Blog 3 Interacting with Professional Administrative Staff

My main research is about common delays in infant, toddlers and preschool children. I want to create an Advocacy Plan for children with delays. For this blog assignment I interviewed and observed our center director for Head Start. She has been working for Head Start for 14 years and a director for three years. During this time as a director and a teacher she has worked with children and their families that have delays. My first question was “what do you as a center director do if you think a child might have delays.” She stated “we do an initial screening on all our children the first 45 days with DIAL-3.” During the year we do assessment using Work Sampling and Early Learning framework. This is an on-going assessment tool used to keep tract of each child’s progress. Then they share the information with the parents during home visits and conferences. I ask what a center director does with the information she receives from teachers about a child that has failed the DIAL-3 screening. She stated that she ask teachers to retest the child in 10 days using the same screening tool. She stated that in the child’s registration packet is forms about a Child’s Health Record, and a Physical form the parent must get filled out by the child’s doctor. This is great information that could explain delay’s a child has. This information will be about each individual child.

Then I ask what the follow up plan is if a child has delays. She stated “a teacher might be asked to do a five or ten day observation on a child that a teacher has concerns about and has failed the assessments.” Then a meeting is set up with the parents, teacher’s director, and special need coordinator. The parents will sign a consent form for the information sent to the school district if a child is three years old or older. The school district will do assessments and observe the child at home and school to see if the child qualifies for services. Children can receive services at home or in the Head Start setting.

My second interview was with a quality control specialist from Early Head Start and Head Start. We had an in-service about supporting cultural diversity and providing accommodation for children with special needs. During the in-service our quality control specialist talked about labeling shelves and containers with pictures, English words and home language of children in the classroom. Early Head Start children can not read the words but teachers can read the words in English and the child’s home language during clean-up time. I thought this was a great idea to read the words to the children that name the objects. Our quality control specialist gave handouts that supported words in English and Spanish that we could label our shelves and materials with. I ask about children that that we have in our classrooms that family’s home language is Chinese. Our quality control stated she would find a list of words to translate and to work with the families.   She offered suggestion of having a tape player and asking parents to volunteer saying familiar words in their home language and repeat the word in English so our teachers would have the correct pronunciation of a word.

I gained many insights from these interviews. I did not know the policies for teachers doing screenings and assessment for Head Start children. This would be a challenge for Head Start teachers to do all these screening on seventeen children that were three years old or twenty children that were four years old. They are two teachers in a room but one teacher would have to do the screenings on each child. The other teacher would facilitate learning for the classroom. I liked the idea of using a tape player for my families to say words in their home language. I was excited to see if my children would recognize their parent’s voices on the tapes. This information from my interviews will be useful in my research paper to provide a professional support for children that have delays.