Headstart of LaPorte County envisions a community in which all children have access to high-quality, educational, developmentally appropriate child care that enables their parents to work to support and better the circumstances of their families. Its mission is to improve the quality and accessibility of child care for the community and increase public awareness of the importance of quality early childhood experiences.
The school offers age-appropriate learning and care to high-risk children as they prepare for elementary school. Its curriculum provides learning experiences based on math, science, art, and literacy.
Natasha Kelton, the PFCE Manager at Headstart of LaPorte, has seen Learning Genie as a great tool to collect all the information regarding the program performance. She has kept track of all the activities done by the families with their children; the activities carried out in the school, and teachers’ participation classroom by classroom. It has allowed her to reach out to families and staff to accomplish continuous quality improvement, and her agency has become a data-driven organization capable of making decisions promptly.
Every month, Natasha extracts all this information to present to the Policy Council, the ECE team, and the Board of Directors. Learning Genie has made this task easy for them, as they can use excel sheets to edit the data and present what is relevant to each report. Even the Health Department has used the dashboard to keep track of the Daily Health Checks and to be aware of the community’s needs.
“We looked into Learning Genie, and we just felt it was easy. It was just user-friendly. The training for the teachers was always lovely. Tracy was fantastic at explaining things; whenever I had questions or concerns, she was there and accessible. I think overall for our families, and our program is user-friendly, is pretty self-explanatory.”
Natasha Kelton, PFCE Manager at Headstart of LaPorte.
When the Learning Genie was introduced to me, I was very excited about sharing with the parents what I was teaching to the children on a more personable level. One of the most valuable features that I used was taking photos of the children doing activities and being able to send the pictures electronically to the parents on a daily basis. The parents were very excited each day to receive their email and see what their child had learned. The parents would use information we provided on a daily basis and talk about what they learned at school. This was a great conversation starter. Most children would come home from school and ask their child what they learned at school today and most would say “nothing I just played”. With the daily information I found that the children showed what they learned at school sometimes teaching their parents some things.