get two organizations to work together.
   • Have parent organizing curriculum for West Oakland parents
   • Kerry has Parent Organizing model from West Oakland (Ruben Lizardo)
   • Oakland Ready to Learn could work with La Clinica, East Bay Peninatal
   • Model is more information / education – interested in expanding to other areas – leadership engagement
   • Individuals / homes / clinics / fairs
   • Models used in different ways
   • Repetitive ongoing relationship – peer to peer - how often do the meet?
   • Desire to frame this as the whole family
   • Partnership around different language group
   • Have Ruben come and have a conversation about organizing, share ideas
   • We already have these areas of focus and a team that is working together
   • Promotoras: share with La Clinica – we want to build parent leadership would be good to have something to plug them into; will grow over time.
   • Plan for development enough to get money
   • Resolve structure of work group
   • Have a conversation with Andrea about ideas and options around parent organizing.
   • Hold an immediate family event; plan family literacy and other work
   • Whole group coming together? Meeting with Ruben so that people feel included; would help to bring clarity around organizing piece; clarity around language
   • Send around overview from conference description as a piece for folks to work on
   • Revise school readiness site description before sharing (to reflect Casey language). Kerry and Kathleen will help.