On May 25, the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Early Childhood Development, within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), hosted a webinar with the Department of Labor and the Department of Education to highlight approaches to utilizing registered apprenticeships to support the child care and early childhood education workforce.
Randi Wolfe, executive director of Early Care & Education Pathways to Success (ECEPTS) described ECEPTS’s commitment to the apprenticeship model.
“We don't have the option of failing our apprentices,” said Wolfe. “We don't have the luxury of high rates of attrition given the crisis level shortage of workers across the country. Our newest innovation is our Community of Practice Institute, through which we train and support a cohort of eight to 10 community-based partnerships to design, develop and implement new registered apprenticeship programs, providing a model of how to efficiently and effectively expand apprenticeship across an industry.”
Pamm Shaw, strategic funding and partnerships director for YMCA of the East Bay in northern California, discussed the pathways available to workers in early care and childhood education.
“We have head start, early head start, early head start childcare partnerships, a preschool, as well as state funding. People do not come in and expect to just get 12 units in early childhood and an associate teacher permit, which is the California state requirement for the classroom. They expect to come in and get their MBA degrees, and we strongly encourage that.”
Dr. Barbara J. Cooper, secretary of the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education, noted Alabama’s ongoing efforts to support early childhood workforce development.
“Our early childhood educator apprenticeship has helped to increase the quality of care in the early childhood setting by creating these opportunities to upscale our incoming workers and articulate coursework seamlessly between the community colleges and universities.”
You can watch the full webinar here.
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