Archive for the ‘Higher Education’ Category

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Misael Carrasquillo

Leadership is about people who want to change the world – and it’s about the institutions that train these leaders. That’s why it’s an honor to recognize Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) and Misael Carrasquillo, one of its graduates and employees.

Fifty years ago, Bunker Hill opened its doors to students. Since then it has become one of the most affordable, most diverse colleges in the state with two main campuses in Charlestown and Chelsea. 

Strategies for Children has hosted four interns from Bunker Hill in recent years, and while none of them have had early education experience, they have brought the invaluable gift of their life experiences, knowledge from their fields of study (business, political science, and communications), as well as their passion for social change.

Earlier this spring, Amy O’Leary, the executive director of Strategies for Children, attended a Bunker Hill’s Strategic Planning Community Convening event where she met Misael Carrasquillo, who has devoted himself to learning everything he can so he can share his knowledge — and his institutional affiliations — with other people. 

“I went to the Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Dorchester,” Carrasquillo explains, “and I didn’t know what I wanted to do after high school. Like a lot of students, I was living in the present, enjoying what life had to offer in that moment.”

Carrasquillo had participated in the U.S. Marines Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC). During his senior year, he was approached by a recruiter for the U.S. Marine Corps. So while his peers were worried about applying to college, Carrasquillo, who had his father’s support to enlist, was convincing his mother to sign the necessary paperwork.

“There was a $10,000 bonus that got me to say, yes. I had never seen that much money before, and my parents had never seen that much before.”

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Parisa Maryam Fakhri

Parisa Maryam Fakhri grew up in Iran, where she always wanted to be a preschool teacher, but as the oldest child, her parents wanted her to pursue medicine.

When it was time for her to go to college, the Iranian Revolution had shut down the local universities, so Fakhri’s parents said she should study in Europe or the United States.

“It was hard to get a visa to come to America,” Fakhri recalls. “It would have been easier to go to Europe. But Iranian women are some of the strongest women, so even though it was hard, I knew there was more opportunity in the U.S. And in my geography class, they talked about Massachusetts. I liked the name, and I used to dream that one day I would go there.”

People said a visa would be impossible to get. But when the customs officer asked why she wanted one, Fakhri firmly said it was because she wanted to study. Three weeks later she had her visa. She was the only one she knew of who was awarded one. Cousins and friends said that Fakhri, who enjoyed life at home, would not succeed in America. But her parents told her that she could.

And she did.

Fakhri lived with an American family and went to college. She spent long days studying English and immersing herself in American culture. A year and a half later, she met her future husband. Marriage and motherhood led her to pause schooling to take care of her family.

“I wasn’t taking any courses. I was home,” she says, but life slowly drew her toward interacting with more young children and eventually working with them. “I was going to the playground, watching my son play with other children. I would go to the gym and leave my son in the gym’s child care. A neighbor would ask me to take care of their child.”

“The fire that started in my heart in Iran grew. I decided that I wasn’t going to do the work my parents wanted.”

Instead, she got a job at ABCD, an anti-poverty agency in Boston, as an assistant in an early childhood classroom.

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MIT pic

Photo: Yan Krukau, Pexels

“Children who attend preschool at age four are significantly more likely to go to college, according to an empirical study led by MIT economist Parag Pathak.

“To conduct the study, Pathak and his colleagues followed more than 4,000 students who took part from 1997 to 2003 in a lottery the Boston public school system conducted to allocate a limited number of preschool slots.

“The lottery created a natural experiment, allowing the researchers to track the educational outcomes of two otherwise similar groups of students when one group attended preschool while the other did not. In decades of research on preschool programs, this approach has rarely been applied. 

“The result: among students of similar backgrounds, those who did attend preschool were 8.3 percentage points more likely to enroll in college right after high school. There was also a 5.4-percentage-­point increase in college attendance at any time.

“ ‘It’s a pretty large effect,’ says Pathak. ‘It’s fairly rare to find school-based interventions that have effects of this magnitude.’ ”

“The preschool boost,” by Peter Dizikes, MIT Technology Review, April 25, 2023

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Sidney Hamilton

“I was born and raised in Pittsfield, Mass.,” Sidney Hamilton says, “and I’m still here.”

A dozen years ago, Hamilton started working as an intern at the Gladys Allen Brigham Community Center. She was a room assistant helping with logistics and making sure children were safe. 

Today, Hamilton works at the Brigham Center as the Empowerment Director & Eureka! Coordinator, and she’s working hard to immerse girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). She’s also a member of the second cohort of our Advocacy Network.

“When I started working with kids, it came easily to me, and I really enjoyed it. A lot of people go to work for the money, and money is great, but I’d rather have a job that I can go to every day that I know I’m going to enjoy. That’s super important to me.”

Over the years, Hamilton worked as the coordinator of one of the Brigham Center’s after school programs and as a substitute teacher in its early education program. She did outreach work, educating teenagers about healthy sexuality, self defense, and financial literacy. And along the way, Hamilton earned an associate degree in human services at Berkshire Community College as well as a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in social work at Westfield State University.

Today, she continues to be engaged by the challenges and joys of building relationships with kids.

“To be able to get to know the kids, understand them better, help them with what they need is an awesome thing. And I love being in a place where we see kids grow up. We’ve had kids from birth who are still in our programs. I started working with a young girl when she was seven, and now she’s a senior who will be graduating high school. So there are a lot of full circle moments.”

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The pandemic wiped out part of Massachusetts’ child care workforce.

Now Boston is trying to rebuild.

And the scale of this challenge is substantial.

“The childcare industry in Massachusetts lost about 10% of its workforce since the start of the pandemic,” WBUR radio reports. “In Boston, that’s translating into long wait lists and shorter hours of care. According to city officials, about 50 early education classrooms are sitting empty because child care centers can’t find enough people to operate at capacity.”

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu “was quick to point out that the estimate doesn’t include centers that have had to cut hours because they’re short staffed.”

To address this daunting gap, the city is using $7 million from the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan Act to launch the Growing the Workforce Fund.

The fund will provide scholarships and financial aid to 800 students who want to earn a Child Development Associate (CDA) or an associate’s or bachelor’s degree in early childhood education.

“Today’s investment is a welcome one for early educators like me,” Lisa Brooks, an early educator at Horizons for Homeless Children, says in a city press release. “Relieving the burden of debt associated with higher education will help educators continue to focus on the important work of building the foundation for our students’ future success.”

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Massachusetts is a leader in educational excellence, but not for all its students.

As a new report – “There Is No Excellence Without Equity: A Path Forward for Education in Massachusetts” — from the Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership (MEEP) explains, “for a long time now, our state’s high overall rankings have masked deep inequities in student learning experiences and outcomes.”

Strategies for Children is a MEEP member.

The disparities the report cites were bad before Covid hit, and many have been aggravated by the pandemic.

“In parts of Boston and cities like Chelsea, Brockton, and Springfield, where infection and death rates were highest, the pandemic inflicted new levels of trauma and anxiety on families already facing significant adversity,” the report says.

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For the past two months, I have had the great opportunity to be a summer intern with Strategies for Children (SFC) through the Early Childhood Policy and Leadership certificate program at Boston College’s Institute of Early Childhood Policy. From the first staff meetings with Amy, Titus, Marisa, Nery, Marge, and Jenna, I have felt welcomed as a member of the team.

During these staff conversations, the team has often discussed how advocacy work is relationship-based. And being included in various meetings since the start of the internship has helped me to see these relationships in practice. The meetings with partners and collaborators are imbued with the feeling of “we:” the goal is shared, the work is shared, and the information is shared. If one person or organization does not know information or feels that someone else may be a more helpful resource, Strategies staff connect people with one another, with organizations, and with resources. Sharing time, information and resource, during meetings and in follow-up emails highlights Strategies’ culture of connection and respect.

The projects I have participated in also reflect this sense of teamwork and shared goals. One project involved collaborating with a team of community partners in Haverhill, Mass., to design a family survey to help inform early childhood partners about families’ early education program and resource needs and to be a tool that Haverhill could use annually. Each meeting with the community partners gave me more insight into how to create and administer a survey. Additionally, I was able to attend a recent Boston Opportunity Agenda Birth-to-Eight Data Committee meeting where surveys were discussed. The themes at the meeting echoed ideas that the community partners had recommended: keep the survey short, have the intended audience test the survey, and have paper and digital options.

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Play is important for children.

However, what’s missing from this important idea, a new report says, is a clear understanding of how play can be an effective learning strategy in early childhood settings – and how best to share this concept with the public.

The report – “The Role of Play in Designing Effective Early Learning Environments and Systems” – explores “questions and debates” about play by drawing on interviews with experts and stakeholders. 

The report is the capstone project of Yael Schick, a Saul Zaentz Fellow and recent graduate of the Ed. M in Education Leadership, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Strategies for Children served as the host site for Yael and offered project guidance.

Guiding questions for this project include:

• What is play, and what makes an early childhood program “play-based?”

• Why does play remain a divisive issue? What are the misunderstandings and misconceptions about play-based pedagogy?

• How do we ensure that all children have the opportunity to learn through play? And,

• How must we communicate with policymakers, practitioners, and parents about the effects of play in young children’s learning and development?

While there are no set definitions of play or play-based learning, there is a great deal of useful research on these topics. Among the findings:

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We’re continuing to highlight our Advocacy Network participants, and we’re excited about all the work they’re doing in the field and across the state. For past blogs click here and here.

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Kelly Marion first came to the Gladys Allen Brigham Community Center when she was 11 years old. Her father had just passed away. He had been the victim of a violent crime. And Marion’s mother wanted Marion and her siblings to stay engaged with the community – and the world.

Today, Marion is the CEO of the community center, where she has worked for over 30 years. The center currently serves 2,500 families in and around the Western Massachusetts city of Pittsfield, in Berkshire County. 

“The majority of our families are socio-economically challenged,” Marion says. “We have a lot of single-parent households and grandparents raising their grandchildren.”

The center has a number of programs that support children, all the way from birth to age 13, including child care programs and an array of programming for middle and high school students. Once they’re old enough, many of these children are hired as center staff.

Thanks to her work, Marion is a seasoned advocate. So for her, joining Strategies for Children’s Advocacy Network was a chance to connect with other early educators from across the state — and share a vital message. 

“I don’t think people see how important early childhood education is, and how important high-quality early education is,” Marion says. 

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Amy O’Leary at the Massachusetts State House in 2011

We’re thrilled to wish Amy O’Leary a happy 20th anniversary! She started working at Strategies for Children on June 24, 2002.

We sat down with O’Leary to talk about this milestone.

“I have to say how grateful I am to have been at Strategies for Children for the last 20 years,” O’Leary says. “I would have never imagined that I would have this kind of job.”

O’Leary’s work with young children started at Skidmore College where she earned a degree in psychology and early education.

“I didn’t do a traditional K-12 education major,” O’Leary recalls, “because I was very interested in understanding why children did what they did, and how they sat in the context of family and community.” 

O’Leary’s campus job as a financial aid student was working as a classroom assistant at the Skidmore Early Childhood Center, a laboratory school affiliated with Skidmore’s Education Department, where she also did her student-teaching. 

“It was such an important part of my college experience to have that world where I could go three times a week, whether it was to my campus job or [for] student teaching, and develop relationships with families.”

“I don’t think I realized how wonderful the program was, and how it prepared me for my next job as a preschool teacher in Boston.”

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