Building Robust Early Learning Systems
Starting Smart and Strong is a community-driven commitment to ensure that every young child living in Fresno, Oakland, and East San Jose grows up healthy and ready for kindergarten.
Stories
Angela Louie Howard
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, OAKLAND
“About ten years ago, 86 percent of the third graders in District 2 were not reading and testing at grade level. We really wanted to close the education gap for children and families. What we found out is that a lot of children were coming into elementary school with no early learning background.”
Angela Louie Howard runs Lotus Bloom, a network of family resource centers in neighborhoods across Oakland. Their playgroups for children 0-5 provide a welcoming space for families with young children to play and learn while supporting parents and caregivers with workshops and community resources. School Readiness Playgroups provide an entryway into the local elementary school. “We really believe in building on the strengths and knowledge of the parents who are within our program and our community.”
Maureen Casey
PRE-K TEACHER, SAN JOSE
“In past training, it always felt like it’s just the new thing that teachers are supposed to be doing. But now we really are all behind it. We’re seeing the data and how much better things are getting because we’re doing the social, emotional learning and growth in the classroom.”
Maureen Casey is a special education pre-K teacher in the Franklin-McKinley School District in East San Jose. She received training and coaching to improve how she teaches social and emotional skills in her classroom to make sure children can succeed in kindergarten and beyond. The school district is working to make sure the training has buy-in from teachers like Casey, that educators have a say in how data is collected and that educators are reflecting on data in ways that they find useful to improve their own classroom practice.
Jessica Gutierrez
PROGRAM MANAGER, FRESNO
“It started off as a local community pilot. And now it’s grown to the point where I don’t think anyone could have foreseen.”
Jessica Gutierrez runs the Language Learning Project for Fresno Unified. The professional development model focuses on the value of and support for a child’s home language, getting to know the child and family, and concrete strategies early childhood educators can use to support linguistic growth in both home language and English. With investment from California’s Department of Education, the project has gone on to publish a toolkit and expand to neighboring counties. During the pandemic, the project conducted train-the-trainer institutes over Zoom, which were attended by practitioners from 24 additional counties in California who want to do this work in their own communities.
Rhonda Moore
EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATOR, OAKLAND
“It gave us, as teachers, time to come together, to sit and talk out what we are going through in each classroom.”
When a preschooler was regularly hitting her twin brother at school, instead of punishing her, Rhonda Moore spent extra time with the child, showering her with praise for successes. She knew that it was important to listen and respond to the child’s needs as well as to regulate her own response. Moore’s training comes from her participation in a professional development program in trauma-responsive strategies for early childhood classrooms. Called ROCK (Resilient Oakland Communities and Kids), the program was developed in Oakland by local educators and mental health experts. It includes workshops, professional learning communities and coaching to give educators space, time and culturally responsive-strategies that respond to historic levels of trauma in communities and families. “The goal is to make space to talk about the children who are in front of us,” says one of the facilitators, Melissa Luc.
Juan Cruz
SUPERINTENDENT, FRANKLIN-MCKINLEY SCHOOL DISTRICT, SAN JOSE
“I’m intricately involved in everything early learning. A lot of the decisions we’ve been making are a result of my better understanding of what is needed in early childhood education and making sure that we’re allocating the resources.”
Though he started out his career working with teenagers, Superintendent Juan Cruz has become a big advocate of early childhood education. Under his leadership and with investment from the Packard Foundation, the school district has partnered with community organizations and early care providers to create a robust infrastructure for training adults who work with young children. This work has included teacher-led professional development, multilingual training for parents in Vietnamese and Spanish, collaborations with the local Educare and Head Start and community-driven data collection. The school district has done a fair amount of adapting along the way, changing programs to better fit the needs of educators and parents and responding to shifting community needs, economic insecurity and the pandemic. Cruz is proud of where they’ve arrived. “It really has transformed our system.”
Ramona Ruacho
HOMECARE PROVIDER, FRESNO
“Before, I thought: ‘You sit down. You read. You finish the book. And then you go on to the next activity.’ Now [I know] you have to listen to the kids’ conversations. You focus on what you are reading. You use voice inflection and you talk about what you are reading.”
Ramona Ruacho participated in a training program developed in Fresno designed to support teachers and caregivers of young bilingual children. She attended regular professional development programs on Saturday mornings along with other family homecare providers, teachers and those who work at child care centers. The training is designed to ensure all adults who work with young children in this city are trained in how to do intentional language-building activities with the children in their care. Ruacho said the opportunity to be trained alongside teachers helped her understand the critical role she plays in getting children ready for school.
Bernadette Sangalang
CHILDREN AND FAMILIES DIRECTOR, PACKARD FOUNDATION
“We had our foundation way of doing things. We had to learn to listen in a deeper way.”
Bernadette Sangalang was a new program officer when she and her colleagues first came up with the vision for Starting Smart and Strong. A social worker by training, Sangalang was not used to the power imbalance embedded in the grantee foundation relationship. “As a social worker, you partner. You must meet people where they are at.” Yet still, as foundation staff, Sangalang and her colleagues had certain ideas about the way the initiative should work, how to define success, and the right way to offer support and resources. Over the life of the Starting Smart and Strong initiative, as relationships with community leaders grew, they learned to step back and trust local expertise. Today, as the Director of Children and Families for the Packard Foundation, Sangalang uses all she has learned in their new funding strategy in maternal and child health. This includes her approach to working in community as a grantmaker and knowledge about when to let communities lead. “All of it is about putting families and children at the center.”