CHAPTER IV:
Establishing Program PrioritiesFELICIA ROBERTS'S PRIORITIES
AND CHANGES: CASE COMMENTARIESIn the introduction to this manual, we met Felicia Roberts, Director of a mid-size, urban program (200 children and a management team that includes the director and three other full-time coordinators). Felicia Roberts has just come away from a conversation with one of her teachers, Carolyn, who talks about the difficulties she is having with a child who came into the program six weeks ago. Leon is easily distracted, has difficulty getting involved with classroom activities, and has trouble changing from one activity to another. Sometimes he erupts into violent behavior. Carolyn is concerned that he also has difficulties with language. After the conversation, Felicia thinks about Leon's needs, Carolyn's needs, and the needs of the teaching staff as a whole. She's thinking about how to provide more special services, such as speech and language services. At the same time, based on experiences with children similar to Leon, she's wondering if speech and language services are really what he needs, or whether there are other underlying difficulties that show up as a delay in language.
We asked two expert practitioners to comment on what Felicia should do and what resources she had or would need in addressing this situation.
Commentary No. 1-Head Start Director
"Felicia will feel less overwhelmed and better able to identify available resources if she makes use of her staff and delegates some of the tasks to them. So that's what I did: I called on the substance abuse specialist in our program and two center directors. These are our thoughts, collectively. Felicia could:
· Let her staff know that she understands there are some problems in the program and she's taking steps to address them. This kind of validation is very important to staff-it relieves some of the burden to know that someone is helping.
· Recognize and identify the training needs of her staff. For one thing, she needs to do some training on the negative impact of labeling families and children. Certainly, it will help if the staff have some basic speech and language training. Before planning any training, she should let her education coordinator know about the teachers' concerns and arrange for an assessment of overall classroom needs.
· Realize that the teachers are an important resource: they may have ideas or recommendations that would be useful, and they need a forum for expressing them. They can also assist in locating expertise in speech and language, and programs for children with various special needs.
· Develop a system that allows specialists to provide some clinical support for her teaching staff; this could be done by having team meetings, for example.
· Apply some of the same principles that she's using with her staff and arrange for a family conference. A fact-finding conference with the family can provide a lot of information about how the family members relate. It can also serve as an opportunity to discuss all the formal testing results on hearing and speech, as well as teacher assessments. This would be a team meeting involving the teacher and the mental health consultant.
· Use her team to find resources in the community-assuming the child does need speech and language help. Even if this particular child doesn't need such support, plenty of other children will. Maybe there's a college with a language program that would provide some observation and assessment at little or no cost. Look into child-care resource centers and speech and hearing clinics.
· Work with the education coordinator to explore ways to use volunteers or interns in the class room. This would free the teacher to work more closely with Leon. She can spend some time helping the teacher develop alternative activities he can perform alone. There may also be activities the parent can use; by providing information to parents, they can do language building at home, as well."Commentary No. 2-Early Childhood Specialist
"If I put myself in the director's place and take on the teacher's concern about the individual child, a question I'd ask is: 'Does this child really need a language therapist?' It's possible that this isn't a child-centered problem, but a teacher-centered problem. I'd wonder how knowledgeable the teacher was about speech and language. Felicia could:
· Give the teacher some material to read. Some state-of-the-art but user-friendly material can give teachers a better grounding. Often, teachers can do more themselves to stimulate language development.
· Arrange for a good speech and language presentation to the whole staff, whether for the first time or a refresher course. That way everyone's skills increase, not just this one teacher's.
· Talk to a language specialist after some time has gone by and assess whether more focused work on the part of the teacher is making a difference.
· Arrange for a speech therapist to spend some time in the classroom observing, and then to give staff some ideas for stimulating language. It should be someone; a teacher, or an assistant teacher, or a parent volunteer-who has an interest in speech (like the teacher, Marianna, who had been doing it) or someone who is particularly fond of the child. She shouldn't automatically assume that the specialist needs to work directly with the child.
· Assign a speech aide to work with this child and other children as well. It can be more cost effective, and it adds to the skills of your own staff.
· Think hard about the kind of behavior this child is exhibiting. Behavior is communication. If the child doesn't have adequate verbal skills, his behavior may be his dominant means of communicating. It's important to find out how the child gets basic needs and wants met. If his way of making them known is inappropriate, then the teacher needs to move him along to more appropriate ways. I worry about behavior modification when its goal is behavior compliance; or extinguishing unwanted behavior without understanding that the behavior may be adaptive, given the child's experiences, temperament, and stage of development. So trying to extinguish it may not work very well-because in some way it makes sense to the child.
· Start to wonder, if the child doesn't respond to language interventions-or respond enough-if it really was a 'speech and language' problem at all. Give Felicia a minute and she may still be wondering where to get the right therapist, and how to pay for it... but it may be a clinical social worker or a psychologist that she needs."SELECTING INTERVENTIONS
This manual points the way to improving core services to children and improving program support. It is up to individual management teams, drawing on the knowledge and experience that they collectively bring to the table, to sit down together, take the information in this manual, and assess how best to use it in their local setting.
In deciding where to begin, you, as members of the management team, will need to consider the dimensions of the problem in your local community, the particular needs of the children and families you serve, and your program's readiness to meet the special needs of these children and families. You will also need to think about any community trends that are likely to emerge in the future. Exhibits 6 and 7 offer two worksheets that highlight the interventions recommended in this manual and help you analyze what investment is needed to implement the selected strategies. These are intended to help you and the management team to consider the specifics of your program, identify your priorities, and work toward the changes needed to help children and families affected by substance abuse.
CONCLUSIONThe years since 1965 have taught us important lessons about strengthening children and their environment-the family, classrooms, and communities in which they live. These lessons have lost none of their relevance or value, as we think about how best to meet the needs of children at risk.
More recent lessons are available as well, drawn from research on children prenatally exposed to alcohol and other drugs and research on the other family and community factors that affect children.
Increasingly, we can see consistency across the lessons. We know that children whose lives are affected by substance abuse are a diverse group and fit no single profile. We know that, for preschool children, the most important interventions are the ones that are consistent with the key Head Start direction of the past few years: support parents as the primary educators and nurturers of their children, and provide a Head Start child development environment which is nurturing and fosters social competence through cooperative play. We can see now that facilitating transitions and minimizing distractions, while essential for supporting children at risk, will benefit the learning and development of all children in preschool.
Head Start managers have a crucial role to play in fine-tuning the policies and practices of their local programs in order to provide the most supportive kind of classroom environment for children. The rewards for the dedication and commitment required, for facing the challenges to professional capacity, and the opportunities for growth ultimately lie in the reaffirmation of an old truth: Head Start can make a difference.
REFERENCESBrady, J.P., M. Posner, C. Lang, and M. Rosati. 1994. Risk and reality: Implications of prenatal exposure to alcohol and other drugs. Newton, MA: New England Resource Center, Education Development Center, Inc.
Bredekamp, S., ed. 1987. Developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood programs serving children from birth through age 8. Washington, DC: National Association for the Education of Young Children.
Chalufour, I. 1993. Effective hiring practices: A look at personality, attitudes, and skills. Newton, MA: New England Resource Center, Education Development Center, Inc.
Collins, A. et al. 1993. Confidentiality of Substance Abuse Information. A Manual for Head Start Programs Who Identify Families as Having Problems Related to Alcohol and Drug Use and Who Refer Parents for Treatment. Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems.
Enright, M., M. Antes, and J. Brophy. 1992. Making the most of consultants. Newton, MA: Education Development Center, Inc.
Hawkins, D.J. 1985. Childhood predictors and the prevention of adolescent substance abuse. In Etiology of drug abuse: Implications for prevention. NIDA research monograph series 56. Edited by C.R. Jones and R.J. Battjes. Rockville, MD: National Institute of Drug Abuse.
Koralek, D.G. 1994. Responding to Children Under Stress: A Skill-Based Training Guide for Classroom Teams. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Kropenske, V., ed. 1994. Supporting substance abusing families. A Technical Assistance Manual for the Head Start Management Team. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Ruopp, R., J. Travers, F. Glantz, and C. Coelen. 1979. Children at the center: Final results of the national day care study. Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates.
Schulman, R.B., and C. Jarvis. 1988. Early grade improvement program, 1986-1987. OEA Evaluation Report. Brooklyn, NY: Office of Educational Evaluation, New York City Board of Education.
Swan, E. et al. 1987. The educational effects of a state supported reduced class size program. Spectrum5(4):20-23.
List of ExhibitsExhibit 1:Adapting A Physical World for Children-A Checklist
Exhibit 2: A Teacher Qualities Questionaire
Exhibit 3:Situational Questions-A Tool for Learning About Candidates' Characteristics
Exhibit 4:A Checklist for Devloping A Crisis Plan
Exhibit 5:Identifying Community Resources-A Worksheet
Exhibit 6:Impoving Core Services to Children-A Wroksheet Exhibit
7:Improving Program Support-A Worksheet