Program Profile: Community Renewal Team’s (CRT) Locust Street Early Care and Education Program in Hartford, Connecticut

Community Renewal Team’s (CRT) Locust Street Early Care and Education Program works to meet the diverse needs of families and support the growth and development of the children enrolled in this Head Start program.

Program Overview
According to Elizabeth Mosquera, manager of the Locust Street program, “Our program is so very diverse because of the many and varying needs of the families we serve.” Among those diverse families are some living in shelters, several who speak little or no English, those with an incarcerated parent, families with foster children, those who have children with special needs, and parents who are seeking employment or who are in school working toward a high school diploma or a higher degree.

The program’s mission is to “prepare our community to meet life’s challenges.” The family service and teaching staff work closely with families to identify their needs and then assist in meeting their goals through additional CRT services such as energy and housing assistance, tax preparation, food assistance, employment services, transportation, social services, mental health services, and workshops. The program also has collaborative relationships with outside service agencies and the local public schools. These relationships further support the healthy development of the children who attend the program.

Family Engagement Program Practices

Family Participation in Decision Making
Staff actively seek family participation in decision making in many ways. The partnership starts when parents share information about their child and family in a personal interview and on enrollment forms, and continues through home visits, parent-teacher conferences, and participation in classroom activities.

• Staff members encourage families to talk every day to teaching staff about the program and their child’s education, and formal parent-teacher conferences are held twice a year.
• A staff of six family service workers supervised by one family service coordinator has regular contact with families, conducts home visits, and helps families identify and meet their goals.
• Teachers and other staff are available to support parents of children with special needs in advocating for their children at public school meetings and in other situations where assistance may be needed.
• Staff make a point of involving families as partners in curriculum planning, implementation, and evaluation. At least once a month, parents are invited to meet with the educational staff to plan classroom activities that specifically meet the needs of each child.

Mosquera says, “Our program is family centered and is designed to foster the parents’ role as the principal influence on the child’s development. The parent is viewed as the child’s primary educator, nurturer, and advocate.”

Family Participation in Program-Level Decision Making
Like all Head Start programs, parents serve on the policy council to help make decisions about the program. In addition, the parent committee holds frequent family functions, allowing parents to connect with one another and become involved in the program.

Two-Way Communication
Locust Street staff recognize that its children and families have roots in many cultures and strive to ensure that the staff composition reflects the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the children it serves. The program has been successful in maintaining a high ratio of bilingual staff members, in part by nurturing Head Start parents and volunteers and by tapping into resources available from local colleges and job fairs. With help from parents, teachers label materials in the classroom environment with words from children’s home languages. The program provides most of its written material and information in Spanish so parents can remain informed.

Reciprocal Relationships
There’s always something going on at Locust Street to keep families engaged and informed.

• The program’s umbrella agency, CRT, runs a fatherhood initiative that emphasizes emotional and financial support, positive parenting, building and sustaining healthy relationships, and life skills for fathers. Its core services help fathers with low incomes obtain and maintain employment and housing, refrain from criminal behavior, navigate child support and custody intervention, and reenter society after incarceration.
• The program also provides additional outreach to fathers through a Father of the Month program and a Father’s Corner (across from the teachers’ lounge) where dads can meet one another. A teacher says, “I especially love our Father’s Corner. Fathers are an important part of their children’s lives. All programs should celebrate them.”
• Parents and other family members are strongly encouraged to spend time in their child’s classroom, participating in routine activities like playing, reading stories, and working on art projects. One parent reports, “I was able to participate in some circle time activities and reading stories to the children about the weekly lesson.”
• Family members share information about their culture with the class and participate in multicultural celebrations. A parent states, “I just attended an activity they had in my daughter’s classroom… All the parents brought in a dish from their culture and we all got to taste each other’s dish.”
• Regular events such as Social-Emotional Day, Literacy Day, Science Day, and Math Day support the curriculum. Parents explore these content areas with their children through classroom and program-wide activities.

Developed for NAEYC's Engaging Diverse Families Project through a generous grant from the Picower Foundation.
© National Association for the Education of Young Children.