This is a guest blog by Strategies for Children intern Ryan Telingator. Ryan is entering his senior year at Bowdoin College. 

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Ryan Telingator

These past 10 weeks with Strategies for Children have been among the most fulfilling of my professional career. As a Government & Legal Studies and Education Coordinate major at Bowdoin College, I have always been interested in working in education policy and advocacy – the field where my interests and my coursework in political science, policy, and education intersect.

Before this summer, however, my conceptualization of this intersection was purely theoretical because my main experiences had been teaching and curriculum development.

Strategies for Children has introduced me to policy, advocacy, and governance in an immediate and accelerated way. On my first day at work in late May, Massachusetts was in the midst of providing emergency child care, and the number of coronavirus cases had climbed past 90,000, so I quickly began to learn about the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) and the nuances within Massachusetts’ child care sector. I also learned about the differences between family child care providers and center-based programs, and about how the Massachusetts child care field operated both pre-COVID and during COVID.

Every morning at 9:30, there were daily advocate check-ins on Zoom that added to my education. I had the unique and valuable opportunity to hear from experts with decades of experience. I learned a lot – from the intricate strategizing required to staff child care classrooms based on licensing ratios and COVID-informed health and safety protocols to the latest trauma-informed practices being used by early childhood educators – and I have continued to learn throughout my internship through osmosis.

My main responsibilities over the course of the summer included:

• tracking and compiling news stories about child care policies and budgetary actions in Massachusetts and at the federal level

• tracking how other states adjusted their child care policies in response to coronavirus

• creating fact sheets summarizing recent federal or state actions in the child care realm

• supporting the Strategies team in addressing racial justice, police brutality, and the nation’s reckoning with racial inequities, and

• updating the Strategies for Children Election Page for 2020

Although my previous experience in teaching and curriculum development is in the middle school age range, birth through five has always been my favorite age range. In fact, I worked in a toddler classroom for a semester at a local child care center in conjunction with my Infant and Child Development course, and I babysit throughout the year. However, these experiences had not expose me to the advocacy work that I’ve been doing for Strategies.

Now, as this internship ends, I am leaving this summer confident that I want to dedicate my career to working in the early education and child care field. In fact, an Honors Project for college that I proposed to study presidential power, political time, and mandates using early education as a case study was just accepted, and I look forward to further studying the possibility of implementing progressive education policies and universal child care this year.

After I graduate, I hope to work in a classroom and get practical experience and then move into a more strategic position in an organization, or work in a policy and advocacy organization. I am especially interested in dedicating my career to working to increase equity and accessibility for young children in large urban areas and to social-emotional development and trauma informed curricula that best serve vulnerable populations of children who are most likely to experience adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in their lives.

I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Amy, Titus, and Marisa at Strategies for Children this summer. I have learned so much from all the responsibilities I have had. This was an incredible experience, and I look forward to continuing my involvement in the field.