Management/Staff

As we know, parent/family engagement is one of the most important and longest-lasting benefits of Head Start. To do it right, it requires an all-hands-on-deck mentality. Every interaction with a parent or caregiver, no matter how small or fleeting it may seem, should be considered when putting together the best plan for family engagement. After…

Head Start at the national level does not have any explicit rules regarding the vaccination status of children who attend local programs (a bill proposed in 2015 would’ve required all Head Start children to be vaccinated, but never made it to a vote). As it stands now, it is only mentioned once in the Head…

This may be one of the most difficult topics I’ve ever had to write about. No one wants to think about a scenario in which our country’s most vulnerable, our children, might be the targets of intentional violence. This week, another act of school violence made headlines, just seven miles from Columbine, Co, in which…

We recently gave a free webinar on the three entities of Head Start/Early Head Start Program Governance Structure. (Sign up for our mailing list to receive notices about upcoming free webinars). In that webinar, we talked about the roles and responsibilities of each entity, as well as training and reporting requirements. Based on the questions…

Office of Head Start (OHS) recently announced an update which will delay compliance requirements for background checks and the Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) until September 30, 2019. Under the initial rule, programs were required to comply by September 2017, which was delayed until September 2018. The summary from the updated rule reads: “The…

We’ve reached the ninth and final installment of our blog series on the nine Relationship-Based Competencies, Foundation for Professional Growth. We hope you’ve enjoyed the series and learned a little bit too! (Click here to read all our blogs in the series ») Maintain Professionalism Professional growth is something that everyone should work towards continuously…

The eighth relationship-based competency in our blog series is Data-Driven Services and Continuous Improvement. Every Head Start and Early Head Start program should be collecting and analyzing data on a regular basis to find new solutions to challenges as part of an ongoing effort to continuously improve services for the community that they are working…

We’ve reached #7 in our series about the nine Head Start Relationship-Based Competencies: Coordinated, Integrated, Comprehensive Services. Assembling a Team Putting together a comprehensive service team for the families we work with is very important to their success in Head Start and Early Head Start programs. Every person that works with the families should have…

This is the second blog post in our series about the nine relationship-based competencies. Read our first blog here: Positive, Goal-Oriented Relationships. As professionals working in Head Start and Early Head Start programs we get the opportunity to meet families that have very diverse backgrounds and come from different cultures. Building productive relationships with families…

For the first blog in our series about relationship-based competencies, we’re going to discuss positive, goal-oriented relationships. Creating positive relationships with the families that we serve is a key point in assisting them to become self-sufficient. From our first interaction with families to the last, the relationships that we build will stay with them for…