- Just ahead on "Black Issues Forum," we're diving into the real power of early childhood education, the urgency of early intervention, and how families can lead, not just participate in shaping their children's futures.

What happens before kindergarten can shape everything that comes after?

We'll talk about this and more, coming up next, stay with us.

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[upbeat music] ♪ - Welcome to "Black Issues Forum," I'm your host, Kenia Thompson.

We all know that those first few years of a child's life are critical, but what happens when we layer in biases, inequities, and a lack of access to early intervention services?

Well, we're asking how can family leadership and engagement help shift the future for our kids?

Joining me for this important conversation are two incredible women who have been doing the work, not just talking about it.

First up, we have Kate Goodwin.

She's the owner and founder of Kate's Corner Learning Center in Durham, North Carolina, where the mission is clear, to eradicate implicit biases in early childhood education and to put educators at the forefront of childcare practices.

Joining her, we have Candace Witherspoon, the Director for the Division of Child Development and Early Education at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

She brings a statewide lens to how policy, programs and community intersect in the early childhood space.

Welcome to the show, both of you.

- Thank you for having us.

- Of course.

Kate, I wanna start with you.

Kate's Corner, tell us about Kate's Corner Learning Center and how you came to create this beautiful space.

- Well, we started first with a vision of what did childcare really need to look like and what could we actually do?

It was a test.

Kate's Corner is a lab school.

It was generated off of Truth Education Foundation's research to say, if we pay a livable wage and we help support educators with their financial needs and their social emotional needs, what would that look like?

How does that equal quality insecurity for our families and our children's of course the opportunity for our children to grow.

And so it basically was birthed out of the necessity to show that if implicit bias or any biases were happening and they were being made by the educator, the decision was being made by the educator, what's going on in that educator's heart and mind that needed to be looked at because obviously if it's an adult decision, we need to look at the adults making those decisions.

- Share really quickly, what is implicit bias and what does that look like in early childhood development?

- It's kind of, it's two parts.

One is making an assumption that someone cannot do a thing, which is a little bit less intrusive, and then there's implicit bias that says, because you come from a certain place and you have a certain lifestyle, you're only valuable this way or that.

A lot of judgment that comes with implicit bias, but basically it's not really knowing.

It's a guessing game and because early childhood educators are educators and not doctors or psychologists, sometimes it's a premature understanding of an individual.

- And sometimes we don't even realize we're participating in implicit bias.

- Yeah, you don't know - We don't know.

- Candace, wanna bring you into the conversation, so you're on the policy side of things.

Share with us what the state is doing to support families and how is early childhood education a priority in the state?

- So, North Carolina.

Realize, on early childhood education, it keeps businesses running by keeping parents employed.

Parents want to make sure that their children are safe and learning in a nurturing environment.

And so early childhood education programs provide that for families.

They provide that stability of knowing that their children are being taken care of.

But not only does it provide, like, this avenue to make sure that parents can work and businesses run, which ultimately keep the North Carolina economy booming, but we know that brain development is happening at this critical time and point in the lives of our children.

And so this is when we can go in and make sure that they have a really strong foundation for not only kindergarten but third grade.

We hear about third grade reading scores, and we hear about post-secondary outcomes and graduation rates.

And we know that early childhood education sets the foundation for all of that into adulthood.

- Yeah, I wanna take a moment to clarify something.

So recently we've had the executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, right?

An objective to return authority over education to the states and local communities.

Does that impact what DHHS does with early childhood in North Carolina?

Or are those two separate things?

- Those are two separate things.

So the Department of Education really supports the Department of Public Instruction in North Carolina.

We are housed under the Department of Health and Human Services.

And so while there are some pre-K programs that are housed in DPI, such as Title One pre-K, pre-K for students with exceptional needs, our programs are separate.

And so at this point, what's happening with the Department of Ed, we are not seeing that fall over or rollover into our areas just yet.

- Okay.

And just for clarification for our viewers, DPI is public institutions K through 12, correct?

- Yes, pre-K through 12.

They do have some pre-K programs.

- Okay, so they do have some pre-K programs?

- Yes.

- Okay, awesome.

Thank you for that clarification.

- Absolutely.

- So, Kate, let's talk about when we don't intervene in early childhood education or just that early childhood experience, right?

What are those consequences that are showing up in big ways later on for children?

- Yeah, I think most people start with the academics, and they think, you know, what is actually being taught.

But the skill sets that children are learning in early childhood education kind of open the foundation of them being able to retain and hold information from K through 12.

It starts the learning journey.

It starts the interest in reading books.

It starts the interest in being able to be successful.

And, you know, children look for praise.

They look for the nurturing that's necessary.

And I think we set a foundation for not only just letter recognition and number recognition, we set a foundation for how to handle conflict resolution, right?

To have empathy.

And we teach our children, like, those are the essential soft skills that people are often trying to teach adults because they miss out on that.

But I think the early exposure, because now we know we have brain development so early in life that children are able to catch hold of things very early and are able to kind of condition themselves for learning for the future.

- What does it look like in a Black and Brown child's adulthood that has missed out on that early intervention piece?

- Yeah, I think confidence is the main thing, right?

That plays as a second-guessing.

Sometimes even when you have knowledge, if you've not been affirmed through those type of environments early on in life, you often struggle with the validity of who you are and what you can do.

With implicit bias, it doesn't just happen in early childhood.

When it continues in K through 12, you're kind of passed along and I kind of recognized that really wholeheartedly when I was doing the distance learning work.

- During the pandemic.

- Yeah, during the pandemic, but there's a lot of confidence that's lost during that timeframe and then it also is like, 'Well, if I don't know, then maybe I don't try" and so we see the cliff during, you know, middle school, children just falling off the cliff, not having enough self-worth, you know, to propel them forward.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Candace, what kind of programs are available stateside for families to help with some of that early intervention work that Kate mentioned?

- So there are a lot of programs, both locally and with the state environment.

I would say the biggest resource that parents have while they're in the early education field is actually their teachers, right?

And I'm talking especially lead teachers because they have this additional training.

They have the community college experience sometimes or just life experience to know that I've worked with enough children to say, "You know what, I think that there may be a suspicion of a delay or a concern."

And so for parents, sometimes it's just that lead teacher being able to confirm a suspicion that the parent may have themselves, but, you know, if you're a parent of a three-year-old and you've never had a three-year-old before and you don't know who to, like, how do you compare?

How do I know that my child, where they compare to their peers, right?

- So what, from both of you, and Candace, I'll let you continue on, but what are some of those indicators that there may need to be early intervention that happens?

- Yeah, so there are developmental milestones and there are standards and there are benchmarks that research tells us, you know, by this point a child should be doing this, this and this or they should be looking like this.

They should be performing this way and what we know is that all children are not gonna meet those milestones at the same time.

That's just not life, but when you notice a pattern or a trend with like a subset or a skill, that's when you can say, well, you know, if I'm looking at my whole classroom and let's say I have 10 kids with my other teacher and this one child is just significantly behind.

They're really struggling to grasp this skill.

No matter, I can give them hand-over-hand, support.

I can talk to them.

I'm kind of coaching them on the side.

I'm giving them what is intervention, one-on-one, just me and them and if they're not responding or they're not responding in a way that looks like they're really grasping it, then I might have a conversation with that parent to say, do you see this at home?

- Yeah.

- Do you have any concerns about this?

Have you talked to your pediatrician 'cause that's gonna open the doors.

- Yeah.

Kate, how do you train your educators to effectively do that 'cause you know, as a mom sometimes you're like, "There's nothing wrong with my kid."

- Yeah.

- Right?

- Yeah, absolutely.

- And you take offense to that.

- Yeah.

- But how do you train your educators?

- Well, mainly, as Candice referred to, we have developmental milestones that we do assessments with, right, and so that's how we will determine whether or not there might be some delay.

I always encourage my educators that they are not doctors, right, so this begins a conversation if there's a concern, but one of the things that I always promote with my educators to really make a parent feel relaxed, every child is gonna develop in their own timeframe.

My oldest was potty trained before he was, you know, two, way before he was two.

He was one-and-a-half.

The second one, not until he was three and so I always say to people, when did you learn how to walk?

And that can range from seven months all the way to 15 months, right?

And I think that what we have to do is, even if there's a developmental delay, we have so much wonderful resources that can get children, you know, if it's speech therapy or if it's just cognitive understanding.

We can get them there, what happens often is that there is educators who kind of take it on to say, "Well, your child has ADD and we really, really train against that."

- Yeah.

- If there is some autism or something that is notated by the way that they have noise sensitivity in the room and things like that, we always encourage a parent to go to their pediatrician and figure it out, but I'm very heavy on the training that we are not the one to make that determination.

- Yeah.

- Yes.

- But we start the conversation.

- Yeah, and that's good because I mean, we entrust, as parents, our children to these educators who are with them all day, honestly.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- We see them for such a small amount of time during the day.

Let's explore barriers.

We know, even just as adults, Black women, Black people, we have barriers to healthcare, barriers to access.

What are some of the barriers that families and children face to accessing some of this early intervention?

I'll start with you.

- Yeah, childcare deserts are real, meaning that it's very hard for, I'll speak as a provider first.

As a provider, it's hard to go into the neighborhoods that really need the exposure to early childhood because we are battling with the cost of early childhood, and then the amount of monies that we get back on the subsidy is not enough to pay the bills, basically, to keep the lights on.

And so there's some sacrifices that have to be made as a business person to make that decision, one I'm willing to make all the time, which is what I've learned, is that I have to have those partnerships in place to be able to help lower overhead and things like that.

So I think that the biggest barrier is access, just being able to be in the seats.

And then as research shows, we get in the seats and then we deal with the implicit bias piece, which, of course, then ushers you right back out of the program because of a lack of cultural competence in understanding of how children are developed in their culture and how they learn and things like that.

So I think the biggest barrier sometimes is just the knowledge of some of the workforce and understanding how do I accept and how do I educate a child that doesn't look like me?

- Yeah.

- But the biggest thing is having a space to even take them to.

- Yeah, this is true, and so speaking of that, Candace, let's go to rural areas and access to childcare and cost, right?

You touched on that a little bit.

What is the department doing to help folks who just can't access good childcare?

- Yeah, so we acknowledge exactly what you said.

North Carolina as a state is a childcare desert.

- As a state?

- As a state.

44% of North Carolinians are living in a community that would be considered a childcare desert.

- Wow.

- And what that means is there are more children that need care than there are slots, and there's a formula, but when we're talking about our rural communities, what it really boils down to is a lot of the subsidy conversation that Kate kind of just shared.

Our subsidy reimbursement rates do need some increase.

We need to look at that as a state and how we increase that and give support to providers that are in the rural communities to kind of help them.

When you're looking at programs that are overwhelmingly more children that have subsidy than you have private-pay parents, it sometimes makes it difficult for ends to meet, and it also makes it difficult to find the additional dollars to make sure that you have enough income to pay your staff well.

So when you have low wages, it's gonna be difficult to keep teachers in those classrooms and to prevent the constant turnover, so if you have a building that can hold 100 kids, but you can't keep a teacher, and you can only keep like 60 kids.

You're not even reaching your full potential, which is only exacerbating the fact that it's a desert, 'cause I have the space, but I don't have the teachers to fill the classrooms, so that I can have the kids.

- With that being said, is there partnerships with the community colleges to feed teachers into these spaces that are coming straight out of curriculum into school?

- Yeah, we have a lot of partnerships with the community colleges, with our community partners, like Smart Starts and our CCR and our networks.

The reality is, in addition to all of those things, we also have multiple pathways into the profession, and we have a new educational pathway that's being finalized with our updated quality rating improvement system.

That takes into account experience not just education, because we don't necessarily feel that you have to go to community college to be a great early childhood education teacher, and so these pathways acknowledge that.

But the challenge isn't getting teachers prepped to enter the field, it is attracting them to the field and keeping them there, and that's the wages part that we just need help with.

- Yeah, that's really important, and I know Governor Stein had just did a budget proposal for the state, and I didn't look to see if it included early childhood care.

Did you see anything like that?

- There are some dollars, yes, for early childhood education, and so we just have to kinda see, if the General Assembly is like, yes, let's do that, or let's do it a little bit different.

Hopefully, we'll see something this legislative season.

- Hopefully, hopefully.

- Fingers crossed.

- Finger crossed.

Kate, I wanna bring in what family engagement and leadership looks like.

I mentioned earlier, we spend all day at work.

Our kids are with providers, and at the end of the day, sometimes we're like, "I don't know what to do."

Sometimes we forget how to parent.

We parent on the weekends.

And so, what does family engagement look like at Kate's Korner, for example?

- Yeah, I think that in the last two years, we've really been working on some of the things that I would consider just referring to educator preparation.

We do have an educator first model, which our parents really support.

Like, they come into the building, they see us in session with our psychotherapist on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

- And this is the educators in session?

- And these are the educator sessions, yeah.

And we have, Pinnacle Bank came in and did financial literacy to be able to say, "Even though I pay a livable wage, "how do I utilize those funds, and things like that."

So there's a lotta support with our parents around what's happening, and they feel very secure.

- [Host] Yeah.

- And so, their feedback is always that, "Whatever we can do to help."

We have some parents who are gonna be helping us with gardening programs.

We have some parents who have great social media experience, who are like, "We just wanna come "and take pictures and do things."

So, it becomes inclusive.

We have a family orientated style at Kate's Korner, and I met with some of our families the other night, and they were like, "This has never happened, "that we all get together and figure out "what's best for our children collectively."

They are the first educators, they are first caregivers, and we take their lead.

They know their children better than we do personality wise, and yet there's so much shared information to be had.

So it's a big part of how we measure our success is through the parent engagement, and I'm proud of it.

I absolutely love my parents, yeah.

- Yeah, I've been to the center many times, and it's a beautiful environment.

I mean, you walk in, and it feels like family, from staff to the kids to the parents, yeah.

And it shows that it's an intentional.

- It's very intentional.

Very intentional.

- [Host] Yeah.

- We work on culture more than we work on anything else.

No one is to go through the front door all the way to a classroom without being greeted.

Most of our caregivers know all of the children's names.

Which is imperative, right?

- Yeah, that's impressive.

- And so, and it's very, like, even though you're an infant teacher, you know a preschooler's child's name because, like, that makes a parent know that everyone cares and knows about my child as they walk through the center.

It's very important.

- And I just wanna quickly mention that Kate's Corner has been recognized nationally for the work... - Yes.

- That she's been doing.

- So, you know, it's not just something that you're doing here and no one see, like, it's good work.

- Yeah.

- And folks are recognizing that good work.

- Yeah, I think the model, the empowerment model that we've been working on for educators is been notated on a sitting with the Biden administration and giving the idea of what childcare can look like.

- Yep.

- How can we, you know, get the educators to the table and want to work in early childhood again?

We definitely are working on refiguring out that language and how do we prioritize the importance of educators, but also just what does it need to look like on a daily basis as a provider?

What do I have to like come to?

- Yeah.

- Like I have to reinvest and make sure that my center has all that good feel and it takes a reinvestment.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, indeed.

About five minutes left in the show, Candace, I wanna come to you to talk about on the stateside, a lot of times as parents, families, we don't know where to go, right?

We don't know if we're supported.

What does support look like for families stateside?

- So we are lucky as a state because we have a lot of community partners and PBS is one of them.

So we have partnerships that allow us to reach families in their communities.

There's those route roodle roast...

I always- - [Host] Yes, routle- - The Rooster Road Tour.

- Yes.

- Yes.

- That is a tongue twister.

- Yes.

- Yeah, yeah.

[all laughing] - But we also have these technological like avenues and videos and interactive classrooms so the parents can kind of see, what should a classroom look like?

What could a classroom look like?

- Yes.

- To set an expectation, right?

- Yeah, right.

- Yeah.

- And just have a resource, a hub where you can ask questions and kind of look and research and see what's happening and what's available in North Carolina.

Where are the programs?

Do they have specialties?

- Yeah.

- Just what are the resources that are there?

Because education is a three-legged stool, right?

You have the child and you have the teacher, but you have to have that parent in order for it to balance.

And so it's our job to kind of help educate that parent, because if you don't know, you can't help, right?

So it's my job to make sure you have the tools so you know what to do when you're at home.

What can you do in the bathtub while you're taking a bath?

- Yeah.

- What are some fun things that the kids are learning and they may not even realize they're learning?

- Yeah.

- Like, what can you do with dinner?

Can you separate your vegetables?

Can you put them in smallest to biggest?

Like, just small things.

- [Host] Yeah.

- Small things that can make a huge difference.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- I see.

A few minutes left and I wanna give you time because you, speaking of partnerships with PBS.

- Yes.

- You have a beautiful partnership with PBS currently.

- I do.

- Tell us a little bit about that.

I think we've got like three minutes left.

- Yeah.

Christie Maida and the education department came together to create something that I think is phenomenal in all the places that I've been, the absence of educators being the voice in those rooms have been, it's been painstaking not to have, you know, educators be able to say what they're experiencing, what they need.

And I feel like it is not my place to tell the world what an educator needs.

So we have created an online platform, a community of practice called Truth Talks.

And that community of practice is a space for just educators to express what they need and talk about the things that they're experiencing.

- [Host] Right.

- And it's not a fest, you know, to be negative, but to say like, as an educator, this is what would make my, you know, being an educator more quality.

And I think that we are gonna have our first, you know, in-house PBS event on April the 26th.

And I'm so super excited about it because I'm here to listen.

I'm here to learn.

So we're doing a grand invitation to anybody who is an early childhood provider.

Who works in early childhood education whether it's public or private, it doesn't matter.

Nonprofit for profit.

It is that you are educator.

We have about 50 slots.

We're trying to, you know, that's a small number, but we're just trying to get everyone here to be able to participate and have their voices heard.

- It's a start.

Yeah, and we'll throw up that link on camera, on the screen for you.

Register.

- Yes, please.

- It's PBS Town Hall, April 26th.

This is for educators, early childhood educators.

- Absolutely.

- Before we close out, Candace, I wanna come back to you.

If you could ma wave a magic wand, you know, what is the one thing you'd want to see for early childhood education in North Carolina?

- I'd like to see it valued as a public good.

That is going to set up our children and future generations success because we are raising the generation that is going to take care of us.

- Absolutely.

- These are our future presidents, congressmen, principals, teachers, policemen, doctors.

And I need them to have a strong foundation when they're talking to me and helping me with my bad back.

- Exactly.

- Or our maintenance guy like all of those things.

Everyone right because we all make community.

- Absolutely.

They're all of our children.

- Kate Goodwin, Candace Witherspoon, thank you so much both for the work that you're doing with our young ones and our educators and just really making an impact in the industry.

So thank you.

- Thank you for having us.

- Thank for having us.

- Of course.

And I thank you for watching.

If you want more content like this, we invite you to engage with us on Instagram using the hashtag blackissuesforum.

You can also find our full episodes on pbsnc.org/blackissuesforum and on the PBS video app.

I'm Kenia Thompson.

I'll see you next time.

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