The Path to Regional Coordination in Early Childhood Education

The Challenge:

St. Louis childcare and preschool systems, and thereby teachers, school administrators, and center directors are trying to navigate a system that lacks coordination and vision at a regional level.¹ As a result, quality has not been defined or measured, access to spots that work for parents’ needs for distance, affordability, and child safety is limited, data for improvement is largely decentralized and fragmented, strategies for system-wide improvement are not implemented, and the region misses out on potential funding. Ultimately, a lack of coordinated strategy places the burden on children (ages 0-5) and their families to navigate an inequitable and complicated early childhood system.

The Approach: 

RECC RETREAT: RE-EVALUATING NEEDS

In February 2019, the Regional Early Childhood Coalition (RECC), an collective impact initiative focused on early childhood education, asked SKIP to facilitate a retreat to explore the system structures that could increase the overall effectiveness of RECC. SKIP facilitated a community based system dynamics (CBSD) workshop with 32 stakeholders. Participants worked together to talk about hopes and fears for the organization and draw causal loop diagrams that described what structures they believed led to effective work. After the retreat, SKIP administered a survey to gain deeper insights and reflections and synthesized the results.

Participants identified key themes in facilitating transformative change, including dedicated staff to execute the work and stakeholders having trust in the backbone organization. Additionally, RECC members identified barriers to change including strategic fragmentation in the ECE field, limited staff capacity for system-level work, and the competitive nature of funding for programs (figure 1).

FIRST STEP TO EQUITY COLLABORATIVE: WORKING TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY

In July 2019, RECC made the decision to disband. In its absence, a group of providers, non-profits, and advocates, including SKIP, began a temporary collaboration to work towards a more sustainable system of early childhood education in St. Louis. This group eventually became  the First Step to Equity Transitional Collaborative. First Step began by conducting a needs assessment, in partnership with IFF, to better understand the ECE system. This report, “The First Step to Equity: Building a Better Future Through Early Childhood Education in St. Louis” functioned as a roadmap for building a better, more equitable system in St. Louis. One of the core needs identified was the need to ‘coordinate across the board.’

Grounded in SKIP’s Recommendations to RECC (2019) and supported by the First Step to Equity Report (2019), an entity is needed to ensure ECE system coordination and strategic alignment. As a transitional group, the First Step Collaborative was never intended to be permanent. Thus, this group helped facilitate a regional co-design process that reimagined the ECE system coordination and created a more permanent coordinating entity. This work was led by WEPOWER and the Tomorrow Builder Fellows, and supported by the larger First Step Collaborative.

THE SOLUTION TEAMS: COMMUNITY-LED DESIGN

In July 2019, the Tomorrow Builder Fellows convened a diverse group of community members that included First Step members, ECE providers, concerned parents, nonprofit leaders, ECE policy experts, and advocates to form five “Solution Teams”. Each respective Solution Team worked to advance St. Louis’ early childhood education system by determining key topics, problems, and outcomes for improving ECE in the region, develop strategies for equitably improving the current system, and ensure that all strategies are supported by clear timelines and action steps to drive future implementation. Staff at SKIP joined the Governance & Coordination Solution Team that focused on co-designing a plan for regional coordination.

A research group from the Governance & Coordination Solution Team, including SKIP staff, began exploring successful ECE initiatives in other communities and presented their findings back to the team. Ultimately, the Governance and Coordination Team members recommended that an independent “nonprofit tasked with quarterbacking the region’s ECE system” be established. The specific recommendations, released as part of WEPOWER’s Playbook, also named the First Step to Equity Collaboration as an accountable body for establishing the nonprofit.

LAUNCHING THE REGIONAL COORDINATING ENTITY

Hearing this charge, First Step began the process of forming and launching the new regional coordinating entity for St. Louis. SKIP took the lead on facilitating the new entity’s launch by conducting research, ensuring community input, and designing processes. This included soliciting additional feedback from community members who did not participate in the Solution Team processes, bringing together a subcommittee to advance the entity’s formulation, and providing research support and recommendations for the subcommittee. SKIP then designed and facilitated the formation of a steering committee to hire the CEO and oversee the entity once formed, ensuring that the steering committee would be representative of the ECE community and the selection process would be driven by community members.

The Result:

The regional coordinating entity is set to launch in 2021, designed by community members, backed by rigorous research, provided with dedicated staff and resources to drive coordination in the region, and overseen by the community members who it will most affect. Its’ core strategies are to:

1. Drive quality improvement for both short-term and long-term needs of the regional ECE system.

2. Work with partners to create and maintain a publicly accessible, centralized data hub specific to ECE quality improvement and system-level initiatives. A publicly available dashboard demonstrating progress toward system-level improvements and overall quality will be created and maintained to foster accountability.

3. Formally and consistently convene and connect ECE programs and stakeholders to facilitate system-level coordination toward community-identified needs, system stabilization, and strategic objectives while maintaining a network of ECE programs.

4. Pursue public and private investments to support stabilization and rebuilding efforts post-COVID-19 in the short-term, and strategic equity initiatives in the long-term. The “ECE RCE” will cultivate public awareness about the importance of early education among a diverse set of supporters including, but not limited to, the business, philanthropic, activist, and government agency communities.

5. Partner with ongoing efforts to advocate for ECE policies and programs at the regional, state, and federal level.

It will work to foster an equitable, high-quality regional early childhood system where kids are able to learn and grow in a joyful, high-quality environment regardless of their racial/ethnic identity, family income level, and zip-code. To read more about this effort, visit eceforstl.com.

1. Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education & UMSL Community Innovation and Action Center. (2019). Preschool Development Grant Birth to Five: Missouri Statewide Needs Assessment 2019. https://www.umsl.edu/~webdev/ciac/qs-el-2020-pdg-needs-assessment.pdf