By DEBORAH E. LANS
POUGHKEEPSIE–Can you imagine a workplace that has had zero turnover in its existence? Where every “worker” glows when describing the job? That has a profoundly important mission?
The DAY ONE Early Learning Community in Poughkeepsie is such a place. It aims to address three key childcare needs in one program. It embodies a rich, play-based learning environment for young children (toddlers through four-year-olds), coupled with an intensive, hands-on and paid apprenticeship program that models best practices in early childhood education, and it adds in events that foster a supportive community for parents and other caregivers.
As this paper has reported, Columbia County, like most of the state, faces a severe shortage of child care slots. Finding qualified workers is an enormous challenge due to low wages (a significant proportion of childcare workers live in poverty) and job stresses. The sector experiences significant turnover. Many child care providers – whether centers or group home settings – have closed in the past decade, and there are few applicants to open new programs. Profit margins are razor thin, government regulation is onerous, and the inception of universal pre-K (UPK), while in many ways a boon for families, siphoned off the most profitable segment of the market. Child care is also enormously expensive for families (often costing more than rent), even with increased subsidies, and poor design and administration makes the subsidies unattractive to many. (The next article will survey the current landscape further.)
DAY ONE is designed to address many of the key obstacles facing the industry, and suggests a childcare/workforce development structure that could benefit many communities.
DAY ONE was founded in 2020 by Geraldine Laybourne and Julie Riess. Ms. Laybourne, best known for leading the team that created Nickelodeon and Nick at Night, founding Oxygen Media and helming the Disney-ABC Cable Network (including the Disney Channel), has a masters degree in education with a focus on child development. She is a graduate of Vassar College and a Dutchess County resident, so Poughkeepsie was a natural site for this venture into what turns out to be screen-free play-based education.
Ms. Laybourne’s first and most consequential step in starting DAY ONE was to recruit Ms. Riess as her partner. Ms. Riess is a developmental psychologist who directed Vassar College’s acclaimed early childhood laboratory school for 25 years, developing best practices in an inclusive learning environment. She has also written a parenting column for 15 years and researched the benefits of intergenerational programs for children and elders. She leads DAY ONE’s Teacher Apprenticeship Program (TAP).
TAP is at the heart of DAY ONE and play is at the heart of TAP. Play-based learning draws on the innate curiosity and creativity of children. Recognizing that children learn best when actively engaged, it uses “intentional, age-appropriate sensory engagement and play” to “build the neural pathways crucial for life-long success” – activities that encourage kids to experience and explore.
For example, in the fall, activities may involve apples: cutting them and exploring their structure, using the cut surfaces to stamp, sorting different colors, making applesauce. Recipes call for counting and addition. We need three apples, one, two, three. One plus one makes two, and add another apple and you have three. Apples are red or yellow or green. Let’s put all the red ones in a pile, the yellow, the green. Sorting is a basic mathematical skill. Apples have seeds and a stem. What is the stem for? What happens if we put apples in water? Do they float? Sink? Can you grab an apple from the water? Sorting, stamping and grabbing develop motor skills. Talking about the projects develops language skills and vocabulary.
Likewise, music, singing and dancing develop social and emotional as well as motor skills. Songs can be about letters, numbers, names and rhymes. Flash cards with the names of the children in a group can become a game when the kids are asked: Whose name is this? What is that first letter? What color is it? Kids trace letters in foam or create them with letter-shaped Playdoh cookie cutters or colored pumpkin seeds.
While play-based learning may not look “academic” or structured, it works. More than 70% of DAY ONE’s Pre-K students meet “kindergarten-ready” proficiency standards in literacy (as against 40% nationally and 37% for other Poughkeepsie children attending other Pre-K programs); remarkably, 100% are assessed as Early Math proficient (as against 75% nationally and 78% in Poughkeepsie).
Marisol Hoffman, a TAP graduate, runs a home-based group program for 16 children, 12 of whom are pre-school age. Initially a Child Protective Services worker, she turned to child care when she married and had her own children. She had spent 15 years running her own childcare program before attending TAP. TAP re-energized her, and what she gleaned at DAY ONE about how children learn and how to use play caused her to completely restructure her own programs and approaches.
She now recruits staff from the TAP program, and like all TAP graduates who are continuing in child care, she meets with her colleagues at DAY ONE every six weeks to share tips, discuss challenges, solutions and approaches. In other words, DAY ONE is a continuing source of support and community for those it has trained, meeting needs that the state’s Office for Children and Family Services (OCFS) does not. (OCFS training is geared to its regulations.)
That its graduates will continue in, and ultimately open, home-based group care programs is a goal of DAY ONE. Home-based programs can afford their owners a living wage and are often more economically viable than child care centers. Many parents prefer the more intimate, “homey” environment. Unlike a center, where children are siloed into age groups by state regulation, in a home setting many activities allow for interaction among children of different ages and for siblings to attend together, with older children teaching younger ones. The children in such programs can also experience greater continuity, working with the same teachers from infancy or toddlerhood on.
TAP participants are from the low-income and poverty-level communities that DAY ONE serves. They are not required to hold advanced degrees, although many do. TAP participants are paid a living wage while in the intensive, eleven-week program.
This fall, DAY ONE opened its first bilingual TAP program, and it has attracted a number of Spanish-speaking immigrants from Latin and South America.
Many of DAY ONE’s teachers and apprentices first learned of TAP when attending a parent program there. Parent programs are held on Wednesdays and no registration is required, allowing parents with multiple demands on their time to come when they can. Cindy Fernandez had been a family lawyer in Colombia. Her older son was in school and she was lonely at home with her newborn. She went to some parent gatherings, meeting others facing the same challenges, exchanging parenting wisdom, enjoying yoga and the center’s library.
When DAY ONE opened its first toddler classroom, Ms. Fernandez enrolled her younger child and she joined TAP. Today she leads a UPK classroom and aspires to start her own daycare program once she has more experience.
Estefany Umbach, who today is the director of Community Engagement and coach/interpreter for the bilingual TAP participants, was also a lawyer in Colombia, handling human rights cases. She came to the U.S. as an au pair, then enrolled in and attained a masters in Public Administration, worked in hospice care, and ultimately joined DAY One, initially as a board member.
Ms. Umbach sees early childhood learning as an economic pathway through which immigrants can have their own businesses while serving others. DAY ONE supports those who open their own programs with coaching for one year and free services to assist with the licensing and regulatory process.
What makes TAP special, according to Shaneisha Strange and Michelle Ocasio is its hands-on learning approach, supported by intimate mentoring. Every morning the apprentices assist in classrooms. Ms. Strange, for example, leads a three-year old classroom and mentors two apprentices in that classroom, assisted by a recent TAP graduate.
In the afternoon, the apprentices go to school themselves. As Ms. Ocasio explains, unlike the early childhood programs she took in college, the apprentices receive immediate feedback. In “class” they talk about what happened in the morning. What worked. What didn’t work. The group exchanges thoughts about other possible approaches, led by Ms. Riess.
The joy with which teachers like Ms. Strange and Ms. Ocasio describe their days might explain the extraordinary fact that, in a turnover-plagued industry, DAY ONE today has all of its original staff. And, while newly-trained apprentices hope to start or join child care programs, they are not leaving the field as is happening elsewhere. Moreover, DAY ONE has grown its staff from the inside, hiring its apprentice-graduates to teach and administer.
Chanel Whitaker is now the assistant director at DAY ONE. A Poughkeepsie native, she is a TAP graduate. The genius of TAP, to her, is that every apprentice has a lead teacher who explains how to implement a piece of curriculum: what tools are needed, what is the plan and the back-up plan. Children are not told to sit still or stop fidgeting; rather the lessons and classroom are tailored to the children. If fidgeting is a problem, perhaps it is time for a dance or yoga break. If a child is overwhelmed, perhaps he needs to spend a bit of time in the “privacy tent.”
That the program also fosters a community of parents is also key. Gina McCann, whose son entered the program as a “shy baby who has grown into a boy” who is independent and sturdy, has found some of her closest friends at DAY ONE. She loves some of their special events: the day they school became a farmer’s market, with the kids shopping for (and therefore learning the names of) fruits and vegetables and paying for their purchases (a math exercise, introducing coins) or the “bookstore,” complete with a cash register, where the children could select and pay (a bit) for books.
The program seems to have thought of most everything. For example, the adults in the children’s lives are not called parents, as some children do not have parents or traditional families; instead, the children have their “grown-ups.” Dolls go unclothed so as to foster gender equality and freedom of identity. Through an app called Brightwheel, information about the child’s day is sent home as the day progresses and includes whether she napped (and how long), ate (and what) along with pictures of the day’s doings.
That same care extends to the financial structure, where a few parents pay the full cost, some rely on state subsidies (with DAY ONE assisting with the paperwork) and some, who do not qualify for subsidies, pay a maximum of 7% of their after-tax income – an amount considered affordable by the government.
DAY ONE is currently serving about 70 students in Poughkeepsie. DAY ONE is funded by some state and federal grants – primarily as a workforce development program – and philanthropic contributions.
This year, DAY ONE opened its first “replication site” in Kingston. Its goal is to find support for other sites. Columbia County might aspire to be one of those. For example, Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood (GHPN) hopes to open an early childhood learning center in Hudson. GHPN has had preliminary conversations with Kearney Realty, the developer of the city’s scattered site affordable housing project. That project will include a building on Fourth Street that will have two street-level spaces dedicated to community uses. GHPN dreams of occupying one of those units and offering the city much-needed childcare services.
To contact reporter Deborah Lans, email deborahlans@icloud.com.
