I didn't realize how behind I was on updating the site, but much has happened since the last post in 2018. We launched the Parent Survey with 24 schools and with more than 1,000 responses! Over the late summer and early fall, schools received individual coaching from Veronica Maravankin. These conversations focused on how to report back to parents what we learned from the survey, and to start to take action based on the results. So far schools have adjusted the number of days they are closed, have created more time for face-to-face conversations between parents and directors, and have started to utilize new communication apps! 
As a community we also identified some areas where we want to improve:
1) Helping parents of full day children feel more connected to the community and the school
2) Building the connections between Jewish early childhood and other Jewish opportunities ( camps, day schools, synagogues, etc.)
3) Overwhelmingly, our parents are really happy with their early childhood experience. How can we share this information far and wide? 

We are gearing up to do another round of data collection in April of 2020, with hopefully more schools and more responses. 

Lastly, if you haven't seen it already, check out the new and improved JUF early childhood site. It will help you find programs nearby, learn the benefits of Jewish early childhood and give you access to the Preschool Concierge! 

We did it! We finally have a survey in survey form! It still needs some work but the taskforce had the chance to take the survey and give us some more feedback. We have folded in their thoughts and our next step is to take it to families to do cognitive testing. Cognitive testing is just a way to sit with some parents while they take the survey and ensure that the questions we are asking are worded properly, and that we aren't missing any major topics. 
We then refocused on our brainstormed ideas from last time. The taskforce picked their top ideas and created storyboards to prototype them. Kate will take these ideas to parents with young children to get their thoughts and see what we might like to implement.

Today's meeting was dual focused: We refined our survey tool and then reviewed data to start the marketing and awareness conversation. It was a jam packed day but we accomplished a lot. Please take a look at the notes below. If you have any additional comments you can add them here or email Kate.  

On June 5th, 2018 we kicked off the Parent Satisfaction Task Force. This group, comprised of directors and parents has a dual focus. The goal if this group is to create a universal parent satisfaction tool and to help increase the marketing and awareness of the Jewish early childhood programs we have in the area. 
The June 5th meeting was dedicated to the former, and we spent the majority of the meeting discussing parent expectations of early childhood education. We also went through a question bank (comprised of satisfaction questions that were shared by the schools) and mapped those questions to the expectations. You'll find the notes from the meeting below as well as the results from the mapping exercise. By the next meeting, we'll have taken the results and formed them into the first iteration of a survey tool!