Recap of last meeting
Had guests at our last meeting—from Child Care Careers and Boulder Journey School.
 
Introductory Conversation

• Per the experience of members of the Collaborative, the CCC wasn’t always able to get people in certain areas. Would be incredible to have people trained and ready to come into a Jewish school.
• Some recent discussions around subbing during the COVID era.
• What could it look like to develop a subbing pool (with or without CCC)?
• Rachel Raz recently shared an example from Israel—the community hires subs and they are farmed out. This could relate to recruitment as well.
• There is an opportunity: educators who are underemployed from our schools now.
• Can we share among and between schools at this time?
• Waiting to see what public schools will do about sharing subs.
• Discussion about what state currently allows in terms of sharing subs in ECE versus what schools themselves will opt to hold by.

 
Brainstorming
If we designed pool of subs, in our Mary Poppins (dream world) scenario we would want:

• Cost for schools:
  • Affordable
  • Equally cost-effective to use the platform so that directors use it and don’t try to strike separate deals?
• Specialized training/onboarding:
  • Minimum or certain standards
  • Jewish content knowledge
  • Kosher 101
• Access:
  • Available in all geographic areas
  • Option for school to pay mileage and Uber/Lyft
• Ease of use for employer:
  • Someone else to find the subs
  • Ease for the employer like in the fabled Babysitters Club (on call gets it done)
  • Teacher arrives and school has immediate access to personnel files/documentation
• Ease and efficiency for subs:
  • Different framing (and rate?) for tomorrow for future weeks.
  • Mobile app to accept subbing positions
  • Subs could check off interest; could mitigate fatigue from app sending you irrelevant potential placements.
  • Info stored and considered regarding
    • what each age groups feel comfortable with
    • how far willing to travel
    • hours/days desired

 
Next thoughts

• What do we want to get in place for a time when our schools can be more safely open to subs?
• For now, we think it is the case that schools have adequate sub pools (since opening with limited staff, making other school educators available); should we test this assumption with a two question survey at end of this week?
• Want to try a pilot of sorts, when the time is right; worth considering partnering with CCC, if they can work with our Mary Poppins list.

 

We purposefully launched our taskforces at different times. We started with the Staff Retention Taskforce, knowing that there were resources available to us to help us measure and assess our staff's happiness. We have done some really great things with that taskforce (click here to learn more). We are actively trying things to improve the satisfaction of our educators so that they stay in our system and continue to grow with us. Now it is time to turn to those not yet in our system. How do we find new educators? How do we encourage them to join our system? This is a problem not just for us, but for early childhood in general. How do we best showcase our strengths and create strong partnerships so that we are the first system that comes to mind for new educators? This group is going to explore that work.

At our launch meeting we had current Collaborative members share what they are doing in their programs (everything from recruitment bonuses, to partnering with high schools). We then started to some strategic mapping to think about what we should start doing, continue doing, or stop doing. Over the next few months we'll do some research on interest and feasibility and will then get cracking!