Scappoose, St. Helens, and Lincoln County School Districts Join Early School Success Partnership

Scappoose, St. Helens, and Lincoln County School Districts Join Early School Success Partnership

What is ESS?

The Early School Success initiative (ESS) is Children’s Institute’s response to research which finds that children have the best outcomes when they receive developmentally appropriate, aligned instruction from preschool through the elementary grades. Developed out of the lessons we’ve learned through Early Works, ESS is a partnership. ESS partner districts are provided with consultation, professional development, and coaching to help them strengthen and align preschool and elementary learning experiences and develop deeper, more effective partnerships with families.

Though most education reform efforts and professional learning opportunities for educators focus on grades 3–12, we know that changing student outcomes and closing opportunity gaps requires a transformational shift in how we think about and approach education in the early years. The state of Oregon recognizes that “the greatest gains are achieved when the services and instruction children receive are well aligned and structured to build on one another.” ESS exists to support educators and communities to make this valuable alignment possible.

 

ESS Expands to Include Rural Districts

ESS launched in 2019 with Beaverton and Forest Grove School Districts as its first partners. As these two districts enter their third year, CI has sought to expand the program. We’re pleased to announce that we will be working with Lincoln County, St. Helens, and Scappoose School Districts to bring ESS work into Oregon’s rural context.

Through a rigorous application process that included input from district leadership, teachers, parents, and other members of the school communities, these district partners were chosen based on demonstrated commitment to early learning, the value of partnership, and existing work toward racial equity. 

“With the vision that all young children and their families will thrive, the Scappoose and St. Helens School Districts are thrilled to be able to build upon the early childhood landscapes within our communities,” says Jen Stearns, director of student achievement for Scappoose SD. “Our partnership with Children’s Institute and the Early School Success Grant will empower us to serve more students effectively, encourage parent engagement, and support the alignment of dynamic instruction from preschool through 2nd grade. This is an exciting time to be serving the students and families in Columbia County.” 

Dr. Katie Barrett, director of elementary education at Lincoln County SD said, “Our district is immensely pleased to have the opportunity to work with Children’s Institute on the Early School Success project. We recognize the need and importance of aligning our early learning program with our elementary program, and this grant will allow us to continue to strengthen this alignment as we build sustainable systems and structures that can be replicated in all four areas of our district. We are grateful for the recognition of the work we have begun here in Lincoln County School District, and look forward to our partnership with Children’s Institute.”

 

Related Links

Beyond Fadeout: Why Preschool to Elementary Alignment Matters

Q&A with Karen Twain: Why I Believe in Early School Success

Hard Truths About Land Acknowledgments

Hard Truths About Land Acknowledgments

Most of us are familiar with land acknowledgments, have heard them and have given them. As an Indigenous person, my feelings toward them, at this point, are mixed. I think, like all things racial justice, it’s an always-evolving conversation.

I get the growing feeling that Native people are starting to feel ambivalent about them. A few weeks ago, several of my colleagues and I watched a Land Acknowledgment Conversation hosted by Portland State University. During the panel, Shirod Younker, a Coquille and Coos artist, said, “It’s this stolen car that they keep driving past us, and they keep waving at us, saying ‘Hey, we stole your car!’ That’s what a land acknowledgment is, right?” When I sit in a room and hear an acknowledgment like this, I respond the same way Younker does. As he said, I “ball up.” It gets tiring to hear, “We stole this, and we broke it, and we’re not giving it back.”

I think it’s really important to be specific in an acknowledgment about how the work you’re in a space to do has included, or has not included, Indigenous people and perspectives, and how the work will affect Indigenous people.

I’m a member of the Okanagan Band of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, whose land is northern Washington state and up over the Canadian border, so even being an Indigenous person born and raised in Portland, I’m a guest here, too.

Many of us are guests in our respective homes today. In Portland, where Children’s Institute has its offices, we’re on land that has, since time immemorial, been home to many nomadic groups, including Chinook, Clackamas, Multnomah, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Kathlamet, Mollala, and Salish tribes. Indigenous people lived here for thousands of years, connected to the land and its place-specific teachings regarding how to live on it, unbothered and thriving. White settlement became the norm for this area only 163 years ago, which is six generations removed from us today.

When white settlement began, Indigenous populations were reduced by 90 percent over the course of one generation. Nine of every ten Indian people died from European diseases, or by violence, over the course of about twenty years. But the survivors were still fighting for sovereignty and the right to live on their land in the ways they always had.

These fights were violent. They were wars. And because of this, by the end of the 1850s, the remaining Indigenous survivors, of the illnesses and the fighting, were displaced from this land, their home, and confined to reservations. In Portland, that primarily meant the Grand Ronde reservation, about 70 miles southwest of my current home.

At the same time, Indian children were separated from their families and communities and sent to residential schools. Children from the area that is now Portland likely went to the Chemawa Indian Boarding School in Salem, where they were, at that time, prohibited from speaking their languages or participating in the cultural and spiritual practices that they had known all their lives. Assimilation to Western cultural norms was the goal of their education.

From that point, Indigenous people were, by law, not allowed to live within Portland’s city limits until the 1920s. For context or a frame of reference, that is when my tama, my Indian grandma, was a baby. Since then, of course, Native people have moved back into Portland, and descendants of this region’s Indigenous people are here today. And their culture is resilient. They still hold place-specific teaching about how to live on this land.

Ashley and her Grandma Lucy in Portland, 1982

Acknowledgment of these facts is worth nothing if it doesn’t inspire actions of reconciliation. And that is, I hope, a large part of the work we do every day every day at Children’s Institute. The effects of the colonization of this land have been, and are, experienced most harshly by Native children, Black children, children of color, and children whose parents are immigrants. This organization has a role to play in creating a system of caring for and educating children that contributes to a more just future.

I hope that when we gather, we can not only acknowledge the history of the land that we live and work on, but we can also critically examine the ways that we, and members of the communities that we work with, are either benefitting from or being harmed by settler colonialism, and that we can move forward with the reconciliatory action of seeking out and relying upon the perspectives of the people indigenous to the lands we occupy. Because, like Shirod Younker said, the relationship Native people have with their ancestral land means that they know things that we, as guests, don’t know about how to be human in this specific place.

ECC Policy Agenda Shaped by Lived Experience

ECC Policy Agenda Shaped by Lived Experience

Zakkiyya Ibrahim had been running a 5-star rated child care program in her rental home for three years when she received sudden notice last May, from her landlord, that she would need to close her business within fourteen days or receive an eviction notice. Zakkiyya could not shut down her business in two weeks; not only did her own family depend on the income, she also did not want to disrupt child care for the parents who were relying on it so they could work.

Zakkiyya was fortunate. She was able to negotiate an extension with her landlord, and ultimately, she and her husband bought a home and now operate the business in this new location. But many in-home child care providers in Oregon are not able to seamlessly move from renting to owning property.

“It’s challenging, because there are so many write-offs for a child care business,” Zakkiyya says. “Your income looks really low. That makes it hard to buy a property because you won’t qualify for many loans.”

Finding another rental is difficult as well. Not every rental property meets licensing requirements, and when they do, there is no guarantee that a landlord will be willing to rent to a prospective tenant who intends to run a licensed child care business in the home, even if the business owner carries insurance and has no history of injuries, damages, or other issues.

As a child care provider and the owner of Education Explorers, Zakkiyya has been a participant in Oregon’s Early Childhood Coalition (ECC) since last spring, and told her story in meetings and conversations establishing priorities for the 2021 legislative session. These conversations led to the proposal for House Bill 2484, co-sponsored by AFSCME and Children’s Institute, which asserts that fair and reasonable protections for renters are one piece of expanding child care access and opportunities for culturally specific child care settings, helping to meet a critical need in Oregon.

The ECC’s 2021 Legislative Agenda is centered on community-driven policy proposals like this one, and has been guided by the experiences of Black and Indigenous families, families of color, and families and providers historically excluded from policy and budget decisions. This shift toward inclusive policy-making is a crucial step for implementing comprehensive change needed to build an early childhood system which addresses generations of exclusion and discrimination.

According to Dana Hepper, who convenes the ECC as Children’s Institute’s director of policy and advocacy, “Zakkiyya’s contributions to our work this session have been huge. The items on this agenda were truly shaped by her story and her expertise, as well as the expertise of other participants in the ECC who can offer a deep understanding of the kinds of change we need to see in order to create an early childhood system that really works for people.”

Early Works at Earl Boyles

Early Works at Earl Boyles

Kids begin learning before they’re even born. By the time children start kindergarten, their brains are already 90 percent developed. Children’s Institute believes our education system can do more for kids during this critical period of development. Neighborhood schools can serve children long before they enter kindergarten and provide meaningful support to parents and families before and during elementary school.

Our Early Works initiative demonstrates what happens when school districts, community partners, parents, and funders come together with a shared vision to support the early learning and healthy development of young children: Kids arrive at kindergarten ready to learn, parents feel welcome at the school and empowered to support their children’s learning, and the school community flourishes. 

Read and download the report.

 

Transforming Schools: Community Health Workers in Action

Transforming Schools: Community Health Workers in Action

While community health work is a growing profession, most such workers are not working in an educational setting full-time, nor is there a well-established pathway to placing a CHW in a school, in Oregon or nationally. The process of establishing a full-time CHW and volunteer team of community ambassadors at Earl Boyles Elementary has spanned a number of years and demanded innovation. And while the program has been a success, its future is still precarious.

The purpose of this report is to demonstrate the significant power of such a program, as well as the challenges, learnings, and emerging best practices around it.

Read and download the report.