Earl Boyles’ Neighborhood Center Nurtures Community and Connection

by Celeste Yager-Kandle | Oct 11, 2021 | Preschool, Early Works, Health and Development

In 2010, Earl Boyles became the first site for Children’s Institute’s community-centered Early Works initiative, an approach to early learning and healthy development built on partnerships, innovation, and engaged families. From the beginning, the goal was to provide high-quality early learning opportunities for young children before they started kindergarten, alongside meaningful support for parents and families before and during elementary school.

Early Works also sought to enrich the school community by bringing together existing community resources through the Neighborhood Center, a full-service resource hub for children and their families, which is housed inside of the school.

Prior to Early Works, Earl Boyles was a designated SUN school. SUN, an acronym for Schools Uniting Neighborhoods, is an Multnomah County initiative focused mainly on providing wrap-around support for school-aged children. While SUN partners were a key part of developing the vision for the Neighborhood Center, the Early Works initiative specifically focuses on the needs of young children, birth to three. Working together, the partnership was able to reach a broader base of families with existing resources.

Today, building on the partnerships and services supported by Early Works and the SUN program, the Neighborhood Center works to connect families with services, ensuring that child health, development, and learning are connected to the school beginning at birth. SUN community school manager, Erika Hernandez, explained the Neighborhood Center’s approach to connect families with services, and how Early Works helps in facilitating partnerships.

“We have a very proactive relationship with our preschool and early learning partners. We want to start developing relationships with families before their kids start school, and to make the Neighborhood Center accessible,” explained Hernandez.

“Some of the babies in our play groups have older siblings at the school, too. So, it’s really about knowing the whole family, and without the playgroups or being an Early Works school, we might not see so much of that. This really gives us the chance to know the entire family,” she said.

During the initial implementation of Early Works going back a decade, a community needs assessment was a crucial first step in building a program that would provide families with what they needed, in their own words.

To do this, Children’s Institute partnered with researchers from Portland State University (PSU) to collect data and facilitate listening sessions. The results ultimately paved the way for the birth of the Neighborhood Center in 2015.

Beth Green, director of early childhood and family support research at PSU, was the lead researcher for the first community needs assessment. Green explained, “The Neighborhood Center came out of a recognition that high-quality early preschool helps children develop skills and it’s really necessary, but not sufficient, for ensuring long-term outcomes for kids.” She added, “If you really want to continue to support them academically, and socially-emotionally, you need to make sure their families’ basic needs are getting met.”

Now, the Neighborhood Center is a collective of parents, service providers, community organizations, early learning partners, and policy and advocacy groups, working together to support child development and nurture healthy, stable families. It offers resource connection for families seeking rent and utilities assistance, basic necessities, systems navigation, parent education opportunities, and access to community health workers.

Marina Merrill, director of research and strategy at Children’s Institute, reflected on how the school continues to support early childhood development by supporting families. “At Earl Boyles, we start at birth, knowing that families look to their neighborhood school for a range of support,” she said. “Creating a school as a hub with services beginning at birth helps create strong pathways to support children’s health and well-being. We know that engaging families and supporting their needs is also critical to ensure their children thrive.”

Because of Earl Boyles’ unique partnership with Children’s Institute, and being an Early Works site, the school has built a culture derived from the perspectives of families, and has the ability to respond directly to the community’s needs. And as the community continues to pivot in response to an evolving pandemic landscape, so too, does the Neighborhood Center.

The staff has continued to support children and families through direct services through what they call Care and Connect Team referrals, which include a food pantry, emergency food boxes, and housing and utility assistance.

Earl Boyles principal, Ericka Guynes, spoke to the ongoing impact that the Neighborhood Center has had on the school community, children and their families during the pandemic: “Even though we were not able to be in person, the case management and support continued. We were able to coordinate with our partners to continue to serve our community to support their needs.”

“The Earl Boyles Neighborhood Center has continued to support our community throughout this challenging time,” she said, “and it shows what a community school can look like when everyone pulls together to make sure kids and families thrive.”

Learn More about Early Works

Highlights from the South Coast: Working Together for Kids and Families

by Melissa Duclos | May 22, 2018 | Community Engagement, Featured Programs, School Readiness

CI staff and others visit the Lincoln School of Early Learning in Coquille, Oregon.

On May 3 and 4, Miriam Calderon (director, Oregon Early Learning System), Martha Richards (executive director, James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation), and Ericka Guynes (principal, Earl Boyles Elementary School) joined Children’s Institute staff to visit early learning sites in Coos Bay and Coquille.

Our first stop, the Southwestern Oregon Community College (SWOCC) Family Center operates a preschool and serves as an incubator for regional early childhood programs and services. According to professor Maidie Rosengarden, “The SOCC Family Center is a rare place. There aren’t any other community colleges that operate a preschool, train teachers on-site, and offer distance learning with mentorship from master teachers for early childhood educators.” In addition to providing early childhood education and training early childhood educators, the Family Center has also become a resource network for childcare providers. Danaye Gonzalez, Program Manager for CARE Connections Child Care Resource and Referral, told us about the Inclusive Child Care Program: “We brought together parents and providers to make sure children with disabilities and delays were meaningfully included in early education and childcare. Highlights from the South Coast: Working Together for Kids and Families Parents talked about their children and their experiences, and providers listened to better understand the needs of developmentally disabled young children and their families.” This training is necessary everywhere but is extremely important in a region experiencing a severe childcare crisis.

The South Coast, like many other parts of Oregon, is experiencing a critical shortage of preschool and childcare options for young children. The level of crisis has been a motivator for innovative thinking. In Coquille, Superintendent Tim Sweeney and his team made preschool a priority and created an early learning program in the district. Sweeney and Principal Sharon Nelson took us on a tour of the Lincoln Early Learning Center which houses four full-day kindergartens serving 80 students, two-half day preschool classes enrolling 50 3- and 4-year olds, and a Head Start class with 20 children. “If we give young kids meaningful opportunities to learn and grow, we’re setting them up for success throughout their lives,” Tim Sweeney says.

After visiting Lincoln, we met with 20 early childhood providers and partners from around the South Coast to learn about early childhood concerns in their communities. They told us about the key issues that could use more attention and what they were excited about. The group highlighted the severe lack of childcare for infants and toddlers, the need for better wages for childcare and early education providers, and the housing crisis gripping their communities as concerns that need to be addressed so young children and their families can have stability. For South Coast Early Learning Hub Director Heather Baumer, the challenges have driven the region to be more strategic. “The silos are starting to come down and we all have a ‘can do’ attitude. We’re seeing more collaboration between early childhood and K–12; people are starting to see the connections. It’s exciting,” she said.

All over the state, families are grappling with the lack of safe and affordable childcare, few high-quality preschool options, and rising housing costs. These factors are exacerbated in rural Oregon where public transportation can be inconsistent and incomes stagnant. With 47 percent of children born in Oregon relying on Medicaid for healthcare coverage and nearly 129,000 kids ages birth to 5 living at 200 percent or below of the Federal Poverty (FPL), Oregon needs an early care and education system that fosters healthy parent-child relationships, supports access to affordable, quality childcare, and provides high-quality early learning experiences. Highlights from the South Coast: Working Together for Kids and Families

Oregon’s young children need to be a priority. The families, teachers, and providers of the South Coast know there is no time to waste.

The Importance of Early Literacy

by Melissa Duclos | Dec 8, 2017 | Early Works, Featured Programs, Parents and Families, Preschool, School Readiness

Materials Provided by the Children’s Book Bank

This week’s visit by the Children’s Book Bank to the Early Works preschool program at Earl Boyles is a good reminder of how important early reading is to young children. Consider that:

Eighty percent of child’s brain develops by age 3.
Reading to young children can impact how their brains process stories and contribute to future academic success.
Children who know more words by kindergarten are better off academically.
A child’s reading level in third grade is a consistent predictor of high school graduation and college attendance rates.

For additional information on the importance of early literacy, check out these articles:

Education Week: Doctors Enlisted to Deliver Early-Literacy Message

NPR: Baby’s Got Mail: Free Books Boost Early Literacy

New America: Reading Recovery Program Closing Literacy Gap for Early Readers

Huffington Post: Building Blocks to Literacy

Romper: What Happens In Your Baby’s Brain When You Talk, Sing, & Read to Them?

And if there’s a child in your life who you love to read with, take some time over the holidays to continue working on early reading skills. For tips and resources on how, visit Talking is Teaching, and stay tuned to the CI Blog for some great book recommendations for kids, coming next week!

At Earl Boyles, Parent-Teacher Conferences Foster Community

by Melissa Duclos | Nov 29, 2017 | Early Works, Parents and Families, Preschool, Successful Students

At Earl Boyles, Parent-Teacher Conferences Foster Community
In a school community where over thirty different home languages are spoken, the faculty and staff at Earl Boyles Elementary in Southeast Portland work to make sure all members of the community feel welcome. Whereas one primary role of schools has been to assimilate immigrant children into a generic ideal that did not necessarily reflect American life, researchers have now come to see the importance of the cultural knowledge that students and families bring with them. Schools that value such knowledge and create authentic relationships with students and families note an increase in children’s academic achievement and emotional development, research has shown. Earl Boyles provides a great example of how to foster these kinds of authentic relationships with all families.

At Earl Boyles, Parent-Teacher Conferences Foster Community Head Start, with its Two Generations Together Initiative, pioneered an approach to fostering community and comprehensive child and family services that achieved long-term outcomes by focusing on children and their families. Parent-teacher conferences, which took place at schools across the state this month, including Earl Boyles, are one way for K-12 schools to adopt a family-engaging approach, and create the kind of welcoming environment that has been shown to improve family involvement, as well as to build trust between parents and teachers.

For the past five years, Earl Boyles has implemented a new approach to conferences designed to elicit family involvement and foster a sense of community. While the primary purpose of conferences is still to convey information to parents about how children are doing in school, Principal Ericka Guynes also wanted to use conferences to “create a space that was safe, where parents could start to network, have a cup of coffee, talk to other parents, and access resources.” To achieve that goal, the school incorporated a “Parent Break Space” into its conference model, using the cafeteria as a place for parents to gather throughout the day, and for community partner organizations to provide resources.

Facilitated by Earl Boyles’ Parents United/Padres Unidos group, the Break Space provides snacks, a place for children to draw, and resources—such as a community health worker, information on housing assistance, and a food pantry—determined by a community needs assessment, and ultimately selected by the Parents United leadership team. In addition to meeting community needs, the school uses the Break Space to continue to communicate with parents, distributing a survey from the community schools program Schools Uniting Neighborhoods (SUN) to determine the adult education topics parents are most interested in.

At Earl Boyles, Parent-Teacher Conferences Foster Community

This year, for the first time since the school implemented the Break Space, Earl Boyles will be collecting even more input from parents, working with Portland State University (PSU) to survey parents about the information they received at conferences this year. Principal Guynes is interested in determining whether parents feel as though their voices are being heard, demonstrating that the school views parents as valuable partners in their children’s educations, rather than passive recipients of information during conferences.

The innovation does not end here at Earl Boyles. In the Spring, the school will be using student-led conferences. These conferences allow students to present their work and their future goals to parents, and teachers more time to connect with families. These new approaches to conferences demonstrate how small changes within a school can help build a welcoming school community that supports young children’s learning experiences.

At Earl Boyles, Parent-Teacher Conferences Foster Community

Early Works Receives Federal Recognition

by Rafael Otto | Jan 13, 2017 | Early Works, News, Announcements

Early Works at Earl Boyles is featured in the U.S. Department of Education’s newly released descriptive study on P-3 implementation, “Case Studies of Schools Implementing Elementary Strategies: Preschool Through Third Grade Alignment and Differentiated Instruction.” The study highlights five early learning programs across the country focused on building fundamental school readiness skills (vocabulary, oral language development, and socio-emotional development) and sustaining those skills into the early grades.

The study identifies common approaches to alignment, concerns about the financial sustainability of intensive P-3 programs over time, and the benefits of professional learning communities (PLC) and parent engagement in enhancing the learning experiences of young children.

Early Works at Earl Boyles findings include the importance of parent engagement and teacher support. “School and district staff at Earl Boyles reported an increase in parental involvement since the implementation of their P–3 efforts. Staff reported that, as families have become more involved, students have been more successful academically.”

Read the full report