Success Story: Tri-Valley Opportunity Council, Inc. Inc. Head Start, Child & Family Programs -

Data-Driven Family Engagement Tools for Head Start and State Preschools

Learning Genie is an app for ECE educators and family service workers for Distant Learning and Family Engagement including tracking in-kind. During the COVID-19 crisis, Learning Genie offers free tools till the end of 2020 under a grant (or in-kind) to support all ECE agencies for Distance Learning and track school readiness outcomes.

PRESCHOOL PORTFOLIO APP- LEARNING GENIE

Learning Genie also provides a useful application for portfolio-building. The portfolio tracking and tagging systems could be readily applied to DRDP 2015, Florida VPK, Head Start (HS), Early Head Start (EHS), Montessori, and other state or private-backed assessment tools.

Success Story

Tri-Valley Opportunity Council, Inc. Head Start, Child & Family Programs

Tri-Valley provides comprehensive child development services to pregnant women, children and families throughout 16 center locations across Minnesota and NE North Dakota, with a total funded enrollment of over 800 children. Their Regional Head Start/Early Head Start and Migrant and Seasonal Head Start/Early Head Start programs promote school readiness and encourage parents to become advocates for their children and for their community.

Their Success

Family Engagement Challenges

Christina was confronted with the challenge of training teachers across their 16 sites, when they weren’t all hired yet, and they couldn’t get everyone together in one room for one training. She was also faced with the challenge of many various start dates throughout her centers. They were opening at different times, so she needed to be organized. Christina was determined to make sure that all teachers were fully trained on the program. She scheduled a web training, which Learning Genie recorded and sent to her.

 As teachers were hired throughout her centers, she had teachers watch the training video and follow along with their devices, and send back a sign-in sheet to document their participation. In order to get all the families signed up, Christina had her Education Supervisors meet with families as they completed registration, and they walked each family through the app. This ensured that each family saw Learning Genie as an integral part of their EHS/HS program, and Tri-Valley saw great parent response. Christina consistently monitors and follows-up with teachers to support them as necessary.

Family Engagement Dashboard

Here is a screenshot of their agency’s family engagement dashboard, where administrators can see which engagement items are resonating well with families, and where to improve.

Testimonial

“I am excited to see that our centers have been so successful with Learning Genie so far! Although we did have some initial challenges with training our staff, we were able to overcome this challenge with some creative problem solving and amazing teamwork. I am very impressed with the quality of support we receive from the Learning Genie team, and look forward to our continued success!”

Christina Vega, Education and Disabilities Services Manager