Excited about Smart Start and Sharing Parenting Assessment Experiences!
The National Smart Start Conference will be held in Greensboro, NC the first week of May.
For a close look at innovative strategies in health, education and family support programs, conference participants can choose from more than 60 workshops during the 3-day conference. This is one of my favorite early childhood conferences because of its manageable size (approximately 1000 participants from across the US), the openness of participants to sharing ideas, and mixing of early education and family support practitioners ranging from frontline teachers and family support workers to administrators, evaluators, researchers and policymakers.
The conference is organized by the North Carolina Partnership for Children (NCPC). Smart Start is North Carolina’s name for their statewide public/private partnership. It funds the work of independent private organizations in the 100 NC counties through NCPC and 76 Local Partnerships. Smart Start gains energy and buy-in by giving local communities control of the strategies they use to address four statewide early childhood priorities:
- Raising Quality Education,
- Supporting Families,
- Advancing Child Health and
- Expanding Literacy.
North Carolina has been a longtime leader in early childhood practice and research. So it’s no wonder that this conference offers marvelous opportunities to interact with cutting edge practitioners, researchers and policymakers who are devoted to supporting the development and well-being of young children and their families.
I’m eager to hear the opening keynote by Dr. Clancy Blair, professor of cognitive psychology at New York University. He has researched the development of executive functions which are pivotal to school readiness and achievement. These functions are developed through experience and influenced by family and the home environment. I hope that he’ll report the highlights from his recent federally-funded projects that have studied innovative approaches to developing executive functions in early childhood education settings. Of greatest interest to those of us working with families, he is testing a parenting program in Early Head Starts to promote self-regulation involving both parents and children.
One of the featured sessions at the conference reminds me of the old African adage: It takes a village to raise a child. Strengthening Families: How Do Communities Come Together to Better Support All Children? will be conducted by Neal Horen, Director of the Early Childhood Division, Georgetown University, Claudia Zundel, Colorado Division of Behavioral Health, and Dr. Dana Hagele, Pediatrician. This promises to be a thought-provoking session about the collaboration of multiple supports in community early childhood systems — including physical health, mental health and early childhood services – that are necessary to promote positive well-being and prevent debilitating problems in families living with high risks.
I invite you to join us at our session on parenting assessment, #403 in Grandover East at 3:30pm on Tuesday, May 5: Exploring If the KIPS Parenting Assessment Fits My Program. I am most excited because we will be sharing experiences with parenting assessment by long time KIPS users from North Carolina, Lee Henderson from Smart Start of Mecklenburg County, Raquel Rivera from YMCA of Charlotte and Berta Andrade and Trina Stephens from IMPRINTS in Winston Salem. Even more, I am particularly excited about this year’s presentation because, starting in fiscal year 2015, programs funded by Smart Start will be required to collect evidence of their outcomes. Because of the well-documented central role that parenting plays in child development, Smart Start outcomes include “increase positive parenting practices,” and KIPS has been identified as the gold standard by Smart Start’s evaluation team. Thus, evaluating our parenting assessment will be of great interest to those attending the conference given that their outcomes include improving parenting. I expect we will have lots of specific questions on how to make KIPS work within the context of specific programs. Come join us and bring your questions!
We already have many KIPS users in North Carolina. Most programs choose to learn to use KIPS via our online training. During the KIPS eLearning folks interact with me virtually for about 10 hours. This allows us to reach many more people at their convenience. However, I don’t get meet even a small fraction of the KIPS community in person. So if you are a KIPSter or thinking of using KIPS, be sure to introduce yourself to me. I always enjoy meeting KIPS users and folks who are curious about KIPS.