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Posts Tagged ‘#ECEWorkforce’

The National Early Care and Education Workforce Center – a federal effort deployed by local and national leaders

Posted in Child care, Cost and affordability, COVID-19, Federal, Funding, National, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, tagged #ece, #ECEWorkforce on February 14, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Huong Vu for Strategies for Children

Earlier this month, federal officials announced that they are creating the new and promising National Early Care and Education Workforce Center (the ECE Workforce Center). It’s a national effort to rebuild the workforce that includes local leaders here in Boston.

Launched by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with $30 million in funding, the new center will address an old problem: even before the pandemic, the early childhood workforce was plagued with low pay and high turnover rates. This situation has grown worse during the pandemic.

“We know it is hard for families to find quality early childhood programs. One of the reasons is that programs are having trouble recruiting and retaining early educators,” January Contreras says. Contreras is the assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families, part of HHS. “We cannot continue to expect early educators to remain in these critical roles only to earn poverty wages.”

HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra adds, “HHS is honored to launch this first-of-its-kind research and technical assistance center to support the essential early childhood workforce who partner with families every day to ensure young children have what they need to thrive.”

The new ECE Workforce Center will help by addressing recruitment and retention. The center’s work will include the input of early educators and be carried out over the next five years by six partner organizations. They are:

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A new toolkit for early educators who are also advocates

Posted in Child care, Early educators, Funding, National, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, tagged #ece, #ECEWorkforce on February 7, 2023| 1 Comment »

Screenshot: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment

Given their expertise in working with children, families, and state agencies, early educators are uniquely suited to be advocates.

Now, a new resource — The E4 Toolkit — gives them more ways to do this work and explain why and how the field of early childhood education can be improved.

“We want to connect early educators to data and talking points about the early childhood education (ECE) workforce and offer potential solutions to some of the issues they face,” Hopeton Hess explains. Hess is a research and policy associate at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.

Using the E4 Toolkit – E4 stands for “Early Educator Engagement and Empowerment” – early educators can draw on a collection of strategies and solutions that was created “to support early educators in their advocacy, power building, and engagement with stakeholders.”

Specifically, Hess says, “Early educators could use the toolkit in group settings to contribute to their shared understanding of the early childhood sector.

“In conversations between early educators and advocacy organizations, the toolkit would be a useful prompt for identifying workforce needs and desires.”