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Part 1: Center-Based Programs
Early Head Start Program Profile
Family Star Early Head Start
Denver, Colorado
November 3-5, 1997
Family Star, which operates a Montessori school for infants and toddlers, operates a new Early Head Start program for 75 families at two centers in northeast and northwest Denver, Colorado. Many families served by the program are Spanish-speaking Latino families. The program provides full-time child development and care in Family Star's Montessori school while parents are working or in school and offers monthly parent education meetings. Program services are child-centered, and staff members speak both Spanish and English with the children.
OVERVIEW
Family Star operates an Early Head Start (EHS) program in Denver, Colorado. Family Star began in 1989, when a group of citizens took over an abandoned building being used as a crack house across from the Maria Mitchell Elementary School (a Montessori school) in northeast Denver. They turned the building into a Montessori school for children ages 0 to 6. Family Star expanded in 1997 and opened a school in northwest Denver, where most of the EHS children are served.
Community Context. Family Star serves families living in the poorest areas of Denver. Northwest Denver has problems common to many urban areas, including high levels of poverty, crime, and substance abuse, as well as a lack of services (most notably child care, affordable housing, and public transportation). Community leaders are committed to improvement and have formed collaborations to address these problems.
Program Model. Family Star is a center-based child development program providing services in two centers. Children receive full-time care in Family Star's Montessori school while their parents are working or in school. The family services advocate works with families to develop family goals, and she reviews their progress toward those goals. Families receive home visits from their child's directress/director (the lead teacher) before families enter the program and again when children make a transition to a new classroom (usually when they are 14 months old).
Families. Family Star serves diverse families. Two-thirds are Hispanic, and one-third belong to other racial/ethnic groups. The majority of families are single-parent families, but about one-third of families include two parents. Approximately one-fifth of the mothers were pregnant when they enrolled in the program. About one-third of the families were receiving welfare cash assistance when they enrolled.
Staffing. The Family Star staff members who care for children include 5 directresses, 1 director, and 12 assistants. Family Star also employs three part-time assistants who provide coverage when staff members are absent or must leave early. The Montessori mentor observes staff as they work with children and provides individual and group feedback, which is also used to plan staff training sessions. The health coordinator and infant/mental health specialist work directly with families as needed and also provide staff training and consultation. The family services advocate is responsible for all recruitment and enrollment activities, and she works with families to link them to needed community resources. The child services coordinator schedules the child development center staff, plans and conducts staff training, and oversees the program's adherence to the Montessori approach. The program coordinator oversees all aspects of the program, facilitates the program's health services advisory council and policy council, and serves as a key link to the Head Start community. The executive director is a community leader who creates and maintains collaboration among community agencies and programs serving children.
RECRUITMENT AND ENROLLMENT
Program Eligibility. Family Star serves families who live in northwest Denver, between Interstate 70 and Alameda Boulevard from north to south, and from Sheridan Avenue to Broadway from west to east. Families must meet the EHS income guidelines, be working or in school, and have a child between the ages of 7 and 12 months. (The age requirement was designed to facilitate enrollment in the research.) For its infant/parent classroom, Family Star recruited 10 expectant mothers. The program also targets Spanish-speaking families, homeless families, and families with children who have special needs.
Since its beginnings in northeast Denver, Family Star's approach has been to develop a program that serves families at all income levels, with a sliding-fee scale. The executive director plans to expand the northwest program to include families from all income levels, because she believes that a mixed-income model is the best way to support a high-quality child development center and enrich the lives of all families in the community.
Recruiting Strategies. Family Star staff members use many strategies to recruit families. Those strategies include sending flyers out from the city's Department of Social Services and from local high schools, canvassing door-to-door, advertising on the radio, conducting over 50 community presentations, and providing an orientation to the program for community members. To overcome strong cultural beliefs against having strangers care for very young children, the program has worked intensively to introduce itself to the community. Referrals from other community service providers have been the best source of families to target for recruitment.
Enrollment. Family Star's Early Head
Start program is funded to serve 75 families, all of whom will participate
in the EHS evaluation. At the time of the site visit, Family Star was
serving 52 children at the northwest center, 38 of whom were participating
in EHS and the national research (the children who were not in EHS were
older or were from families who did not meet the EHS income guidelines).
The northeast center was serving seven EHS nonresearch children. Since
Family Star began providing EHS services, five families have left the
program because they moved, lost custody of their child, or did not actually
live in the program's service area.
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Family Star serves families living in four neighborhoods in northwest Denver, Colorado. Denver is a booming city that has grown substantially in the past 10 years. The housing and job markets are very tight, and the cost of living has increased. The vacancy rate in Denver is three percent, and affordable housing is lacking. Northwest Denver is home to a diverse community that includes approximately 70 percent Latino families. Part of the area Family Star serves is located in an Enterprise Zone. Northwest Denver has problems common to many urban areas, including crime, drug use, a high teenage pregnancy rate, low high-school completion rates, and heavy traffic. Approximately 40 percent of families in the area are at or below the federal poverty level, and half are headed by single parents. The high school dropout rate ranges from 6 to 65 percent across the four neighborhoods. Few low-skilled jobs are available in the area. Parents reported that most jobs that pay well require technical training. Parents believe that transportation is a barrier to finding better positions, because many large employers are located in the suburbs, and there is no fast, reliable public transportation system. At the time of the site visit, Denver citizens voted down a proposal to build a light rail system to link the growing city to its sprawling metropolitan area. Community leaders hope to address the transportation issue over the next few years. Local service providers and EHS staff reported that many services are available in the community, but they are often insufficient, and families do not know how to access them. In particular, the supply of affordable, quality child care is insufficient, and affordable housing is lacking. Funders have encouraged service providers in Denver to coordinate services for low-income families. The network of community health clinics is strong and provides high-quality health care for low-income families. Many other successful collaborations have been developed. Community collaborators reported, however, that Head Start and the public health community have not cooperated with each other in the past. The Family Star staff members have worked with community partners to improve collaboration; in the past year, they have brought in a dentist to conduct dental screenings for all of the children, arranged for staff members to receive donated vaccines, and held a community-wide disabilities screening at the school. A significant strength of the community is its commitment to programs that serve young children. Colorado has had a state-run preschool program since 1992. It serves approximately 1,500 at-risk three- and four-year-old children in Denver. The governor and the mayor have commissioned a variety of panels to study such topics as the availability of child care and the effects of new welfare reform requirements on children. A new initiative, called Educare, brings together the business, education, and child care communities concerned with early child care and education. The Family Star executive director is a community leader who is often invited to participate on panels that recommend strategies to develop programs to serve children in Denver. |
The families the program serves are culturally diverse; about two-thirds are Latino, 10 percent are African American, 10 percent are white, and the rest are from mixed ethnic backgrounds. The program's focus is on serving Latino families; therefore, most of the staff are bilingual. Both Spanish and English are spoken with the children throughout the day. Fifteen percent of the mothers enrolled in the program are teenagers. The majority of families are single-parent families.
The families the program serves are culturally diverse; about two-thirds are Latino, 10 percent are African American, 10 percent are white, and the rest are from mixed ethnic backgrounds. The program's focus is on serving Latino families; therefore, most of the staff are bilingual. Both Spanish and English are spoken with the children throughout the day. Fifteen percent of the mothers enrolled in the program are teenagers. The majority of families are single-parent families.
Enrolled families bring a variety of strengths to the program. Many are highly motivated to succeed and meet their education and employment goals, and they are responsive to the help and input they receive from the program. Families also have a range of needs, including transportation, child care, better employment opportunities, and affordable, safe housing.
CHILD DEVELOPMENT CORNERSTONE
Center-Based Child Development Services. Family Star provides full-time child care services Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Children who are 2 to 14 months old are cared for in the Nido (an Italian word for nest). At the time of the site visit, the maximum group size in the Nido was 10, and the child-adult ratio was 3 to 1. When children are about 14 months old, they move to the Infant Community. In the Infant Community, the maximum group size is 10, and the child-adult ratio is 5 to 1. Each classroom is led by a Montessori directress or director, who must hold an Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) diploma. Each directress/director is supported by assistants, who are trained by the program on the Montessori approach and other aspects of caring for children in the school.
| Family Star staff members believe that their Montessori curriculum and approach (which requires a well-trained, aware adult, a prepared physical environment, and children who are given the structure and materials they need) will improve child development outcomes by supporting child exploration, communication, development of trust, and independence. |
Everything Family Star staff members do in the classrooms is child-centered. Staff members provide direction, while the classroom environment and routine give a sense of order, helping to establish appropriate sleeping and nutritional habits for the children. Because Family Star emphasizes a respectful, multi-cultural approach, staff speak both Spanish and English with the children. Because the classrooms were designed to "fit" children and meet their needs, everything is child-sized. Parents are indirectly affected by these practices, and many parents begin to institute these patterns at home.
In February 1997, the program conducted an infant/parent classroom (I/PC) for 10 expectant first-time mothers and their male partners. Four of the mothers were teenagers. For eight weeks, the I/PC met in the school three times a week for three hours a day. Expectant parents participated in the prenatal curriculum, which introduced them to the Montessori approach and what it was like to become a parent. The I/PC also provided an opportunity for additional social support and sharing. The directress who conducted the class visited each family at home after the baby was born to help it set up the best environment for its newborn. Seven of the 10 families who participated in the I/PC enrolled their children in the school. Staff reported that those parents seem more sure of themselves and have had fewer problems adjusting to the demands of the program than other parents who did not participate in the I/PC. The program plans to conduct the I/PC again.
Family Star requires parents to prepare and bring nutritious food for their children that is consistent with the Montessori approach. Children under six months old receive ground solid foods that consist of protein, grains, vegetables, and fruits. Older children eat solid food. Staff members discourage parents from sending sweets or "junk foods." All children over six months old drink from glasses, use "real" plates and utensils, and sit on child-sized chairs at small tables for all meals and snacks. Children help with preparing meals and with cleaning up, and they eat at their own pace. Everything is done at the children's pace. The Montessori curriculum also prescribes the approach to toilet learning and to the structure of the classroom's physical environment, which parents learn about when they enroll their child in the school.
Group Child Development Activities. The program provides parent education through informal teaching and modeling when parents drop off and pick up their children, discussions at monthly parent meetings, and special program activities. Parent meetings are held one evening a month in the program's large staff room/kitchen. The staff conducted a parent interest survey to determine which parent education topics would be of interest. At the time of the site visit, the infant/mental health specialist was preparing to discuss guidance and discipline at the next parent meeting. Parent meetings are well attended, with approximately 40 parents participating.
Family Star's community includes some grandparents who are primary caretakers for children in the program. Staff members are working to support these grandparents and their unique needs. One grandparent organized a support group that provides a forum for grandparents to discuss their concerns and share them with each other.
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The Family Star EHS program provides full-time child care, and at the time of the site visit, none of the children were receiving care in other child care arrangements. In the four neighborhoods Family Star serves, six child care centers serve children under age 3. Community leaders believe that child care availability and quality will become larger issues as more families in the community reach the welfare reform time limits during the next two years. Community partners and parents noted that many members of the Latino community have strong reservations about leaving their children in the care of paid child care providers, because their preference is to have parents or other close relatives care for their children. Parents reported that after getting to know the Family Star staff members and seeing how well their children are cared for, their concerns have decreased. Staff members believe that community attitudes toward center care and using child care in general will change as more parents and community leaders share their experiences working with Family Star. |
Child Development Assessments. Family Star directresses/directors conduct formal assessments of progress toward early childhood education and parenting goals three times per year using the Ages and Stages Questionnaires. They conduct informal assessments and observations in the classrooms more frequently. Classroom staff use the results of the assessments as they develop each child's individual lesson plan. They complete the assessments with parents at parent conferences held at the school three times a year. At the parent conferences, they also discuss the assessments, set goals, and plan how to meet those goals.
Health Services. At the time of the site visit, the program had recently hired a part-time health coordinator to monitor the children's physical health, oversee staff training and parent education in the health area, and monitor child and family health services. The health coordinator will also work with the program's infant/mental health specialist to meet child and family needs for mental health services. The infant/mental health specialist works directly with families and serves as a resource for staff who have concerns about particular children and families. In the past six months, the program has arranged for on-site dental screening for every child over 12 months old, and the community's Part C (formerly Part H) provider has used space at the school for a community-wide bilingual screening for children suspected of having developmental delays.
Services for Children with Disabilities. If staff members suspect that a child has a disability or delay, they refer the family to the Part C provider for further evaluation. For one child, who came to the program with severe medical complications, staff have worked with the parent and other community service providers to accommodate the child's needs in the classroom environment. At the time of the site visit, 6 percent of enrolled children had a suspected or diagnosed disability.
Transitions. Within six months of each child's third birthday, the child's directress/director and members of the family services team will work with the family to create a summary of the child's skills in seven areas and begin planning for the child's transition out of the program. The group will review the child's development status, discuss the child's readiness to make the transition, and discuss program options that are available in the community.
If the child will move into a Family Star program for 3- to 5-year-olds, one month before the child's third birthday, the parent will meet with the releasing and the receiving directress/directors to develop a phase-in plan. If the child is moving to a program outside of Family Star, staff will develop a phase-out plan, which will include visits from the receiving teacher to Family Star and visits from Family Star staff and the family to the new program.
The program coordinator hopes that each child can be accepted into Head Start, and at the time of the site visit, the program's executive director and the program coordinator were working to develop a Montessori Head Start program that would be administered by Family Star.
FAMILY DEVELOPMENT CORNERSTONE
To be eligible for the program, parents must
be in school or working full-time. Even during the summer months, teenage
mothers are required to bring their children to the center. If a parent
loses a job or quits school, the program works with them to revise their
family development goals. Program staff members see themselves as resources
for families, and the family services advocate maintains a community resource
guide. Her office, near the school entrance, serves as a resource center.
At the time of the site visit, the program administrators planned to have
the newly hired male involvement coordinator and health coordinator also
serve as members of the family services team.
| Staff members believe that the high-quality child development program they provide gives families the confidence to pursue their educational and employment goals. |
Needs Assessment and Service Planning. The family services team and the directresses/director work with families to conduct a needs assessment and develop three family goals. The family services team and the program coordinator support families as they choose their goals and work toward them. The family services team provides referrals to community service providers and formally updates goals every six months. Staff informally monitor progress toward reaching goals during conversations with families when they drop off or pick up their children.
Education and Employment Services. Family Star refers many families to MiCasa, a program that helps families develop long-term education, training, and employment goals and provides additional referrals and coordination of services to meet those goals. In the coming year, the staff plans to offer GED, English as a Second Language, and computer classes at the Family Star school.
Father Involvement. At the time of the site visit, the program was in the process of hiring a male involvement coordinator who would serve as a role model for the fathers in the program and run a father support and discussion group.
Fathers are very active in the program. Staff members reported that fathers drop off or pick up their children about half of the time. Fathers also attend parent meetings and policy council meetings.
Parent Involvement in the Program. Parent meetings, the policy council, and the program's newsletter are key parent involvement activities. In response to the results of the parent interest survey, parent meetings in the coming year will include discussions of family development topics. The program coordinator facilitates the work of the policy council, which includes three parents of children in Nido, three parents from the Infant Community, and two parents from the northeast Family Star program. The program's newsletter is distributed quarterly to all families and contains articles by parents and staff members about Family Star activities, child development topics, and parent education topics.
STAFF DEVELOPMENT CORNERSTONE
Family Star's Montessori approach guides its staff development activities. Staff receive support for becoming accomplished Montessori teachers and assistants. The program administrators believe that it is their responsibility to help staff prepare professional development plans that include staff agreements about how they plan to do their jobs and commitments to specific attendance goals. The professional development plans will include goals in areas such as English and Spanish literacy, GED attainment, and computer proficiency. Professional development plans will be reviewed formally once a year and updated informally every six months.
Training. Because it is very difficult to find Montessori teachers who are certified to work with children from birth to age 3, Family Star hired eight candidates to be trained as Montessori directresses/directors. This group signed a contract to work for Family Star for three years in exchange for 10 months of intensive Montessori training and the 350 hours of observation required to attain an Association Montessori Internationale diploma. Staff members were hired based on their affinity for children and experience working with them, rather than on their professional degrees. The program also sought bilingual employees.
All assistants received six weeks of training before the school opened, and they received Montessori assistant certification. Many of the assistants are EHS parents. Their children receive care in the center but not in the same room in which they work. Other Family Star staff members can enroll their children in the school at a reduced tuition. All new assistants receive on-the-job training and mentoring.
The program hired a part-time Montessori mentor to work with staff and provide training and support at the individual, classroom, and school levels. Using the Montessori approach, she observes staff and individual children. She often asks classroom staff members to spend time observing the children they work with and discuss their observations with her. The Montessori mentor provides hands-on modeling and immediate feedback to staff. The Montessori mentor and the child services coordinator identify staff training needs by observing staff and by discussing their needs with them.
The executive director, program coordinator, and Montessori mentor plan to evaluate the Montessori training requirements that staff members have met already and compare them to the requirements for the child development associate (CDA) credential. To meet the education credential requirements in the EHS performance standards, they will identify parallels between the Montessori training and the CDA requirements.
In addition to their Montessori training, staff receive training on the basic health and safety issues necessary to meet the school's licensing requirements. Staff members are also trained to work effectively with parents, so they can foster strong relationships with parents. Staff believe that by building strong relationships with parents, they are able to communicate even very sensitive information to parents (such as concerns about suspected developmental delays).
Supervision and Support. The Nido and Infant Community directresses/directors meet once a week with the child services coordinator for group supervision that covers all aspects of their work, from classroom staffing to how individual children are doing. At the time of the site visit, staff informally received individual supervision of their work during conversations with the child services coordinator, the Montessori mentor, and the program coordinator.
It is Family Star's policy to hire staff members from the immediate neighborhoods they serve. Family Star's director grew up in northeast Denver.
Program administrators have found that staff at their northeast school are highly committed to their work. Family Star staff members receive competitive wages and generous fringe benefits.
Staff Turnover. Since the northwest school opened in February 1997, three of the assistants have left the program and been replaced. Two of the assistants who left moved from the area, and the other decided that child care was not her desired profession. None of the directresses or the director have left the program.
COMMUNITY BUILDING CORNERSTONE
Program Collaborations. Family Star staff have worked hard to introduce the EHS program to their new community. Before the school opened, staff met with over 50 community leaders and other community service providers to introduce themselves and begin forging collaborative relationships. Staff members also used these meetings to learn about the resources available to families in their community.
Because of the difficult experiences the Latino community has had with research studies in the past, community leaders were concerned about the implications of randomly assigning families to the program. To address this concern, staff helped the community understand the importance of the EHS national evaluation.
Community service providers have responded to Family Star's dedication to improving the experiences of children and families in their community by contributing their own time and the time and resources of their organizations to help Family Star meet the needs of EHS families. Members of the health services advisory council reported that their personal interactions with Family Star staff, who follow up immediately with them when they promise to help the program, make Family Star stand out from other similar organizations. Family Star staff take full advantage of opportunities to collaborate and receive services and training for family and staff. Community collaborators appreciate the persistence of Family Star's staff members and their dedication to their mission.
Family Star grew out of the Montessori elementary school program that was located in northeast Denver and planned to provide Montessori education for children from birth through sixth grade. The Denver Public Schools moved the Montessori elementary program to another area of the city. Family Star has been collaborating with one of the new Head Start grantees, Rocky Mountain Ser, to administer a Montessori Head Start program in northwest Denver, so that the EHS children in northwest Denver can receive a Montessori education from birth to age 5 and then have the opportunity to apply to the Montessori elementary school. At the time of the site visit, Family Star was negotiating with Rocky Mountain Ser and its landlord to determine whether additional classrooms could be added to the northwest facility for Head Start.
Interagency Collaboration. Family Star staff believe that they have improved the quality of care available in their community and that they serve as a model for the community of what a high-quality program for infants and toddlers can be. Community service providers are welcome to observe at the school and speak to administrators about what it takes to develop and implement a high-quality program for young children. Family Star's executive director plans to work with other community leaders to help parents and grassroots community organizations build similar child development programs in other parts of Denver.
Family Star staff members serve on many community collaboration committees, including the mayor's Head Start commission, an alternative school's advisory council, the voting district's interagency council, a local Part C interagency council task force, and northwest's teen pregnancy prevention council. The program coordinator leads the area's neighborhood nutrition collaboration.
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Colorado's new welfare policies limit the amount of time individuals can receive TANF cash assistance to five years over their lifetime. After two years, recipients must work. Counties may choose to exempt families with very young children from the work requirement. Approximately one-third of Family Star families were receiving cash assistance when they enrolled in the program. Child care subsidies are available to parents with incomes below 130 percent of the poverty level (or up to 185 percent of the poverty level, at county option). At the time of the site visit, welfare reform
had not had a large impact on the program, because all of the families
who participate must be involved in education or employment activities.
The program coordinator reported that many parents are referred
to MiCasa, a cooperating service organization that provides education
and employment services for families. She believes that families
will access more of Family Star's family development services in
the coming year because of the welfare reform requirements. |
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND LOCAL RESEARCH
Early Program Support. Family Star received extensive support from its TASC consultant during the early stages of program implementation. It also received key support from its RAP and Zero to Three consultants and from its federal project officer. This group of professionals guided Family Star's development of comprehensive services, including assistance with service plans, designing training sessions, developing systems for program governance, and ensuring that quality services for children, families, staff, and communities would be in place.
Continuous Program Improvement. Two faculty members from the Center for Human Investment Policy at the Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado at Denver, serve as Family Star's continuous program improvement (CPI) consultants. Family Star's local research partner recommended them to the program. The CPI team worked with staff members to explore their theories of change and developed an outcomes matrix listing the outcomes that the staff expects to affect under the four cornerstones. The CPI team also talked with the staff about how they will measure their progress, and it will develop ways to measure the program's chosen outcomes.
Local Research. A team of researchers from the University of Colorado's Health Sciences Center is serving as Family Star's local research partner. The University of Colorado researchers, whose backgrounds are in psychiatry, psychology, human development, and anthropology, are experts on the socioemotional development of infants and toddlers, interventions targeting families in poverty, and risk research, and they have extensive experience conducting large-scale, longitudinal research projects.
The local research team is focusing on understanding which parts of the program work best for whom, with an emphasis on understanding individual differences in each child's development and caregiving context. They are assessing the building of positive relationships, the development of socioemotional competence (including early moral strengths), and the intentional and self-directed activities of the child as they relate to readiness for learning. They are supplementing the national data collection with observations of the families, process observations, and ethnographic observations and interviews. The researchers have also developed a form that staff use weekly for each child to document the child's experiences in the classroom. The researchers will use this information to describe the intensity and type of services each child received.
PROGRAM SUMMARY
Family Star provides full-time center-based child development services to working-poor families, many of whom are Latino, single-parent families. The center provides culturally-sensitive, child-centered services using the Montessori curriculum. At the time of the site visit, the program was in the process of adding staff to strengthen services in several areas, including health and father involvement. The program had just hired a health coordinator to coordinate and oversee health-related services and was planning to hire a male involvement coordinator to support fathers' involvement in the program.
PROGRAM DIRECTOR
Lereen Castellano
Family Star Early Head Start
2246 Federal Boulevard
Denver, CO 80211-4642
PROGRAM COORDINATOR
Terry Hudgens
Early Head Start Coordinator
Family Star
2246 N. Federal Boulevard
Denver, CO 80211
LOCAL RESEARCHERS
Robert N. Emde
Program for Early Development Studies
Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine
University of Colorado Health Sciences Center
4200 E. 9th Avenue, Box C268-69
Denver, CO 80262
Jon Korfmacher
Erikson Institute
420 N. Wabash Avenue
Chicago, IL 60611
JoAnn Robinson
Kempe Prevention Research Center for Family and Child Health
1825 Marion Street
Denver, CO 80218
Paul Spicer
University of Colorado Health Sciences Center
4455 E. 12th Avenue, AO11-13
Denver, CO 80220
Norman F. Watt
Department of Psychology
University of Denver
5578 South Hillside Street
Englewood, CO 80111
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