School Readiness Action Plan Leadership Team Meeting, 1/22/14
Special Guest: Larry Schooler from the City of Austin’s Communication and Public
Information office
 Background/why he’s here” ECC wanted to give parents’ a voice, so they reached
out to the city’s comm. & public information office
 Larry helps clients find a way to get 2 parties talking, acts as a facilitator to help
the dialogue occur
 Use community meetings, telephone calls, and online forums for dialogue
o Speakupaustin.org
 Before launching Larry’s work, there are a few pre-steps
o Identify who we want to engage
o Think about what we want to glean from them
o Why are we asking this of them
o What do we intend to do with the data we collect
 Leadership team already knows “who” but there needs to be discussion on the
other pieces at both this meeting and at the upcoming stakeholder meeting
o Possibility of ongoing ad hoc group from the team to work with Larry
o Brooke got names of volunteers, will send out an e-mail to prepare for
stakeholder meeting
 Do we want to hear from all families or just those of low income?
o San Antonio had so much funding because it was “for all”
o We should look at all families across the socio-economic strata
o Possibly over-sample low income since that is generally a target group
 Since we have some data, think about what we already know/have collected, and
then decide on questions from there
o Strategic questions that families must answer, i.e. what strategies out of
the following would benefit your family most
o Also ask families about their big picture goals and reflect that in the plan
so these families see themselves in the overall plan
 Previously UWGA has been able to provide giftcards/food/childcare to
participants in these types of community meetings… what can we do for this?
o Office we are working with cannot provide funding for giftcards, does
have relationship with Parks and Rec office to provide discounted
childcare
o Possibly use other resources to provide giftcards/food
Special Guests: Tonja Rucker and Katie Whitehouse, National League of Cities in DC
 Both from the division concerned with children and families under the national
organization that deals with cities, Austin being one of their clients
 Austin has been selected as 1 of 6 cities in NLC’s membership to get help from a
15 month program funded by Kellog for birth to 8
 Project includes technical assistance with monthly phone call conferences, oneon-one calls with Ron, site visit (why they are in Austin now), cross-city meet up
in Chicago
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Other cities involved: Ft. Worth, TX, Richmond, VA, Hartford, CT, Rochester,
NY, Longmount, CO
Hopes to bring visibility to Austin and with that, funding
Next technical assistance call will be Feb. 6 at 2pmEST/1pmCST on family
engagement
Field Trip to San Antonio
 They have funding for mega preschool centers (to accommodate 500 children
each)
 Seem to have a lot of focus on their 3rd grade programs rather than an early
education system
 Weird government structure, no clear way for how people can have input in to
this
 Kind of rushed to use the $$ they got for early childhood and now need to figure
out the details
 The money was an 8 year allocation, in 8 years they will re-evaluate before
getting funded again
 The centers do have a lot of great learning experiences
o Sensory rooms
o Motor development rooms
o 1 teacher and 1 aid per classroom, with class size capped at 20
o Teachers work together in groups of 4/clustered classrooms, and each
group has at least 1 special ed teacher
o Teachers are well-paid and well-recruited from all over the country and
even internationally
o Principle and 2VPs don’t have to internally examine and assess, giving
them more time to observe and assist
o Lots of quality control
 Promise neighborhood/EDI has impressive amounts of data
 IDEA: bring council member(s) on these site visits (local and to other cities
possibly)  Sue and Linda will meet and discuss ideas/details for this
Talking Points for City Council Advocacy Visits
 Under “thanks” add in a thank you for the work on changing rules for social
services contracts
 Under “on-going support needs” Sue is going to work on the explicit wording
having to do with funding – new funding vs. how the funding pie gets split up
Everyone look over the SRAP 2015-18 timeline and respond to Sue with any changes
IMMEDIATELY so this can be finalized, since it was not gotten to in the meeting