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OEC webinar panel: practical steps — Elevate, Pyramid Model, community partnerships and family voice
Summary
Office of Early Childhood speakers and a practitioner panel highlighted concrete strategies for welcoming, trauma‑informed early‑childhood classrooms, including OEC’s Elevate program, accreditation pathways, the Pyramid Model, ECCP consultation, Stowe Early Learning Center practices and Danbury community outreach.
State Department of Education and Office of Early Childhood staff and a panel of practitioners used the recorded webinar to lay out specific, implementable steps for creating inclusive early‑childhood climates.
Amanda Pickett, a consultant with the State Department of Education, foregrounded the importance of language and definitions: “Words matter,” she said, and urged programs to distinguish school culture from school climate when planning interventions. Michelle Levy of the Office of Early Childhood outlined OEC supports: Elevate (a continuous program‑quality improvement process), accreditation pathways (NAEYC and family‑childcare accreditation), the Connecticut early learning and development standards with a dual‑language learner framework, the Sparkler mobile app for screening, and the Early Childhood Consultation Partnership (ECCP) for free mental‑health consultation across Connecticut.
Panelists then offered program and community examples. Jacqueline Vallee of Stowe Early Learning Center described a focus on trust and family co‑creation of classroom environments and said the program uses debriefs after difficult incidents and solicits parents’ feedback on everyday logistics. “We really are grounded in creating a feeling of trust,” Vallee said. Teachers and family advocates described daily practices such as home visits, family advocates, bilingual materials and cozy corners in classrooms to support social‑emotional regulation.
Community partners from Danbury described scalable outreach: multilingual tip sheets placed in laundromats and kiosks, Portuguese bilingual story times, Zoom‑based parenting workshops, an annual early‑childhood fair, matchups between home visitors and families of the same culture/language, and a large police‑station “party on the patio” event that distributed backpacks and reached more than 800 families. Eileen Costello and Tara Cavajo said these efforts grew out of parent feedback and school‑readiness council coordination.
Panelists emphasized data and continuous improvement: use of self‑assessments and simple classroom measures (hands‑up surveys, observation tools) to drive menu changes and other adjustments; reliance on the Pyramid Model for tiered social‑emotional supports; and Crisis Prevention Institute training and on‑call teams for verbal de‑escalation when needed.
OEC and state staff pointed participants to the recorded webinar and cited resources for programs seeking technical assistance, training or ECCP consultation.
