How Educators Have Supported Preschool Children in Minnesota

Interview with Debra Goebel, ELS-ECFE Parent Educator

Debra has been a parent educator for over 30 years. She holds the title ELS, which is Early Learning Services, and ECFE, which is Early Childhood Family Education. She has an early childhood license and a parent education license. As an ECFE coordinator she’s taught both parent education and early childhood. Right now she’s in a coordinating position as a TOSA–teacher on special assignment. In this role she is directly involved with all the planning and programming and support for staff. In this interview, we explored how Bloomington Public Schools is supporting remote learning for young children and their families in Minnesota.

Early Learning Services — Three Components

We have three components to what we call Early Learning Services (ELS). One is our preschool program. We have about 285 students right now, with about 11 preschool teachers and paraprofessionals in the classroom. Our second division is ECFE, which is the Early Childhood Family Education. This program is for children birth to 5 in the school district. When the families register for a class, they come once a week for about an hour and 45 minutes. The parents and child are with the early childhood licensed teacher. We’re trying to serve all the families here in Bloomington. Our third area in Early Learning Services is early childhood screening. Every child in the state of Minnesota goes through basic screening before they enter kindergarten.

Family Demographics and How They’re Supported at Bloomington

In Bloomington we have all kinds of families. It’s mostly white, but we have many Latino families and Somali families. Our preschool programming is on a sliding fee. There are lots of preschools in our community, but because ours is a sliding fee scale we offer it to every child. The sliding scale is based on their income. In the past, about 70% of our families didn’t pay anything for preschool.

We have a Spanish-speaking community liaison, and we have a Somali-speaking liaison that work with families to help get them registered. Our ECFE is really diverse, too. We have a lot of families for whom English is not their first language. In ECFE we have one class called Preparato–the parent educators speak Spanish; she teaches the class in Spanish.

How Families Are Supported Virtually

Part of the time the early childhood teachers are with children virtually. They do some greeting songs, an activity with the parent and child together. They sing some songs or they might read a story, but they encourage families to be singing or reading the story with them. The other part of the time is parent discussion. We also have online videos and recordings of books.

We have some other activities for children. We’ve created a model we’re calling the Mr. Rogers Model. When the teachers are online with the young children present they’re engaging the child when they do activities–they ask questions. They’re real slow; it’s not rushed, but it’s fun. There are fun things kids can interact with.

Early Childhood Indicators of Progress

Supporting a Child’s Social Emotional Development Through Parental Support

There are five main areas for parent growth and development. One of those sections is just on parent-child relationships. There’s a whole section there on how parents can support their child’s social emotional development.

Conscious Discipline

Social Stories

Parent-to-Parent Support

We have learning bags that go out. If we can’t get a bag to somebody, other parents offer to deliver. With distance learning we cannot have parents on the property. So one parent organized meeting at the park, socially distanced, with other parents. They’re all trying to find ways to see each other, to support each other. We’ve also seen an increase of parents supporting each other’s mental health. It’s really sweet.

Support from Parent Educators

The other piece that we have in ECFE that is new to families is that our parent educators have provided what we call ‘Drop-in’ opportunities for parents.

We believe when a parent’s mental health is stable, and when they’re supported, they’re going to be supporting to their child.

At eight o’clock at night we have parent educators who are online so that parents can connect up with parent educators. Our parent educators are assigned to every preschool classroom. If a parent expresses their stress to a teacher, the teacher can recommend that they talk to a parent educator to receive some support. This has been increased this year because of COVID. One of our parent educators, when she found out that parents were meeting at the park, she would go to the park and read stories to the kids. We’ll just do anything we can to support families. We’ve been all over the board.

Parent Educators and Public Nurses

I love the connection with a public health nurse. The public health nurse can give basic information and basic support. And the parent educator can come in and have longer conversations of support. A public health nurse can’t always address and take a parent from the first stages of deciding about toiletry, for example. We, as parent educators, we can have those longer conversations and be able to dig in to support the parent long-term. That can happen between a public health nurse and a parent educator.

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