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Are you having difficulty engaging families? Are you spinning your wheels trying to get parents engaged? Need some strategies to help improve your engagement with families? If you answered yes to any of these questions, we encourage you to watch this video from The Gravely Group CEO, Mel Gravely, as he explains four ways to…

In June, OHS released a program instruction to remind designees about the requirement to maintain full enrollment for the upcoming school year. “This Program Instruction (PI) reiterates the importance of full enrollment. It also outlines the authority of OHS to designate an agency as Chronically Underenrolled and recapture, withhold, or reduce the base grant for…

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…

Every time we host a webinar on record keeping or on the three entities of Head Start/Early Head Start, we get the same question: “What is the minimum amount of members that must be present at a Board or Policy Council meeting to achieve a quorum? “ The answer to this question is actually pretty…

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…

I’m sure you’ve let it slip once or twice. An acronym that you use every day in your work as a Head Start staff person, only to experience a deer-in-the-headlights look when you use it in conversations with parents. Federally-funded programs have a title and term for everything. Every framework, initiative, program, tactic, and strategy…

As Mother’s Day approaches we at The Gravely Group asked Mr. Gravely about his experience growing up. Even until 2014, Mr. Gravely’s mother was living and a very important part of his life. This week he pays homage to his mother and all the things she taught him… “So many children grow up without the…

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…

I have a special place in my heart for foster children, having been a foster parent myself for many years. Foster children can often feel like the world has forgotten them, as the many adults around them are busy navigating the complex bureaucratic web that is the foster care system. While we all mean well,…