Conversations with Ted Alejandre and Heather Smith

Since this is our launch into the world of podcasting, we thought it'd be important to speak to the why behind not just this podcast, but also the creation of our brand new department, Early Education and Development. And to do this, it seemed fitting to invite our one and only San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools. Ted Alejandre and the  director of Early Education and Development Department, Heather Smith. 

Early Education and Development webpage:
https://www.sbcss.k12.ca.us/index.php/en/ess-2019/early-education-and-development

Music by lemonmusicstudio from Pixabay - Where the Light Is

Transcript

 Nancy  00:06

Hello, everyone. This is Nancy Sherod and it is my pleasure to welcome you to our very first full episode of the Early Education and Developments podcast, Tomorrow's Readiness Starts Today. Each month we will introduce you to someone who's playing an important role in the preschool to third grade initiatives. We'll fill you in on some of the key topics that impact learning environments for our littlest learners, and share with you some of the awesome things we're doing here in the early education and development department at the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools. Since this is our launch into the world of podcasting, we thought it'd be important to speak to the why behind not just this podcast, but also the creation of our brand new department, early education and development. And to do this, it seemed fitting to invite our one and only San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools. Ted Alejandre, thank you for being with us today.

Ted  00:55

You're welcome. It's great to be here today.

Nancy  00:57

Perfect. Well, later in this episode, we'll have Heather Smith, the director of Early Education and Development speak to the department's role in the collective impact vision for the county. But can you please start us off with a little bit about San Bernardino county wide vision in building the cradle to career roadmap to success for our children and the future of San Bernardino County?

Ted  01:18

Absolutely be wonderful too, you know, we have a credible relationship with so many individuals in San Bernardino County, because our county has a vision for San Bernardino all the residents in San Bernardino County. And that vision is to have a county that is the best place to live, work and play. And to make that happen, we really have to have strong collaboration between all entities in the county to have those pillars of support from government from faith based institutions, certainly from our schools, but from everybody associated with the interests of supporting students in our communities, everyone wants our students to be successful. And through the county wide vision, we're able to accomplish that. So that is a incredible roadmap for us to work towards, so that it can be available for anybody to participate all in the interest of supporting students.

Nancy  02:05

I love that. And that roadmap is a key piece to our work down in early ed. And we're really starting to bring up cradle to career for everyone. So can you tell us a little bit more about that cradle to career piece that's started here at the county level?

Ted  02:17

Absolutely. You know, when the county wide vision was accomplished, it really had elements of across the county that were focused in certain key areas like health, safety, and education being amongst the highest priorities. In education, we felt that it was important to have a roadmap for every district to focus on to ensure the success of every student. And that's when the cradle to career was established in partnership with Cal State University, San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools and other key stakeholders. And what the cradle to career provides is really the best indicators of success for every one of our students. You know, in San Bernardino County, we have 33 school districts, over 400,000 students. And in our cradle to career, those success indicators are really in the zero to 5, k-12, and post secondary areas for academics, but also for personal growth, so that every single student has a mindset for success across those levels, and the support behind it to ensure their success from all the stakeholders involved.

Nancy  03:23

I love it perfect. Well, and as we're talking with our listeners and letting them hear more, let's kind of circle back to that collective impact. Because we have a lot of things going on that are at the heart of the work we're doing here in San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools, can you talk a little bit about modeling our future and maybe some of the three steps we're taking towards that collaboration?

Ted  03:43

Absolutely. Collective impact is key. Because none of us can do this work alone, we can't work in silos, we really have to support and collaborate amongst each other. So when we look at initiatives, partnering with stakeholders is only going to leverage the services that each agency and individual and stakeholder can provide, so that you really have greater success because everybody's contributing to the same goal. When you have mutual goals. For example, we'll take literacy, one of the first visions that came out of the cradle career was the vision to read. And so to help students build literacy skills, certainly teachers in the classroom can do that. But so can parents at home so can business partners so can other stakeholders who  can provide the resources and opportunities for students to engage in language experience and reading opportunities and resources to support literacy. You know, we provided our first platform for that through our footsteps to brilliance, and that platform was a collaborative effort with San Bernardino County preschool services department, first five, San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools and children's fun, who invested our resources into a platform that's available for every single one of our families that live in San Bernardino County. So that's just one example of me NEA, as to how you can through collective impact, really leverage those resources for the common good of our community. And every resident in San Bernardino County.

Nancy  05:10

I love it. And footsteps is at the heart of a lot of the things we're doing in early education, from our love for literacy to our learning with me launch that's coming up pretty soon. So we're excited in future episodes to share a little bit more about footsteps to brilliance and some of the great things that vision to read has springboarded us for our departments. So you've talked a ton about collective impacts? Can you share how this model fits into the SBCSS as an organization, and specifically with the creation of the new Early Education and Development Department branch that we are a part of?

Ted  05:41

Absolutely, you know, one of our greatest responsibilities is to ensure that our stakeholders and our communities receive the best services possible, not just from us, but everyone we're associated with. And when you have that intrinsic desire to support students through collective impact, then everybody puts forth their top efforts. And that means that every organization has to bring in individuals with that mindset of collaboration, every time we bring in new employees. And every time we select leaders for key departments, we really look at that individual being someone who has an intrinsic desire to work with others to collaborate with others, so that we can again, build our strength through partners and through engagement with our partners in support of our students. And that's what I'm so proud of all of our administrators, certainly all of our teachers and paraprofessionals, every employee in San Bernardino County, works towards our mission, which is to transform lives through education, you can ask any one of our team members, and they know what our mission is, because everybody understands their role, and how to support it directly or indirectly. But when you have that kind of team, then other teams and agencies government, private business, Faith base, etc. Want to be a partner and be part of a team countywide that can support the efforts to support students.

Nancy  07:04

Well, we love what we are doing. And we're thrilled for the development of our department, we have taken off and launched from January to now. And we're thrilled to have you here with us this morning, to take the time to chat a little bit about collective impact, to share about vision to read. These are all big pieces that we're going to continue to talk about in the next few months. So I just want to thank you for taking time this morning to share with us and get us started on this great new podcasting adventure and really sharing with our families and childcare providers and teachers and everyone else that is leading the charge for our littlest people. Thanks for being here this morning.

Ted  07:38

No, thank you for inviting me. And as I close, I just want to remind all of our listeners that to get more information, especially about our cradle to careers, we actually have a cradle to career interactive established on our website. So if you're a come to our website and look for our cradle career interactive, you can actually look through every single one of those indicators that will give you some of the best resources for teachers, for parents, and for anybody who wants to get involved in this important endeavor. Through this database of key resources. We've heard from many individuals about how helpful they were in supporting this effort, and having as many community members get involved. And so I want to thank all the listeners, I want to thank all of our partners, and continuing to support our efforts to transform lives to education. Thank you so much.

Nancy  08:27

Thank you.

Ana  08:31

Hi, everyone. This is Ana Garcia jumping in to join this first episode and introduce our next guest. We are excited to be sitting down and talking with our director in Early Education and Development, Heather Smith. Welcome, Heather.

Heather  08:42

Good morning, everyone. And thank you for inviting me this morning.

Nancy  08:45

We're excited to have you sit with us and share a little bit about the department. But before we do that, can you start us off with a little background on your journey in education and what led you to your current role?

Heather  08:55

Absolutely, I'd love to. I was hired as a kindergarten teacher and taught for about 17 years. From there I became an ELA or literacy teacher on special assignment where I was fortunate enough to work with teachers across our district. After that I became a principal and an elementary school site. And then that led me to the county office of education where I became a coordinator for English language arts and literacy programs here at San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools. After that role, I moved into a program manager position with a learning systems and supports department as part of our ed services branch. And I'm currently now the director of our brand new department which I'm thrilled to be serving our children and families ages zero to five.

Nancy  09:38

And we love working with you.

Ana  09:41

Heather, how do you see our department impacting early education?

Heather  09:46

Oh my goodness, we have so much work in front of us that is really important work when we think about how we support our children ages zero to five their families as well as the educators that support them. Of course universal pre kindergarten is a huge part of what we do in our department, and being able to develop a mixed delivery model that will allow our families to make choices for their children that best fits the needs of their children as well as the needs of the family. And when we talk about a mixed delivery system, we talk about Transitional Kindergarten being one of those choices. We talked about a California state preschool programs, as well as Headstart its community based organizations, as well as our family, child cares. All of those provide an an incredibly important resource for our families, to provide a high quality environment and a high quality learning experience for our kids. We want to make sure that we think through innovative approaches to early education and development, looking at ways that we can meet families where they're at to help support literacy development, school readiness, positive transitions into our elementary schools and making sure that we're again, supporting the vision to read, which is our county wide vision, making sure that we're connecting our families with resources that are quality, that are vetted and are free. For our families, such as footsteps to brilliance,

Nancy  11:13

Perfect. Let's go into a little bit more, because we have some fun people coming in in the next few months, that are going to tell us about some of the pieces you said so expand a little bit not a ton because we're gonna have a whole episode on it about the innovative approaches, because that's a big project we're working on with a lot of energy from the whole team. It is

Heather  11:31

and we're really excited about some of the ways that we're able to really expand on our collective impact approach, which means that we're working with partners in our community to provide some of those resources that I mentioned, one of the ways that we're doing that is we are partnering with KVCR, our our local public television station, as well as footsteps to brilliance to provide a dual language in Spanish and English early learning television show that is going to be aired. And we're really excited about that. And the purpose of that is really to provide an opportunity for our children to expand their knowledge, of language of literacy in in both languages, from the comfort of their own homes. And then we also have our love for literacy project.

Nancy  12:22

We're gonna tap you in for that, Lindsay, thank you.

Heather  12:24

Excellent. Our love for literacy project is really amazing. We are working in partnership with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, what we're doing is we're actually working with the folks that are experiencing incarceration, to bring their children in to work with them on literacy, we of course want to continue to build that family relationship while they are separated. But we also want to provide opportunities for literacy moments actually is what we call them where the families work with the children on early literacy, they use footsteps to brilliance on the iPads, they also engage in reading actual texts, they have an opportunity to really work on some of those literacy skills together.

Ana  13:10

So Heather, both of those us footsteps are brilliant. Can you give us some background on that?

Heather  13:15

Absolutely. But steps to brilliance is one of our amazing partners that we work with. We have been in partnership with them since Gosh, 2016 - 2017. I believe. What they provide for us in San Bernardino County is because we have a superintendent that really supports early literacy, we have an opportunity for all of our families with children ages zero through third grade, to participate in use footsteps to brilliance, absolutely free at no cost, with or without internet. And it is a program that they can access via the web or through an app on their smart device. It is device agnostic, which means you can use it on anything, any type of smartphone or tablet, a desktop computer or laptop, or Chromebook, anything like that. And what kids can do is they actually create a free account, they get access to hundreds of digital books, early writing opportunities and skill based games. It's incredibly interactive, very engaging for kids, and again, helps support that development of language and literacy.

Nancy  14:21

Thank you. That's super fun. So what are you hoping to see accomplished in the early education and development department in the next 12 months? We've got a lot of projects, but what is your biggest hopes for the department?

Heather  14:33

I think my biggest hope for the department is really to increase equity and access to high quality environments and learning experiences for all of our children across our county. I believe that through universal pre kindergarten and the development of that system, we have an opportunity that has never been provided to us before. We want to make sure that we are again supporting all of our four year olds as well as our three year olds to make sure that they have Quality, two full years of quality learning experiences before they enter our Lea system or our K 12. System. We want to make sure we continue to focus on the expansion and the creation of that mixed delivery model, as I mentioned before, really making sure that we are providing professional learning opportunities, coaching, resources, and support for all of our providers that support our children, regardless of the type of environment that they're working with kids in, I mentioned all the different types of programs. And I think we need to really focus on continuing to develop that. And not only develop the mixed delivery system, but also helped connect that system with our LEA's, making sure that our, you know, school site secretaries know what the options are for the families as they come in making sure that our administrators know what a mixed delivery system is, and how they can partner with their local family childcare, or with the state preschool that happens to be down the street. In order to provide those opportunities for our children and our families. I want to make sure that we continue to engage in our collective impact work, our projects that meet families, where they're at, to support successful transitions and school readiness. All of those things are critically important for our department. We are unique in that we not only support our districts in the county, but we also support our early learning agencies as well as collective impact efforts.

Nancy  16:27

We know we have a fun road ahead of us in the next 12 months. So thank you for sharing. Okay, so we have families, teachers, leaders, child care providers, they're all listening to this podcast. Is there anything you want them to hear from you or our department? Before we sign off?

Heather  16:43

Yes, I believe that, I really want to emphasize that San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools, our mission is to transform lives through education. We have a cradle to career roadmap that I think intentionally has zero to five as the first chunk on that map. Because what we do in our department to help kids prepare for school is critically critically important. And so I just want everyone listening to know that that is why we are here. That is why our department was created in the first place. We are here to support our families through services specific to early learning and development, making sure that we're again increasing that access, access and equity and being a resource also for our families. Knowing that our families can reach out to us if they have questions, we can certainly connect them with the resources they might need. Whether that is within San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools, or within one of our collective impact partners, because we have a lot of partnerships that are set up intentionally for us to be able to make those connections for our families.

Ana  17:48

Thank you so much, Heather, for being with us today. We really enjoyed our conversation with you. And to our listeners. Join us next month when we will be sitting down with our chief officer and CEO of footsteps to brilliance to share with you some of the great work they are doing alongside our department and getting literacy into the hands of all zero to eight year olds across San Bernardino County.

Nancy  18:06

Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope to have you tune in next month when we continue to share the message that tomorrow's readiness starts today.