Posts Tagged ‘#EarlyEducators’

For Cari Moore, being an early educator is, in part, a second chance to make up for time she lost when she was a child struggling with meningitis and severe allergies to foods, including peanut butter and chocolate. It was a tough time, but it led to a fulfilling career.

Moore’s family moved to the United States from Panama, and Moore grew up in Chelsea. Her mother spoke Spanish, but wanted Moore to speak English, so Moore decided to teach herself Spanish.

As Moore began thinking about careers, she drew on her own experience.

“I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician,” she says. “I wanted to do what doctors had done for me because I really appreciated that. But once I realized that child care and schools were an option, I realized I wanted to become a teacher. Even though doctors were important to me, so were teachers. When I missed school, it was my teachers who would come and see me. They would have packets for me.”

Moore also spent years being the youngest cousin in her family. And when a new cousin was born, when Moore was a teenager, she stepped up to babysit for that child. And, as a high school student, Moore traveled to Mexico where she worked in a camp, coming up with activities to help children learn more about their communities.

By the time Moore applied to college, she knew that she wanted to work with children, and she choose to attend Wheelock College. 

“Wheelock felt like home. It felt cozy,” she recalls. “I majored in psychology with a specialty in early education.” 

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“Every child has the right to be cared for. Why aren’t we providing that as a society?”

— A trailer from the documentary Labor of Love: Stories from the front line of the childcare crisis, from Kids Count on Us, a statewide coalition of providers, parents, and teachers united to create quality, affordable child care across Minnesota. April 27, 2023. The featured child care providers have also shared their ideas about their state’s needs.

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Back when Barack Obama was president, Adrienne Armstrong worked in corporate marketing. Today, she’s a family child care provider and a member of the second cohort of Strategies for Children’s Advocacy Network.

“My last job was at John Hancock. I was there for 15 years,” Armstrong says of the insurance company. Then she left. “It was the result of a layoff. You think the whole world is coming to an end, but I realized that was one chapter of my corporate career ending, and it was the beginning of my second career as an educator.

Armstrong used the time off to travel, work on her house, and figure out her next steps.

She had always loved children. She hadn’t had her own, but she had raised her niece and nephews. And when her colleagues brought their children to work, Armstrong would sit down on the floor, in her business suit, to play with the kids. 

 She decided to enroll at Endicott College and earn a degree in early education.

Then she decided to open her own child care business — Adrienne’s Day Academy — in Boston’s Roxbury community, where she had grown up.

“Now I joke that I’ll never put on another suit in my life. Who knew this transition would be so rewarding?” Armstrong says. She has now been an early education provider for 12 years. 

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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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scholarship

Photo: Micaela Bedell for Strategies for Children

The Department of Early Education and Care has posted up-to-date early educator scholarship information on its website.

As the website explains, “The Early Childhood Scholarship provides financial assistance if you are currently employed in an early childhood field. This includes all licensed and funded EEC program types.”

The scholarship is for early childhood staff who are “enrolled (or plan to enroll in) a higher education certificate, associates, bachelors or masters degree program at an approved institution in Massachusetts.”

Eligible majors include: ” Early Childhood Education, Child Development, Family Studies, Child Care Administration or fields that directly name early child development as its specific areas of inquiry.”

There’s more detailed information on the Office of Student Financial Aid (OSFA) website.

The Early Childhood Scholarship was funded as a pilot program back in the fiscal year 2006 state budget. It has since been awarded to thousands of early educators, and its popularity has led to continued public support, with annual funding of more than $3 million per year. 

You can register for a Zoom information session (with simultaneous interpretation in Spanish and Portuguese) that will take place on Wednesday, April 26, 2023, at 7 p.m.

And you can download a scholarship guide that explains how to apply. 

For more information contact the Early Education and Care Help Desk at (617) 988-2450 or submit a report request.

Check it out and consider applying for a scholarship!

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“Covid provided an opportunity to really highlight this issue in ways that we’ve never seen. To have babies sitting behind Zoom cameras, to have toddlers trying to be busy while people were working from home; suddenly all the things we knew [about families’ early education and care needs] were in the public eye.

Ellis and SFC at BPR

Lauren Cook and Amy O’Leary at WGBH

“We have not changed our priorities even though the the brain science tells us how critical these early years are. So that’s what I’m hopeful for. It’s not just the people who work in this field, who have young children who are fighting for this. There’s been this bigger awareness of why we need high-quality programs starting at birth…”

— Amy O’Leary, “Boston Public Radio Full Show 4/18: Tax Day,” WGBH, April 18, 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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When Jayd Rodrigues was 12 years old, she wanted to be a pediatrician. 

“But not because I was interested in anything medical. It was because I liked working with children,” she says. 

Today Rodrigues is the executive director of early education at Horizons for Homeless Children, a Boston nonprofit, where she oversees 22 classrooms. She’s also a member of the second cohort of Strategies for Children’s Advocacy Network.

Rodrigues’ story starts in Cape Verde where she was born.

“I immigrated here with my family when I was 2 ½ years old,” she explains. “So I’m from Boston. I grew up in Dorchester, as the middle one of five children, and I’m still in the neighborhood.” 

Rodrigues’ parents, who have been together for 53 years, don’t speak English, so Rodrigues speaks English and Cape Verde creole. When she enrolled in Suffolk University, she did so as the first generation in her family to attend college.

“My parents are the catalyst for where I am today. Even though they don’t speak English, and they haven’t gone to college, they consistently are my cheerleaders. And they’ve allowed me always to be who I am without hesitation.” Which includes, Rodrigues says, her life as a member of the LGBTQ community and her role as a foster parent.

“Near the end of my time at Suffolk, Jumpstart came and did a presentation about their AmeriCorps program, which trains college students to provide language, literacy and social -emotional programming in preschool programs.”

Rodrigues signed up for Jumpstart and worked alongside students from Harvard, Boston University, and Wellesley College, but found herself sharing less than she might have – until a Jumpstart coach who saw Rodrigues’ passion for children said, There’s something special about you.

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Leea Cooley has been interested in working with children for a long time. As a child growing up in Indiana, she liked to play school. As a teenager living in Agawam, Mass., – where her family moved for her father’s career – she loved to babysit. 

But it wasn’t until she was a newly divorced mother of two children talking to her divorce attorney that she thought about weaving her interest in children into a profession.

“My lawyer told me that she thought a good career for me would be family child care. She saw the way that I cared so much about children. So I pursued my license, and I got it. And my lawyer put her two children in my program. Along with my children, they were my first customers. And since then, I’ve been running my family child care business for 25 years right here in my house.”

It’s a career that has been full of joy, generosity, and hard work. And one that has led Cooley to join Strategies for Children’s Advocacy Network, so she can formalize the work that she has been doing for parents for decades.

“One of the main lessons I’ve learned,” Cooley says, “is that parents need help. They need advice. They need guidance. They’re working full time jobs and then they’re going home and caring for their families, and they don’t always have time to access the information that they’d like to have.

“Over the years, my biggest aha moment is I need to be that resource for families.”

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We’re proud to announce that the 9:30 Call turns three years old this week.

Launched in the chaotic early days of the pandemic, the 9:30 Call began as a response to a global emergency. The Call helped early childhood providers across the state connect and keep up with evolving Covid policies.

Since then, the 9:30 Call has grown into a powerful advocacy tool for managing the pandemic and making policy progress for children and families. 9:30 callers have heard from their colleagues as well as from elected officials, policymakers, researchers, advocates, and academics.

Whether you’ve joined the call once or many times, we want to thank you and invite you to join us this week. 

We are spending a few minutes at the start of each of this week’s calls sharing reflections and memories about past speakers and topics.

Visit our 9:30 Call website for additional information about our past and upcoming guest speakers. And sign up for the 9:30 Call to receive the Zoom link for this and future meetings.

You can also find the follow-up materials folder with the chat, slides and attachments from previous calls.

This week’s schedule includes:

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