Management/Staff

As a Head Start leader, building relationships within your local receiving schools is one of the best ways to both understand and plan for the process of transitioning a child from Head Start to kindergarten. However, as with most things, that doesn’t just happen automatically or overnight. It takes time to form a plan, and…

Employees are one of the most important resources we have in Head Start. Last week, we announced a new training, Onboarding your Head Start Staff. While we have always included elements of employee onboarding in our trainings, as part of our comprehensive Knowledge Management system, we have separated onboarding into its own stand-alone training. With…

Head Start wants to ensure that the staff and teachers who are serving local families have the appropriate education to do so. The Early Childhood Learning & Knowledge Center (ECLKC) hosts a series of briefs that outlines all the educational requirements for the majority of Head Start staff positions, everything from Executive Directors to Home…

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…