Implementation Experiences – Chris Amirault

Implementation Experiences – Chris Amirault Program Transcript

CHRIS AMIRAULT: In general we've had a very positive experience with NAEYC support for accreditation and haven't run into too many problems. That said, the main reason why I think I can say that is that we had adequate staff support to make sure that that could happen. And the person who worked with us on this and continues to do so did take full advantage of the online materials, phone support, on the paper-based materials that we received, and so on.

I think that the main challenge to our program has been, and I think in some ways continues to be, the fact that our curriculum is not a purchased product. And so providing documentation for what we do and how we do it has been something that we have had to learn how to do. There was one year, actually— again, I think it was 2006—where the teachers had done a lot of work labeling photographs to provide documentation for various things.

And the weekend before our visit, we went through our folders and learned that, again, there were some real misconceptions and things weren't quite labeled right. And we had to sort of move things around and make sure that they had the right labels and things like that. And it was a good example of, I think, again, the sort of burdensome level of detail that we didn't want to have fall on our teachers.

We wanted to have it fall on our administrators, but of course, at some point your classroom teachers have to be part of that documentation process. And we've gotten much, much better at that in the last 10 years, but that definitely was a challenge.

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Implementation Experiences – Crystal Shatara

Implementation Experiences – Crystal Shatara Program Transcript

CRYSTAL SHATARA: Everywhere we turned, we had support. And we had support from the team inside the building, as well as support from our corporate office. We have our own accreditation team that walks us through every step, and helps us find all the policies and how we meet all those standards on the paperwork side, as far as all of our family handbooks and all of our medication policies and all that goes. So I think everywhere we turned, we had help and support from every aspect that we needed it from.

I think the biggest challenge that programs face when going through the process is finding quality staff, finding staff that not only meet your state licensing requirements, but meet the additional educational requirements that Macy recommends.

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Implementation Experiences – Mary Graham

Implementation Experiences – Mary Graham Program Transcript

MARY GRAHAM: Going through the accreditation process is daunting. It is very comprehensive. As the director, you could feel invigorated getting the 10 books, or you could feel overwhelmed getting the 10 books and saying, how are we ever going to do this?

In Philadelphia, we're very fortunate to have a very active local AEYC affiliate, who, in the '90s, wanted to take on the mission of increasing the number of accredited centers in the area. In fact, they received a great deal of funding. DVAECY and other organizations received a huge grant from the William Penn Foundation and came up with this project called Child Care Matters.

During that six-year process, the goal was to increase the quality of child care centers in the Philadelphia region going through the accreditation process. At the time, there was no QRIS or Keystone Stars. None of the states were doing any of the quality rating systems. So the way to go was through NACY. We received a great deal of support through the Child Care Matters project. We received the accreditation support from DVAECY, but we also received financial support in this process.

During a self-study, you highlight what areas do need improvement. Do you need to purchase different types of equipment for certain learning areas or certain learning centers? Do you need to improve some of your policies regarding benefits for staff, since they address, do you have benefits for staff, and what are they? Do you give staff planning time outside of the classroom?

So that entire process was helpful in looking at it. I never felt that Children's Village was going through this alone. We always felt that DVAECY and NACY had our backs, as did other agencies. Philadelphia is like a large family. We're all connected, so what happens in one center is often supported by what's happening in other centers.

So I met with a number of directors, who, over the last 30 years, have become some of my closest friends, and specifically going through the NACY accreditation process, because there are some things that you have to think of. And there's no need to reinvent the wheel. If this other agency had a policy already written, how could we modify it for our program?

So it's really an exchange of knowledge, both in small centers versus large centers, and for-profit centers versus non-profit centers. How could we share, and how could we work together? I think one of the best benefits of the accreditation process in Philadelphia was to develop the fellowship of the childcare directors. After an agency started through the process, we got financial

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Implementation Experiences – Mary Graham

support through Childcare Matters based on the numbers of low income children we had.

So it was a financial boost to us as well. Later, when NACY redesigned the accreditation process, we happened to be in the first group of people going through the redesign, and we all had lots of questions, including the local AEYC staff. That's at the time when we called on the national AEYC staff and always found them to be responsive and supportive.

This isn't to say that it's a perfect process, and being involved in NACY, you have the opportunity to give feedback through this process. They have been very responsive. That's why they've redesigned it once, and they're in the process of redesigning again. They hear when we say there's too much paperwork, or this is a problem, or this is an issue. That has been good as well, that it's not just NACY saying there from the top, this is what happens, but rather it is a communal effort.

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Implementation Experiences – Lorraine Cooke

Implementation Experiences – Lorraine Cooke Program Transcript

LORRAINE COOKE: Some of the problems or challenges that we encountered were cross-referencing items that were redundant between and among standards. It was kind of walking through the dark and finding your way. I decided to develop a file system which was divided by standard and criterion. And I filed the sources of evidence, but then I realized that there were so many redundancies that the evidence kept being filed in different criterion and that became very frustrating.

And the volume of paper was just enormous. So it took months to figure that part out. I kept going through the manual and highlighting and cross-referencing. Since my program was one of the first locally to go through this reinvented accreditation process, I really had no one to share my experiences with. I did have contact with staff in NAEYC Academy who were very helpful. Fortunately, my being a pioneer I was able to share my system with the new programs going through the system after we did. So that was helpful to other programs.

Also challenging was some criteria was just not applicable to our center. One of those was a criterion regarding the use of outdoor pesticides. It's so not relevant to us because we're located in an urban environment and pesticides have nothing to do with us. And while I may be assessor aware of that, we were still rated very poorly on this criterion. I do believe that that criterion has been removed since it was realized that it just was not applicable to many center settings.

I think the biggest challenge that most directors and programs have is actually getting started. The accreditation materials used to come in a big box and many directors said, oh my god, I've got the box and I can't even open it. So just opening it was intimidating.

It's important to break the process down into small pieces. We did learn that. It's a lot of work, but it certainly does make the program better.

Scheduling is important. So you actually allocate a specific block of time in your day just for the accreditation work. And it really is possible to run a program and pursue accreditation.

I did learn that delegation was necessary. As I said, having a lead teacher take on the monitoring of the classroom portfolios saves an enormous amount of my time. Allowing the social worker or the family worker to take on the families and community piece helped. The custodian was able to deal with the facility. The kitchen staff worked on nutrition. And it's helpful to make relationships with health

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Implementation Experiences – Lorraine Cooke

professionals in the community because that will also help you in the process. And bringing in the entire team is absolutely necessary.

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Implementation Experiences – Mandy Doy

Implementation Experiences – Mandy Doy Program Transcript

MANDY DOY: The problems and the challenges that the programs encounter are a lot around credentialing. Early childhood education, Bachelor degrees, or any type of degrees, even associate degrees or CDAs, are decreasing. Far few people are graduating from college with DCE degrees. A lot of them are graduating with elementary education degrees, and seeking positions in the public school system.

So to get those people involved in our early childhood programs and to get them to want to be credentialed is quite a challenge. The support—I think that there needs to be more support and resources in regard to that portion of the evaluations, or the QRIS process.

Monetarily our teachers don't make very much money. So people that are in ECC are never in it for the dollars. They're in it for the passion of caring for children and educating children. The support that they would really need is more monetary support than anything else.

As far as programs for actively interested in accreditation, I think it can be a combination of me seeking to have programs interested in accreditation, and then also program seeking help with accreditation. It all depends on the program.

You have individuals where they really want to improve their program. And they're ready to take on that next step. You have programs that would really benefit from taking on to the next role of accreditation or QRIS in the state of Illinois.

Where we typically see programs falling short when they begin the process is really the organization portion of it. There is a lot of paperwork, a lot of administration pieces that go into it. There's a lot of collecting of information.

You can't create all of the information in a short period of time. It's really over a course of a year that you're collecting data—communication from the parents, communications about the children, transitions that the children are going through. All of that information has to be collected throughout that time period, because if your program is being evaluated in a month, you can't recreate all of that information to collect it all so that the evaluator can see it.

So it really is a yearlong process so that you can get all the data collected that you need. So those are some of the things that you really have to address before you want to proceed. It has to be a proactive step. You have to have all of your ducks in a row in terms of if you have organizations such as learning care group

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Implementation Experiences – Mandy Doy

where you have multiple programs that run some of the same pieces from a corporation aspect, it's a little bit easier.

But it still is center-specific. So you still have to have all of the center communications, the center newsletters, and pieces like that so that you can move on with the accreditation portion once the evaluator gets there.

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Implementation Experiences – Christy Opsommer

Implementation Experiences – Christy Opsommer Program Transcript

CHRISTY OPSOMMER: In some situations, we see programs having challenges in regards to maintaining quality staff. And unfortunately, in our industry, that's something that we see across companies and across programs. And so really working to move forward through the accreditation or the QRIS process, regardless of turnover, and making sure that those new folks coming into our schools have an understanding of the process, in regards to accreditation and QRIS, and continuing to move along the track of becoming accredited and QRIS- rated rather than stopping the process altogether because of the staffing changes.

Depending on the accrediting body or the quality rating and improvement system, there are varying levels of support. And in some cases, we see schools being supported by folks coming in from different county agencies and really coaching them through the process, talking to them about what is expected, really helping them to move forward and get to those higher levels of quality.

There are often resources that are online that schools can look into. Our support here at our corporate office actually works with the schools to provide policy changes if needed, give them information about teacher training. In other cases, we don't see as much support. Or in some cases, we see the support being contradictory. And so licensing might give a school one set of guidance. And the actually technical assistance give a different set of guidance. And that's, I think, where schools struggle the most.

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