8084 MD4 Dis

Implementation Experiences – Mandy Doy

Implementation Experiences – Mandy Doy Program Transcript

MANDY DOY: The problems and the challenges that the programs encounter are a lot around credentialing. Early childhood education, Bachelor degrees, or any type of degrees, even associate degrees or CDAs, are decreasing. Far few people are graduating from college with DCE degrees. A lot of them are graduating with elementary education degrees, and seeking positions in the public school system.

So to get those people involved in our early childhood programs and to get them to want to be credentialed is quite a challenge. The support—I think that there needs to be more support and resources in regard to that portion of the evaluations, or the QRIS process.

Monetarily our teachers don't make very much money. So people that are in ECC are never in it for the dollars. They're in it for the passion of caring for children and educating children. The support that they would really need is more monetary support than anything else.

As far as programs for actively interested in accreditation, I think it can be a combination of me seeking to have programs interested in accreditation, and then also program seeking help with accreditation. It all depends on the program.

You have individuals where they really want to improve their program. And they're ready to take on that next step. You have programs that would really benefit from taking on to the next role of accreditation or QRIS in the state of Illinois.

Where we typically see programs falling short when they begin the process is really the organization portion of it. There is a lot of paperwork, a lot of administration pieces that go into it. There's a lot of collecting of information.

You can't create all of the information in a short period of time. It's really over a course of a year that you're collecting data—communication from the parents, communications about the children, transitions that the children are going through. All of that information has to be collected throughout that time period, because if your program is being evaluated in a month, you can't recreate all of that information to collect it all so that the evaluator can see it.

So it really is a yearlong process so that you can get all the data collected that you need. So those are some of the things that you really have to address before you want to proceed. It has to be a proactive step. You have to have all of your ducks in a row in terms of if you have organizations such as learning care group

© 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. 1

Implementation Experiences – Mandy Doy

where you have multiple programs that run some of the same pieces from a corporation aspect, it's a little bit easier.

But it still is center-specific. So you still have to have all of the center communications, the center newsletters, and pieces like that so that you can move on with the accreditation portion once the evaluator gets there.

© 2016 Laureate Education, Inc. 2