FY24 FA2 Information Session Transcript

Adia Brown: Hello and good afternoon, everyone. I am so happy to be here and once again be giving another information session to all of our friends out there in the Head Start world. Yesterday we were here. We're back at it again. Yesterday we did FA1 and today we are going to do FA2. It's gonna be another exciting opportunity for grantees to take a deep dive with us, a deep dive for one of the monitoring events, and we're really excited about that. We're gonna start off with some information from — Well, first of all, let me introduce my team, because for a long time in monitoring, well, I didn't have the team. 

But now I am, in case you don't know me, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Adia Brown. I'm the Monitoring Lead from the Office of Head Start and I come fully equipped with a full team. We have Jacqueline De Puy, Tamara White, and Faith Scheibe who are here with me today. They're not the exhaustive number of our team. We also have a team member, Cynthia Romero and we have a Davina Faries. Lots of new people. Many people who are able to help out with monitoring. I'm very excited about that. I'm gonna turn it over to Tamara White, who's gonna start the presentation for us.

Tamara White: Good morning for some, and good afternoon to others. Again, thank you for joining us. I'm just gonna talk to you briefly about some of the goals for our session today. Today we're gonna talk about, as you know, Focus Area Two monitoring event. I know everyone is excited about the upcoming FA2. We're gonna go into a deep dive about that. We're gonna review the content, and all the activities, and everything associated with the FA2. We're gonna let you know about the pre-review process. We're gonna give you details about the review process as well as the post-review, and then you'll get some opportunity towards the end to have your questions answered. 

Throughout, as reminded, post your questions in the chat. Some will be able to answer along the way, but we will be allowing time for our illustrious Monitoring Lead, Adia, and others on the team to answer any questions that you are going to have along the lines of FA2 to ensure that you will have a successful review. Let's talk about the overview, the FA2 overview. The purpose is, we wanna understand quality. The FA2 provides you, the recipient, the opportunity to demonstrate that you are providing high-quality, comprehensive services.

We're also going to be listening for strong practices. In addition to demonstrating quality, you'll be given an opportunity to share any information about the strong practices that highlight your program’s strengths and further supports provision of those quality services. As always, the review is going to assess compliance. We want to evaluate the information that's collected during the reviews to assess compliance with all applicable laws, regulations, and policies. That is the Head Start performance standards, the act, and uniform guidance.

Now, let's go a little bit deeper into the review basics. The FA2 is five days in length, generally. We have a review team of five, and I know that this typically — I'm sorry, four reviewers. Three reviewers possibly onsite, and one reviewer virtually. That will be our Fiscal Reviewer. They will be conducting onsite activities. These onsite activities include things like the classroom and program explorations, data tours with the program managers, data testing, and then discussions and more discussions, and lots more discussions. 

These discussions are the opportunity for you, as the program, the recipient, to share with us, and explain to us, and demonstrate how you're providing quality services, sharing your strong practices, and how you're complying with the laws and regulations. If we can move on. Now, we're going to talk about the pre-review activities. First, the pre-review activities. These are additional steps that are gonna take, make sure that you are successful in this review. 

We work as a team to make sure you're successful. You and your team are gonna come together and do everything you can to prepare for the review, and we're gonna work with you. One of the things in that is that 45 days, generally around 45 days, before the actual review, you're gonna get a notification letter. That notification letter will include the name of the reviewer assigned, the dates of that review, some basic review information, and then it's gonna let you know about the forms that you must complete in advance of the review. 

For example, and we're gonna go deeper into this, the program enrollment roster. You're gonna have to do the Criminal Records Check Document and complete a Staff Qualifications Tracking Document. All of this information is going to be in that notification letter, and it is one of the first steps in ensuring that you have a very successful review. Now, let's go deeper into these documents. The program enrollment document. This is where we're going to be looking for eligibility file records. 

By providing the information of your program enrollment, we will use that to take the sample for our eligibility file review. When you complete this document, you wanna make sure you assign a participant ID number. Please do not send any names or any PII, personally identifiable information. It's going to include the center location and name, and if applicable, the classroom information. But do not include teacher’s names. And again, this is to help us to be able to identify which files we're going to look at, and this is something that you will be providing in advance.

The next document is the Criminal Records Check Document. You will need to provide this document and have it for all staff working in your Head Start program, not just teachers, but all staff. We want to ensure that the recipients are completing the required criminal records checks prior to hire. You're gonna make sure you have the staff names, their dates of hire, any initial State history checks and details, FBI checks, child abuse neglect registry check details, and the date of the most recent criminal history check. All of this, again, is done prior to us coming onsite. 

There's also the Staff Qualifications Tracking Document. This is where you will be listing all of the qualifications for your Early Head Start and Head Start teachers and family service staff. When I say that, these are individuals who are working in this role, as your lead teacher and family services staff. We wanna know their qualifications. The next step to ensuring that we have a successful review event is the pre-review planning call. This is done a few weeks prior to the actual review, and this is where our Review Lead will be contacting you and introduce themselves to you and the Head Start Director. This is the opportunity where you will be able to ask any questions in preparation for the review. It is an opportunity for the Review Lead to ask initial questions so that they can be prepared as well when we come out onsite.

They're gonna be asking things about planning the schedule, getting to know what your schedule is like for the week, your board members, all staff. This is where this will start to take place. It is also the opportunity for our Review Lead to talk about reminding you about any OHS resources to help you through any prework to support your preparation. And again, it could be about the CRC checks, the program enrollment roster, and the staff qualifications tracking sheet.

These are some of the things that will be talked about. And again, any questions that you have, just to make sure that you are ready to go the moment our reviewers come onsite. You all will be ready to just jump in and share everything and start to brag about your program.As we move forward in this process, we are now going to a deeper dive with the FA2, and this is where I am excited to turn back over to Adia, who will be able to go deeper into the FA2 process. Take it away, Adia.

Adia Brown: Tamara, I was actually doing a little bit of research while you were speaking because a lot of people have questions about the criminal background checks. You had said that we needed to get a list of all their staff for criminal background checks, and a lot of times, I think grantees have some confusion about whether or not we mean all of their staff or staff that have direct contact with children. 

I went back, and I did a review of the Head Start regulations, and it doesn't say — it doesn't delineate whether or not the staff has contact with children or not. It just says all staff, meaning that all of the staff who are considered to be Head Start staff need to have a background check. There's no delineation in the regulation that says, only staff that have contact. It says all staff. I just wanted to do a little bit of research on that, just so that people could have that information and really feel like they know what that looks like for them.

Tamara White: Adia, thank you. I appreciate you doing that, and I know our recipients do, too. Thank you for that.

Adia Brown: No problem. It's my pleasure to do it. Is my camera on because I can't — I have a lot of screens. I can't see what I'm doing right here. Can people see me? I don't know.

Jacqueline De Puy: It is not on, Adia. 

Adia Brown: Well, let me get myself together. 

Unknown: It’s only your name. 

Adia Brown: It looks like it's on. It's on now. Can you all see?

Jacqueline De Puy: Yep. 

Adia Brown: OK, good. That's great. Here we go. Let's do the deep dive. Let's go into the Focus Area Two. Let's start off with, what is, what does it look like? What does the whole Focus Area Two look like? We start off with the protocol. The protocol is broken up into a lot of different areas, but we have three different things that are really important to grantees. The first thing is the content areas. Most people are familiar with the content area. 

We have six different content areas, Health, Education, FCE, Fiscal, ERSEA, and I didn't name them all, but people are normally familiar with the content areas. Inside of the content areas, we have what are called performance areas. You're gonna hear us talk about those performance areas as the presentation goes forward. We'll explain to you what they are. Inside of the performance areas, we have performance measures. For grantees, that's probably the area where you are most interested, because the measure is actually the question that we ask. It's actually how we measure your compliance. Let's go to the next slide.

Let's start this whole process off with talking about program design and management. It's the first place that we start in FA1 and FA2. But we start here in FA2, and there's a lot of things that we're interested in trying to learn about, about this particular area. We start off, really, there's a lot. We start off with a planning and introductory meeting. We do this with the managers. The grantee will talk with their reviewer, and they'll decide what time they want to do it. This usually happens the first day of the review. It happens early in the morning. Who's gonna be involved? 

A lot of times, programs wanna invite about 20 different people to this management meeting. What I will say is that it's not as effective to invite that many people to your opening meeting. What happens is, most of the people don't get to talk. There's not an opportunity for us to actually have this conversation, with all — with 20 different types of managers. Grantees, as they're working this out with their program specialists, you really want to think about who gets invited to this meeting. 

Basically, the people who you want to invite to this introductory meeting are the people who can start to give a picture about how you are providing services in your program. You really want to think about that and decide who you want to invite to this particular meeting. Additionally, this meeting is not about a presentation. A lot of times grantees want to do a PowerPoint presentation, or they feel like they need to prepare a bunch of different documents and hand those things out. 

That's not what this meeting is about. We are going to learn about your programs over the course of the 5 days that we're there. We just want this meeting to begin the journey with you. We want you to give us a good foundation that maybe lasts about 15 minutes, and then we want to be able to ask you questions that help us to go on this journey. In the PDMI meeting, we also — in this section, we have a lot of discussions. There's discussions with your education staff, your family service staff, the governing body, the Policy Council, and we want to explore things like supervision and oversight.

You will hear us talk about, throughout this presentation, data tours. There are a lot of data tours in the new protocol. What we tried to do is we really try to make sure that you're prepared for these data tours. A lot of the data tours. We don't want binders. We don't want people to start to build, to actually create binders for us that you don't use, that you kind of put up over the shelf, that you only make for the monitoring team. What we really want to do is, during a data tour, we want to see the data that you use on a regular basis and how you use it.

For example, the reviewers will request information on things like your community assessment. They want you to talk them through how did you do the community assessment. What is the information in your community assessment and how are you using that information? How did you use that information to actually design the program that you have for the parents and the community there? If you do a community assessment, every 5 years, with all the updates, you should have enough information to start to build a program that helps you to meet the needs of your community.

They’re gonna ask you about your self-assessment. They're gonna want you to share that with them, and show them how you did the self-assessment, and what did you learn from that self-assessment, and how are you making improvements based on it. They’re going to ask you about data and reports for ongoing monitoring and program improvement. They want to know, what kind of data do you use as a program. How do you use them? When do you use them? How often do you get them? How are they useful to you as a program?

They're gonna ask to see your organization chart cause that gives them an idea, at this beginning meeting, of who's involved, who's actually managing, and where does information come from. They're also gonna ask you about your standards of conduct. They're gonna want to see them because they're gonna want to see if you have these standards of conduct, how do you ensure that everybody in your program abides by those standards of conduct, and how do you make them real for everybody in your program.

They're gonna ask you for a wage study because they wanna know in this review, are you actually paying people wages that actually are comparable to other programs like yours, other preschool programs, kindergarten, other early childhood education programs. It is really important with the workforce shortage that we're going on right now, that people really do these wage studies, so they can see if they have wages that help retain their staff.

They're gonna ask you about information for program retention data, and criminal record checks, and staff qualifications. We are, in this new protocol, giving you all the information that you need to understand that these are the basic pieces of information that we're gonna ask you about. This is not a limited or exhausted list. This is the things that we're gonna ask you for, for the most part, and we ask for additional things only when questions come up that make us feel like we need to get additional information. Every section we work on will have that.

Adia Brown: Let's talk a little bit about this, this performance area. The first performance area is Program Design and Improvement. Under there we have performance measures. In each of those areas we have, well these are the areas that we have. We have Program Design and Strategic Planning. We have Program Governance, and we have Staffing and Staff Supports.

Let's get into it. Let's get really deep down into the nitty gritty of this, of Program Design and Strategic Planning. Underneath each one of these we have performance measures. The measures, you always live there in the measure because they actually have performance standards that are attached to them. You can see here under Program Design and Strategic Planning we have a measure for program design. 

What we want to measure is if the grant recipient adjust its program design to remain responsive to shifts in the community needs, strengths, and resources over time. What that's telling you is that we're gonna look at your community assessment, your self-assessment, and all those different things, to see when you first started this program in the beginning of your 5-year grant, have you made adjustments that remain responsive to your community. Because we know that in communities things change over time, we want to make sure that you're changing with your community.

The next thing is that we actually have a measure about data management. We're really interested in whether or not the grant recipient adjusts its program designed to remain responsive to the shifts, and community needs, and strength, and resources over time, and if you do that based on data. Do you have trends that say — for example, maybe you have trends that talk about a health issue in your community and something that's cropping up in your community. You're seeing these trends? Do you make shifts that are responsive to meet the goal of that trend?

The next thing that we talk about is program monitoring and improvement. What we want to know is whether or not the grantee uses program data to routinely monitor your progress toward your goals. At the beginning of your program year, and your first year, you should have goals and different things that you're trying to meet and desired outcomes. Now that we're here, we're visiting you, we're doing this monitoring event, it’s the third year, we wanna know whether or not you actually have monitored those goals, and whether or not you have made the adjustment to assure that you've made progress towards them. 

At this stage, in a Focus Area One, we're just trying to figure out what the goals are. Do you have goals? How are you implementing those goals? What are your strategies to meet the goals? But in the FA2 this is where the rubber actually hits the road. We're trying to determine, you had some goals, are you actually meeting those goals. Are you doing it? Have you made the adjustments along the way, to your goal, so that you can ensure that you're actually doing the things that you said you wanted to do in Head Start?

We move from those measures, and we go to the next set of measures which are Program Governance measures. These measures are about collaborating across the organization, about the governing body, and the Policy Council. What programs wanna know here is that we think that it's really important that you are collaborating with your governing body, with your program staff, and with your Policy Council. It's almost like the branches of the American Government. We have Congress, the Senate, and we have what's called the OMB. It's like a three-legged tier, and those tiers actually help us to ensure that the programs are doing exactly what we think, and we have promised that they're going to do. In this case, we want you to collaborate with everybody in your organization to assure that you're meeting your goals and your expectations for the program.

The way that you do that is that you should have a governing body that really is not — we don't want lame duck organization, we want a governing body that actually is working with the program, and they remain responsive to their community needs. The way that they do that is that they're using their expertise as governing body members to ensure that they can contribute to the program in ways that helps you move forward. The Policy Council. Everybody loves the Policy Council because the Policy Council and the policy committees are also drivers of the program. 

When we come for the Focus Area Two, we want to see that Policy Council is active, that Policy Council is getting information, and that that Policy Council is doing things to make sure that all the parents and the families in your community are getting the type of Head Start program that they need and that they want. Finally, the last performance area here is Staffing and Staff Supports. We know with the workforce shortage and all the different things that are going on, that this is a very important section of the protocol.

The first thing in this section of the protocol, one of the measures is your management team. We wanna ensure that now, at your third year that your management team has clearly defined and manageable rules. We wanna know that for each one of the areas where you have to meet the performance standards, that you have a leader. There you have somebody who's responsible, that they have the experience for doing it, and that they are actually moving their area forward so that all the comprehensive services in your program are actually working.

Another important place in the program and performance measures are professional development. This is really important, because at this stage, you're in your third year, and we want to know if you have provided the professional development to your staff so they understand things like developmentally appropriate practice. We hear a lot these days about challenging behaviors, and actually, when I go and I talk to people, what they're experiencing is not challenging behaviors at all. They're actually experiencing developmentally appropriate things that young children can do, that are challenging to adults who may not understand developmentally appropriate practice.

It's really important, when we get down to this third year, that all of your staff are getting a continuous improvement in professional development, and it should be running like a well-oiled machine by the time you've had your grant for 3 years because you have actually done the professional development to ensure that your staff understands all the rules. They understand what to do and they have a great strategic plan for moving forward.

Finally, there's organizational accountability here, and this is a new area specifically for Focus Area Two. Organizational accountability is all about the grant recipient establishing high expectations for staff, and implements an ongoing communication and training system to reinforce organizational accountability. We're going to be asking you about that when we come onsite to see if you do that. Finally, workforce development. You probably see a theme. There’s a big theme under-staffing and staff support.

By the time we get to the third year we want to make sure that you have trained everybody, that you are supporting everybody, that people are getting fair compensation, that you have opportunities for career advancement. We want you to be an established program that really supports your staff, so that you can have a stellar and outstanding Head Start program with quality staff to help you to support that.

We're gonna move along. We're gonna move away from PDMI. That's a lot for PDMI. We're gonna move into Education and Child Development Services, another really important area of the protocol. You can see that in this section it's very similar to how we started off PDMI. We have a discussion. In this case we want to discuss things with your education staff, including teachers. We have a data tour. The data tour is with your education manager and your staff because we want to get oversight, and in we want to get insight on your oversight, and on the  practices that help you have a stellar education program. 

We also do explorations. In this section, we do classroom observations because we want to figure out whether or not you are using your child assessments in the classrooms. Are you actually using those child assessments to actually make improvement and ensure that children are making progress? Are you using instruction and individualization for all the children? Is it just something that you put on the lesson plans or is it really something that you're doing in the program to make sure that each child in that program really has an individualized plan that is moving them forward in their trajectory of development and education?

It's not just about one thing. I'm gonna work with the blocks and Johnny today. At this stage, it should really be that you know the children, and you know what they need. Those plans are actually moving their progress forward. We're also looking at things like a developmental screenings, and referrals, and coaching of the teaching staff, and your staff qualifications. All these things kind of come together in this section to ensure that you actually have a program that's solid enough to make sure that when children leave your program, they've gotten all of the education that they should have gotten at this stage in their lives. 

Let's go to what those measures look like for you. We have a set of — we actually have a set of areas. We're going to look at Curriculum, Screening, and Assessment Tools. We're gonna look at Teaching Strategies and Learning Environments. We're gonna look at Qualifications, Professional Development, and Coaching. Finally, Transitions. Let's go deeper. Deeper is really about the performance measures in Focus Area Two. Let's talk about this area, which is Curriculum, Screening, and Assessment Tools. Here's the measures. 

The first thing we wanna do is we wanna talk about your curriculum. Are you using a research based and culturally appropriate curriculum to achieve your child outcomes? This is not really about us just asking, you are using Creative or Frog Street, or whatever curriculum you're actually using. We really are thinking about this curriculum. One, is it research based, and two, is it meeting the culture of the children in your program and how do you know that? How do you know that? How do you know that this curriculum is actually helping you to achieve child outcomes? We'll be having those conversations with you.

We also are going to ask you about your screening tools, and whether or not those tools are helping you to screen children in a way that helps to indicate whether or not they need further evaluation, and if they're getting that further evaluation, and how you're using those screening tools to really help you individualize for children. Finally, there's child assessments. We wanna ask you questions and we actually want to see, we want to see the data from your child assessment, because at this point we want to see, well, where did these children start in your program and where are they now.

When you do your child assessment, are people moving? Are kids moving from sort of the baseline of where they started in your program? Through your individualization for those children and through your thinking about where they are, are they moving from point A to Point B? If we come to your program and it's the very beginning of the year, we wanna look at the information from the year before. Because those children, that's where we'll be able to see the progress. Maybe we come to your program in September and October, and you haven't gotten this far yet. 

We wanna go back to the year that was before that so that we can see how you use your data, how you made the assessments, and how that actually moved children forward in your program. Our next is Teaching Strategies and Learning Environments. In this section we have four measures. The first one is about teaching strategies. This is really, really, really important. It's super important. One of the things that we're finding that there's a correlation between, is whether or not the teacher in the classroom has good and effective teaching strategies and practices or whether or not they actually have inappropriate discipline and child abuse in their classrooms. 

Teachers who have really effective teaching practices and who are responsive, and they understand effective care, they are a lot less likely to do inappropriate things in the classroom like pull children, or grab children, or bind children, or punch children, or do any of those things. This is the area where we really want to focus in. We wanna key in on whether or not, we go around to your program, and we are seeing that the teachers in that program are effective and they understand what practices they need, and that those practices are tailored to each of the individual children. 

We think that that helps not only with the education of children, but also with safety overall. We wanna look at your lesson plans because we wanna see whether or not you are intentionally designing lesson plans that keep children engage, that keep them interested, and make them feel like this is; get their curiosity going, that it creates joy in your classroom. We don't wanna just look at the lesson plans to see whether or not you drafted up a lesson plan. We wanna see whether those lesson plans are intentional, and they're working in your program.

We want to look at the learning environments. We want to see how organized they are. We want to see whether or not you have schedules that promote really healthy development. Are kids getting to go outside? Are you having gross motor activities? Do kids get to move in your program or are they stuck? Do teachers make children sit at circle time way too long so that they start to get ants and hit each other and not do the right things, or do teachers actually make sure that they have a short circle time? Are teachers engaged in small group activities, or do they just let the kids go off and do small group activities by themselves while they kind of sit at the desk.

We wanna actually look at the learning environment and see how rich they are, and how full they are, and what people are doing, and are those things really reflective of what a good learning environment looks like in Head Start. We are still Head Start, even though we have gone through several years of a pandemic, and a workforce shortage. The thing that makes Head Start programs different than any other child care program, is this set of standards and the fact that we have a high benchmark that we want programs to meet, because we know this is the right things for kids.

Finally, home visiting and group socialization for home based programs. We want to go into your program and see, hey, first of all, are people getting fair compensation here? Are there opportunities for advancements? Are there things that, in the home based programs, for home base, we want to see socialization. We want to see whether or not we can go out and do some site visits. We want to know whether or not the teacher is the child's first and foremost teacher. 

Those are things that we're looking for when we go to home visiting groups socialization. The bullet point that's there on the slide, my team is probably going to fix it because it's about something else. Let's talk about, I think this might be another measure. This is about Qualifications, Professional Development, and Coaching. Under here, the measures — that was the area — the measures are teacher qualifications, professional development, and coaching. Here's the thing that I want grantees to listen to really, really, really, really, carefully, because we're making a change, and you guys need to understand this change and make sure that you know that this change occurred. 

For a very long time we evaluated teacher qualifications. We evaluated teacher qualifications, and we said OK, we want to know if the teacher is qualified, but if the teacher is not qualified, as long as that teacher is on a professional development plan, we will only cite an AOC. We only say an area of concern because we want to make sure that programs have enough time to move those teachers from being in a place where they're not qualified, to where they have a professional development plan that will get them qualified. We did that in the Office of Head Start for very, very long time. 

It's been years, I think we started doing it when the partnerships happened. We are making an adjustment this year and that adjustment is, if it has been within 2 years, and that person is on a professional development plan, we will still give you AOC, but if it has been after 2 years, and the person still hasn't gotten their qualifications, and they're still on a Professional Development plan, we consider that an area of non-compliance. Because after 2 years of a staff being at your program, they should have gotten their qualifications at that point. If they haven't, then we are gonna actually cite a finding for your program because we don't think that professional development plan should be indefinite.

We want to give people the opportunity to be on a professional development plan and get more credentials and become a quality teacher. But there's a time limit to that, and it can't be forever that we let people be on the professional development plan without getting the proper credentials. This is a change that we're making. I wanna make sure that people on this call are aware of that so that when we come into your program, we you know a lot of times, people say, “Well, you know, it's OK before. We had all these people on professional development plans, and we never got a finding.” Well, now, if the people are on professional development plans for too long, then you will get a finding. OK?

We also are looking to see whether or not you're doing coaching. Super important. We want to make sure that folks can get the support and the knowledge that they need to do a good job. Lastly, Transitions is just about the grantee being really intentional. We wanna make sure that when children are in Head Start or Early Head Start, and they're moving to their next program, that there's an intentional process that you are using to make sure that they are as successful as they possibly can be in that next environment. 

That success is really based on you doing really great assessments and getting really good information about those children, and making sure that you pass on that information to the next place that they're going, but also the success hinges on how much you know about that next place. How much do you know about the school they're going to or how much do you know about the Head Start program that they're going to? How can you help inform those people so that they can take the child on the rest of the journey when they leave your program? Super important. Hope people are doing that.

Let's move on to help services. Health services again, same kind of format. We want to have discussions. We're going to have data tours. We want to do explorations. For these, we want to talk to people. We want to talk to your Child Health and Safety Managers. We want to talk to the Mental Health Consultant. We want the Mental Health Consultant to come in front of us. We don't want you to tell us about the Mental Health Consultant. 

We don't want you to tell us what the Mental Health Consultant does. We wanna actually talk to the Mental Health Consultant. Make sure that during this part of the review [inaudible]. Now I can’t [inaudible] but hopefully one of my team will mute that person [inaudible] it’s going to get really crazy if they don’t know.

Tamara White: Adia, can you repeat that last session because we couldn't hear you? About, after the mental health consultant?

Adia Brown: Yes. Can you hear me now?

Tamara White: Yes, I think it was the rattling from the other person being off mute. Thank you.

Adia Brown: OK. Mental health. We wanna make sure that we actually talk to the Mental Health Consultant. Whoever that person is. A lot of times we come to programs and we're talking to a Health Coordinator, or maybe a Mental Health Coordinator. We wanna talk to the licensed Mental Health Consultant that provides mental health to your program. Make sure that you invite that person to the review because they're really an important part of your team.

We're gonna ask you for some documents here, too. We wanna see about oral medical health determination tracking, vision and hearing tracking, referrals. We wanna see some referrals. We wanna see some example menus. Want to see the policies and procedures related to child discipline, criminal record checks and their checking sheets. As everybody in your program who works for Head Start needs to have a criminal record check, and we need to see that they have had them. This is not just about teachers or people who are directly related to people in the program. Everybody should have a criminal record check.

We wanna see whether or not you have maintenance plans and records. We wanna see about lead testing and whether or not you're testing the paint and water in your program. We want to see about your emergency plans and we also wanna see the data related to expected families and the services that they have.

Adia Brown: Health services as the content area. Here are the performance areas: Child Health and Oral Health Status, Mental Health and Social Emotional Well-Being, and Child Nutrition. Moving along, I hope I'm going to the right side. I am. We're gonna go deep again. Here we are. Oh, there's more. 

There's more performance areas, Safe and Sanitary Environments, and Expected Families. So now let's go deep. Going in deep under health we have Child Health and Oral Health Status is your first performance area. The things that we are measuring here are child, child health status and care. This is something that people, this is an area where people make mistakes all the time. I wanna be really clear. I'm gonna slow down with this one. What we're looking for here is, we're looking to see that the grant recipient supports children to become, and remain, up to date on the schedule of age appropriate medical and oral health care, including the need for referral and follow up. We want to know, did you, do it? Did you make sure that if kids were not up to date, because they could come into your program and they're not up to date, that's OK. If they come in, you find that they're not up to date, we know that that happens.

But at this stage in the review, we want to know that you, if you get from the health care provider that the child is not up to date, that you actually do the things to make sure they come up to date, and that they remain up to date. So that's really important here.

We also want to know whether or not you perform and obtain hearings and vision screens for children. We want to know whether or not the grantee provides education and opportunities to the parents about health. It's really important. We can't do the job forever for all the kids in our program. But the better job you do in making sure that parents understand why health is important, why oral health is important, why all those things are important, the more likely that over the child's lifetime, that their parents will participate in that and make sure that they do healthy things.

The other thing where people maybe they forget about it, or they don't have time, or they don't know, or I heard today that some people think that the Policy Council and Health Service Advisory Committee are the same thing. They're not. They’re the 2 different things. Every program should have a Health Services Advisory Committee that helps them think about larger health issues within their community that they need to work on.

Adia Brown: Going deep again. The next performance area is Mental Health and Social Emotional Well-Being. The Mental Health Consultant, the reason why we want that Mental Health Consultant to come to the program is because we want to make sure that the mental health, that the grantee develops a positive program environment that includes a partnership with a qualified Mental Health Consultant. Now that Mental Health Consultant is only coming once in a while to observe the classrooms, or they're only coming twice a year, or they only come when you actually have a problem, that's not a real partnership.

A real partnership with a Mental Health Consultant is a partnership where that person is in your program helping to drive what you do around mental health. You have consultation with them to think about what are some of the big mental health concerns in our community. What are some of the big mental health concerns that we see from our trends when we talk with our parents? What are the things that we all need to work on, and how can you, as our Mental Health Consultant, help us to address these things?

They need to promote mental health and social and emotional well-being of the children, and the staff, and your families. If you only meet with them on a periodic basis, they can't do this job. What we're looking for is, we're looking to see whether or not you have a very strong relationship with your mental health consultant, and whether or not they are an integral part of your program, and in making sure that you have a healthy mental health environment.

We also want to ask about suspension and expulsion in this section. We want to know whether or not you implement positive discipline practices and policies that prohibit the use of expulsion and suspension. We want to make sure that you're not expelling people. You're not suspending people from your program, and when you do, you have very good reasons, and you have good documentation for why you did that.

Children who have what we call challenging behaviors are often the children who need Head Start services more than anybody else. One of the things that we don't want to have happen is that those children get turned away or they get limited exposure to the program because that doesn't help them. And that's not what Head Start is about. We want programs to figure that out. We want programs to make sure that they have staff, and consultants, and a mental health person, that can help them to make sure that that child fully gets what they need when they do have a challenging behavior.

And finally, we wanna make sure that there are family support services, and that those services actually address issues that may happen to families in your program, and then they do it, pretty expeditiously.

Adia Brown: Let's move on and take a deep dive into our next area, which is Child Nutrition. We don't have a lot of program, we don't have a lot of questions there, but we do want to know that the grant recipient implemented nutritional services that accommodate every child's unique and nutritional needs.

We're going to go to the next area and the next area is Safe and Sanitary Environments. This is really important. We want to make sure that you have safety practices. Do you have practices that establish appropriate administrative safety practices and policies. This means a lot of things. Safety in a Head Start program can mean a lot of things about your policies and procedures. 

For example, do you have policies and procedures in your program that account for the fact that you don't want to leave staff alone with children? There's a lot of times when we talk to programs that have before care and after care. In those times of the day, they only have one staff with a group of children.

Are ways that you can mitigate the safety issue there? That safety issue is a safety issue for the children and the staff. A lot of times when you have staff, and they're all by themselves with children, there's an opportunity for them to have allegations against them. There's that, either are or not true, but because you don't have another staff member, or you don't have somebody else available, there's no way for you to protect the staff and the children in that situation. Do you have policies and procedures that ensure that everybody is safe?

One of those things you may want to think about is when we have those times during the day, when we have either the beginning of the day or the end of the day, are there ways that we can consolidate classrooms so that we always have two staff members, so that our staff is protected, and so children are protected. You want to think about things like that.

Of course, you all, of course, you all know about staff background checks. These are really important. What people seem to fail to do is, maybe it's because we're in a workforce shortage, but we see all the time that people say, “You know what? I'm gonna hire this day. I’m gonna try to get this staff right now, and I'll, you know, I'll take my chance on whether or not they had their background check prior to higher.” You know? Maybe I'll get it tomorrow, or in 14 days, or in 72 days, or maybe in 282 days, and that is not the regulation. 

The regulation is that you are supposed to get the criminal background checks prior to hire. When don't do that, we have to cite you as a program. We have to say that you're not doing that. This is really important, because a lot of people say, “Well, we didn't have them.” You know? “We didn't have them alone with children. We never let them be alone with children. It's OK for us to wait to get their criminal background check.” It's not. I know a lot of people take that chance, and when we catch you, we make a finding because it's not safe for you to have people in the program who don't have criminal background checks. 

We move on to Ongoing Oversight and Safe Environments. One thing that we are hearing is, because of the workforce shortage, we have so many managers and people who are stepping into the classrooms, and they're becoming teachers, and they're filling in. What that is doing in the program, it is limiting programs from having the ability to oversee and provide oversight of their programs. Lots of things are happening in programs that managers can't see because they're functioning as teachers, or family service workers, or the bus driver, or the kitchen aid in their programs. 

What we want you to be thinking about, and we want you to be doing, is thinking about other structures that you may have to develop so that you can ensure that your program is actually safe, because when you don't have people who could do the oversight, then you wind up in situations where you have issues that become egregious and detrimental to the overall operation of your program. And of course, there's Emergency Preparedness. We want people to have plans for emergency preparedness. We're seeing things like wildfires all around, wild wildfires, floods, and different things like that. You want to make sure that you have that readily available, and that your staff understand those procedures.

Adia Brown: The next performance area is still, we're still on Safe Environments. There's more things. You wanna make sure that you have a safe facility. Safe facilities are really important. We wanna make sure that your facilities are safe, and that you are doing the maintenance, and all of those things. We wanna make sure that the equipment is safe, that the program environments are safe, and that you have good hygienic practices, and that you have safety practices that are appropriate.

Adia Brown: Finally, there are Expectant Families. We’re gonna check during FA2, whether or not, for expected families, that the grant recipient designs provides comprehensive services for those families, and that the grant recipient provides appropriate newborn and transition services following the birth of an infant. I had a mouthful. I said a lot. I was going on and on and on, but I had a lot of slides I had to cover.

Adia Brown: I'm gonna pass the torch to one of my team members, and I think it's gonna be Faith Scheibe, who's gonna tell you all about Family and Community Engagement. Faith, please take it away.

Faith Scheibe: Thanks, Adia. For our next content area, we're going to talk about Family and Community Engagement Services. The grant recipient must integrate parent and family engagement strategies into all systems and program services to support family well-being and promote children's learning and development. Let's look at healthy monitor. Family challenging, I'm just gonna call it FCE, will be…

Unknown: We can barely hear you [inaudible]. 

Unknown: Can you please speak up. 

Faith Scheibe: Alright. Can you guys hear me now?

Unknown: No, ma'am.

Faith Scheibe: OK.

Unknown: I can hear you just fine.

Unknown: I can't hear.

Faith Scheibe: Alright. Well I'm…

Unknown: I can't hear either.

Unknown: Neither can we.

Faith Scheibe: OK.  I think there's some kind of problem with my microphone. I'm going to try to do my best and if you all can't hear me, then we'll have someone step in. FCE will be monitored through discussions, data tours, and exploration. New in FY24, we’ll be speaking with parent and families to get their perspectives. We'll be talking with family service staff to have discussions to understand how they do their work. We're excited to get the staff perspective in monitoring. And we're going to look at centers and classrooms for how they are customizing to serve their families.

We're going to have a data tour to review how programs track and monitor family data, and then the recipient, of course, will be asked to share real time, data and documentation including but not limited to what you see here. Hold on for 1 second. Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?

Unknown: Lots better. 

Unknown: That's better. 

Unknown: Yes.

Unknown: Yeah.

Faith Scheibe: We are going to be looking at doing a data tour. We're going to be doing discussions and we're going to be doing explorations, seeing how we are customizing our programs to serve our families. On the next slide, we talk about the different performance areas in this area. We have Program Foundations to Support Families Well-Being and Family Engagement, which emphasizes the response of communication with families, and sufficient staffing to support family needs.

We're gonna be looking at Family Partnerships, which emphasizes the implementation of family partnership processes that promote collaboration and support positive outcomes for families. We're going to be Promoting Strong Parenting, Parent Child Relationships, and Engagement in Children's Learning, which emphasizes implementation of parenting curriculum and varying opportunities to improve parenting knowledge and skills.

We'll be looking at Community Partnerships, which emphasizes developing and maintaining community partnerships that support the needs and interests of families as well as in the community. Here's where we take a little bit of a closer look at the performance areas. This Program Foundation to Support Family Well-Being and Family Engagement, focuses on communication and staffing, which includes things like supervision structural supports for family service staff, like training and staff assignments as well as communication structures.

The Family Partnerships performance measure focuses on the family partnership process. Recipients should be prepared to share show data on how you track and monitor family's progress towards their family partnership goals. Promoting Strong Parenting, Parent Relationships, and Engagement in Children's Learning focuses on parenting skills and the parenting curriculum. For these we'll be looking at how programs are rolling out a research based parenting curriculum that meets the needs of their families. 

We’ll also be looking at other opportunities that are offered to build parent skills and deepen their relation their relationship with their children such as networking events, other volunteering opportunities. Finally, what we look, this performance, the Community Partnership performance measure focuses on partnership identification. Does the program have a data driven approach to community partnerships that align with the identified needs of enrolled families? And that's all for Family and Community Engagement. Now, I'm gonna turn it over to Jacqueline, who's gonna lead us in Fiscal.

Jacqueline De Puy: Thank you, Faith. Can everyone hear me, OK?

Unknown: Yes. 

Jacqueline De Puy: OK, thank you. OK. We are going to talk about fiscal Infrastructure.

Jacqueline De Puy: There are two monitoring activities in the Fiscal component of the FA2. The first is data testing and checks to include transaction testing. In transaction testing we will be asking fiscal staff to pull various fiscal transactions so they can be checked for compliance with Head Start program performance standards and other regulations. The second part of the Fiscal component is the data tour. In the data tour the reviewer will ask managers to track, how they track and monitor, Fiscal components for accuracy, how they make decisions, and how recipients provide oversight to fiscal staff. 

On the screen, you will see a number of items that reviewers will ask to see. But one important item to highlight is that recipients should be prepared with their general ledger on the very first day of their review. And because this is so important, I'm going to reemphasize, again, that the general ledger is so important to have ready to go for your reviewer on day one. The Fiscal data tour includes three performance areas. The first is Budget Development, Implementation, and Oversight. The second is Comprehensive Financial Management Structure and System, and the last performance area is Facilities and Equipment Management Systems. And there, I know there's a lot of words on this slide. 

Unknown: I can’t hear anything. 

Jacqueline De Puy: Can other people hear me speak?

Unknown: Yes

Unknown: I can hear you fine.

Unknown: Your fine. 

Unknown: Yeah, I can hear you. 

Jacqueline De Puy: Thanks everybody. Keith, can we go to the next slide, please?

Jacqueline De Puy: OK. We're gonna talk about each of those performance areas in more detail here. The Budget Development Implementation and Oversight Performance area includes one performance measure called Budget Development and Management. In this performance area we are listening for ways in which the recipient uses data to build their budget and how parties such as staff, Policy Council, and the governing body are engaged in the process. 

Comprehensive Financial Management Structure and System includes three performance measures, and they are System for Record-Keeping and Reporting, Internal Controls, and Head Start Grant Management. Some important things to note within this performance area are that recipients will share their fiscal policies and procedures, their fiscal management software, and its reporting capabilities with the Fiscal Reviewer, and that OHS will transaction test various transactions to understand how processes are implemented. Like I said before, recipients should be prepared on that Monday of the review to have a copy of their general ledger, and I see lots of questions coming about this in the chat. We'll make sure to address those in the QA.

They should also be prepared to produce various transactions in a timely manner during the review week. It's important that the requested transactions be given to the review team as quickly as possible so that they can demonstrate an effective use of your data and financial management systems. Sorry, can we go back really quickly? Thank you. This performance area will test the program systems and internal controls as well as any established processes to mitigate potential fraud. Next slide now. For Facilities and Equipment Management System there are three performance measures. Managing — so many people can't hear. I'm getting mixed reviews.

Unknown: Yeah, we can.

Unknown: It may be their own system.

Unknown: Yeah, right, cause we can hear.

Jacqueline De Puy: OK, I'm just gonna keep on going. I'm sorry for those who are having trouble. Within this performance area recipients should be prepared with copies, notices, of Federal interest filed for real properties, and be prepared to share their most recent inventory list. Also, recipients should demonstrate that they've done effective risk preparation to obtain insurance to account for any potential risks to program property or funds. Next slide, please.

Thank you. Now we're gonna shift over to the content area Eligibility, Recruitment, Selection, Enrollment, and Attendance also known as ERSEA. There are two monitoring activities in ERSEA. First will be eligibility file reviews. If you've had a FA2 before, you'll be familiar with this. We will be reviewing a sample of eligibility files to look for the required components and test for accuracy in collecting and reporting eligibility. 

Then we'll also have a data tour with ERSEA management to better understand how managers track and monitor for accurate and timely ERSEA data, and how recipients prevent the risk of fraudulent enrollment. Here on the screen, you'll see quite a bit of information that reviewers will request to see during the data tour. There are five performance areas in ERSEA and I'm sure you can guess what they are. They make up the acronym, so here we have Recruitment, Selection, and Eligibility. 

On the next slide, we have Enrollment and Attendance. I know we just glazed over those two slides, but we're going to talk about them in more detail. First, we have a Recruitment. For the Recruitment performance area, the recipient should highlight their recruitment strategies that identify eligible families, and how they are responsive to shifts in the needs of children and families within the community. 

For the Selection performance area recipients should be prepared to highlight how they establish and maintain a selection criterion that is responsive to community needs and prioritizes children and families with the greatest need. They should also — oops sorry — and they should also describe how they adjust their selection criteria if they have identified the need to do so.

Here we have the Eligibility performance area that has two performance measures. The first is the eligibility process, and within this performance measure reviewers will conduct a review of eligibility files. The second measure is training on eligibility processes where OHS hopes to gain an understanding of processes put in place to protect against fraudulent enrollment and safeguard Federal funds.

For Enrollment performance area, there are also two performance measures. The first is tracking and maintaining enrollment. Here recipients should highlight enrollment practices that monitor and track vacancies to maintain full enrollment. The next one is Enrollment for Children with Disabilities, and this includes monitoring enrollment of children who are eligible for services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Finally, we have Attendance. Recipients should be prepared to highlight ongoing strategies to promote regular attendance and also how they track attendance. You just heard a lot of information from us, and now we're gonna try to piece it together. This is a sample schedule for what an FA2 review week might look like.

Your review may look similar to this, but it also might have some of the data tours plugged around on different days, depending on what you and your Lead Reviewer discuss. I know this looks like a lot, but I promise we do allow breaks for eating, drinking, and there will be lots of fun throughout the week as well. As you can see here, many folks from your organization will be involved in the review, and on Monday we've highlighted some primetime events. The first is the Management Team Kickoff Meeting, and that always starts the review week. We also have the Fiscal Data Tour and the ERSEA Data Tour. Those Fiscal Data Tour and ERSEA Data Tours will last likely throughout the week.

Also, throughout the week, there will be conversations with education staff, family service staff, as well as discussions with the governing body, Policy Council, and parents. The Policy Council discussion will really focus on their leadership role within the program, and the parent conversation will focus on their experiences as parents in your program. I also wanna draw your attention to Friday, where it says the socialization observation. If there's already a socialization event that is scheduled during the week of the review, it will be observed, but there's not an expectation to schedule one just for the review.

For FA2, we have worked to streamline the reports to make them more clear and easier to read. Our hope for this is that it will help programs and regional office teams use the data to support continuous program improvement. On your FA2 reports you may see the inclusion of strong practices. This concept was introduced at the Kickoff meeting on Tuesday. This is really an area to highlight where grant recipients are excelling in providing high quality services to children and their families.

Within each of the content areas that we just discussed; the report will note where there were compliant performance measures. Also, if there are any findings, they will be identified either through an area of concern, an area of noncompliance, or deficiency. How to get ready for your FA2 review? The protocol and resources are already available on ECLKC and the Virtual Expo. As you prepare for your FA2 review, you should consider some of the following questions. Who do you want on your team involved in the different monitoring activities? Who has access to some of your systems and can talk through and share real time data. 

Also, how accessible are your policies and documents that you want to share with the reviewers? To have them already in a centralized place that is easily accessible, and will you be able to pull reports in, live in real time, so that reviewers can understand how managers use systems to conduct oversight.

Please, please, please ask questions as you have them. You're not alone in this, and there's lots of resources to help prepare you for the review. If you have received your 45-day notification, then you can reach out to your assigned Review Lead for support. If you haven't received your letter yet, you can send questions to the OHS Monitoring email that's listed here on the screen. Now that I've talked your ear off, I'm going to hand the mic back over to Adia to lead the Q&A discussion. 

Adia Brown: OK, Jacqueline, can you hear me? 

Jacqueline De Puy: I can now thank you.

Adia Brown: Good. I just put my headphones on so I can make sure that people could hear me. Gosh, Eugen is not really happy with us. Like, I mean, I actually, I've been known to talk really fast. I talk fast all the time, like I'm from Philadelphia. I'm in Philadelphia. It's like a thing. But Eugene is so mad at us because we actually went fast. But we had about, I don't know what it was, 65 slides that we had to go through. It was a lot of information that we gave, and hopefully, we gave enough information that people can get it. 

But you know there's always some time that you could do it again. I'm sorry about that, Eugene. You know what I mean like, it's just, it was a factor of two things. We got a lot of information that we have to go through. We tried to give as many examples and the best examples as we possibly could, so that people could understand it. I actually went slower, because I can, even I can go faster than that. I went slower. But I apologize and hopefully, hopefully, some people are getting some value out of this. We got questions and answers, and there's a document, and Jacqueline, I think you're gonna ask me some questions when it gets to us. 

Jacqueline De Puy: Yeah, we have had folks in the background, collecting the answers, or sorry the question, so that we can ask, but I haven't received it yet. We might have to improvise a little bit.

Adia Brown: OK. I haven't gotten it either, but I'm down for improvisation if we need to do it. 

Jacqueline De Puy: Well, this is a question I think, Adia, that a lot of folks have had over the past couple of days, but it's about unannounced reviews.

Adia Brown: OK.

Jacqueline De Puy: Will programs still get a 45-day letter if they're, if they are determined to have an unannounced review?

Adia Brown: That's a really good question, Jacqueline. The answer is, no. If you have an unannounced review, you'll know that you're having a review this year because you, everybody got a global letter. It's a letter to get at the very beginning, and it tells you you're gonna have a monitoring review. But then, for most programs, you get another letter, 45 days before the date of your review that lets you know this is the date of your review. Before unannounced reviews, you don't.

You’re gonna have a review. But one day, we show up at your program, and we're like, “Surprise! We're here. We're so happy to be here, and we wanna review your program. We wanna do some wonderful things with you guys.” And you're like, “Oh, my, gosh, I didn't know that was gonna happen today.” But that is how it happens.

Can you tell us where we can access the availability calendar? Somebody is gonna put some information into the chat that lets you know how. If you need to update your availability calendar, how to do that. We are going to start to schedule our reviews, get started. We start reviews on October the 9th. There's lots of questions coming into the chat. We start reviews on October the 9th.

Jacqueline De Puy: And Adia, I think we have the questions in our inbox. Now, I just wanna make sure that you got those.

Adia Brown: I'm gonna I'm gonna look them up. I did.

Jacqueline De Puy: OK, great. I think we've had a couple of questions about this new concept of strong practices. Is there anything additional you'd like to share, Adia, to talk about that.

Adia Brown: We really are excited about strong practices. We think that it helps us to move monitoring from just being about compliance to more about performance. Performance includes the things that you comply with. It includes the things that you didn't comply with. It also includes the things that you're doing really well on. Strong practices are way for OHS to understand all the great things that programs are doing in the field. 

We'll use those strong practices to collaborate with national and regional T&TA to provide better training, to drive innovation, and to better understand all the great work Head Start programs are doing. You'll receive information back on your report about your strong practices. You know if you got one. Not every program will have a strong practice, and that's OK. You don't get penalized for not having them, but they help us to really understand the trends in programs across the country. About, where are people really, [inaudible] standards in a way that really affects and changes their community. We're excited about strong practices.

Jacqueline De Puy: Great. Thank you. Now, there's data listed in the grant recipient protocol. Should recipients prepare the data and presentations or binders for their FA2 review?

Adia Brown: Wow! I always love this question, and I hope that it gives people some relief because I remember I've been around for a long time, Jacqueline. Maybe. Oh, gosh! Years. I remember back in the day I would go to programs, and they would put you in a room. It had all these binders in there that they had prepared. What we found was that they actually never even use those binders. A lot of people didn't even know what was in the binder. It was really challenging for the grantees and for the teams because it didn't answer any questions. 

During the FA2 review, we want it to be organic. We want this experience to be as organic as possible. We tell you the types of things that we want you to think about. But we want you to pull those data, reports, and documents live, during the review event. One reason why we want you to do that is because that, in and of itself, shows us how often you use the data like, if we get on a call with you and you're fumbling, you can't find the data. You don't know where reports are. 

You have no idea how to access any, that tells us right away that you're really not using those data reports. They're really not something that you're familiar with. They're really not a tool that you're using frequently in your program. We really wanna see how you use your data. Please, don't prepare binders or presentations. We really wanna see your systems and how you do your job on a day to day basis, rather than a prepared presentation. During the data tours you can expect the reviewer to sit with the content area manager and talk through the process, examples, and the demonstration of how your system actually works.

Jacqueline De Puy: Great. Thank you. I might answer my own question that I'm about to ask, because I know that I was the one that brought it up about the general ledger. For the detailed general Ledger, we want to see both the previous program year and the current program year. I think there might have been a question. Should it be program year or fiscal year? The answer would be program year.

Back to you, Adia. There are a few more conversations happening in the FA2 this time around than we've experienced in previous years. Some of the education staff and family service staff discussions, for example, how can programs help prepare their staff to have conversations with reviewers?

Adia Brown: Oh, wow! That's a great question. And well, one, my first thing is to really let staff know that we're there to really understand how they do their jobs right. If you come to my job any given day, and you ask me a question about how do you do, what do you do, and how do you prepare, and what kind of data you do you use? I am totally able to tell them. With your staff, you wanna make sure that they really feel confident about the work that they do, that they really understand, very well, what their day to day responsibilities are. 

You want them to understand their materials and be able to tell us how they use them. How do you use, if you're teacher, how do you use these lesson plans, or how do you use your child outcomes data? The best way is to really make sure, to make sure that a staff member is prepared for a review is to make sure that they're very prepared to do their job. I'm going to say it again, just to make sure that you get that connection. 

The best way to make sure that the staff member is prepared to do discussions and provide examples during a review is to make sure during their entire tenure as your staff, that they're prepared to do their job. When you're prepared to do your job, and you understand your job in depth, you can't wait to talk about it. Come in and view me anytime about monitoring. Oh, my gosh! I can talk about it all day, all night, every day, as long as I want to, as I'm really prepared to do the job, and I love it so if you do that for your staff, they won't have any problem talking to us.

Jacqueline De Puy: It's great. I just saw somebody commented in the chat as well that it's important to prepare your staff to know the meaning of the acronyms that might be specific to your State alone, so that the reviewer is familiar with them.

Adia Brown: OK, that's good. That's actually good. I like that.

Jacqueline De Puy: Adia, will the CLASS© review be at the same time as the FA2 or will there be a separate notice for that review?

Adia Brown: There's a separate notice for that review because it doesn't happen, it may happen in the same program year, but it doesn't happen at the same time. You get two notices if you have different types of reviews.

Jacqueline De Puy: Great. Thank you. How often do programs need to do a wage study?

Adia Brown: Sometimes I play stump the FED, and in order for me to answer that question, I literally have to go to the program performance standards. There's an answer there that I'm not gonna be able to find quickly enough to answer that question, but go to program performance standards, and it will tell you how often you need to do a wage study, because I don't know off the top of my head.

Jacqueline De Puy: You mentioned in your, when in your discussion about PDMI, program retention, the concept of program retention. Does that relate to staff, or does it relate to families?

Adia Brown: I think today, when I was talking about retention, I was talking about staff. It's really important for us to really think about retaining our staff, and how we do that.

Jacqueline De Puy: For teacher qualifications, if a program has been granted a 3-year waiver, will that be considered non-compliant?

Adia Brown: No, if you have a waiver we take that waiver into consideration, and as long as your waiver meets the performance standard. You're fine. No, we don't do that for waivers.

Jacqueline De Puy: Thanks. Who is responsible for tracking professional development plans for staff without all their qualifications? Is this normally HR?

Adia Brown: In a lot of programs, it is HR. In some programs it might be the Early Child Care Coordinator because they work with a lot of different teachers. It may be supervisors, but mostly it's HR, but we do recognize that many programs do it in different ways.

Jacqueline De Puy: I don't know if you're following along in the document Adia, but I'm gonna skip the next question because I think it's a repeat. There was a question, is the 2-Year Plan for both Early Head Start and Head Start, or only Head Start?

Adia Brown: The 2-Year Plan?

Jacqueline De Puy: The 2-Year Plan for…

Adia Brown: Oh, the 2-Year Plan for teacher for personal development. Yeah, I might need to phone a friend, or do a line into the chat, and I know that Courtney Rajwani is in the chat somewhere, and she can answer that question. I wanna — I don't wanna make — I think I know the answer, but you know how you know the answer, but you don't wanna get it wrong. I don't wanna get it wrong. Courtney Rajwani, if you hear, can you answer that question in the chat for us?

Actually, somebody may have answered it in the document, and I'm just not looking at it.

Jacqueline De Puy: I can. I can. Yeah…

Adia Brown: Yeah, go, go for Jacqueline, cause I can't see the document anymore. Go ahead. Answer your own question, please.

Jacqueline De Puy: I think, to clarify what you were saying earlier, we're looking for the length staff have been on the Professional development plan for lead Head Start center-based teachers, and Early Head Start center based teachers.

Adia Brown: OK, it's for both. Both teachers, we want to make sure that you have them on a professional development plan, that either you have them on a professional development plan, and they finish up everything in 2 years, or you have a waiver that gives them an additional year. And if that's not the case, what we don't wanna have is a staff member that has been in your program for 5 years, and they just never got the teacher qualifications. That's not what we want. That's not what we want.

Jacqueline De Puy: Adia, could you speak a little bit more about the coaching measure, please.

Adia Brown: About the coaching, the coaching measure? Oh, oh, the measure! The performance measure! Oh, yeah. Coaching! Oh, my gosh, yeah, of course. I love coaching, and you should, too, because coaching is actually — it's actually, one of the most powerful things you could do for your staff. There's lots of regulations and rules that you could look up in the Head Start performance standards. But what I will say to you is that one of the things that you need to do to be effective in coaching is, understand each just like the children, for all the children we individualize. 

We determine what their needs are. We determine where we want them to grow. We determine what kind of progress we want them to make. The same thing happens under professional development and coaching. You want to ensure that you understand what's happening with your staff and how they operate and what they need, and you provide the coaching at the frequency and the level that each staff individually needs. I think that's the most important part about coaching, Jacqueline.

Jacqueline De Puy: Thank you, and I'm happy to hear your enthusiasm about coaching.

Adia Brown: I love coaching. I used to be a demonstration teacher. Are you kidding? That was like my whole job. I wish I could do it again. I would love to like, go in a Head Start programs and coach teachers. It is the best job, because think about it, you get to take teachers from where they are and grow them so they can grow all these little human beings into really smart, better, intelligent people who are going to be successful. What a great job! What a great job coaching is. I love it.

Jacqueline De Puy: Well, you're not allowed to leave me as my boss. You guys stick around for a little bit longer.

Adia Brown: OK, alright, OK. That’s fair. 

Jacqueline De Puy: I did see quite a few questions come in about the Mental Health Consultant and there was a question, what kind of documentation do you need to see from the Mental Health Consultant in terms of classroom support, and a follow up to that is, will child observations and individual child support plans, support this documentation?

Adia Brown: Oh, that's a really interesting question. I think somebody is asking me that question, because for years we were like, did the Mental Health Consult do classroom observations? Like that was like a big thing, like they do it. You know what I mean. I think that's really important. But rather than focus on that, Jacqueline, rather than focus on that. What I'd rather focus on is programs who really work closely with their mental health professional. They know how to design their program so that the mental health professional can meet the needs of the children and family. And that's more important. 

It's more important than, let's say, doing classroom observations. Because maybe that's not what your program actually needs. Maybe your program actually needs for your Mental Health Consultant to do home visits because that's where you need the mental health more often, or maybe your program needs for your Mental Health Consultant to work with your Health and Safety Coordinator, or with your Education Coordinator on health and safety, because your Mental Health Coordinator can see that you have a bunch of stressed out teachers because your workforce shortages. 

Therefore, they wanna work and design a program that actually meets the needs of teachers. They know how to calm down, how to deal with children that have challenging behaviors. Those are the things that we're actually looking for. Rather than focusing on what documentation do I need for classroom observations, I need documentation that shows me that you understand the needs of your program and that you're using your Mental Health Consultant to actually meet those needs. That's a lot different.

Jacqueline De Puy: Thanks, Adia. I see we have four minutes left. We probably have time for maybe two more questions. I see a lot of, I know we already touched on the unannounced reviews, but there seems to be a little bit of anxiety about it. I don't know if there's any calming words that you want to provide our friends here to help with that.

Adia Brown: Yeah, Jacqueline is really hard, because that is not — that's not popular. And there's not a lot that I could say to calm people down about unannounced reviews. It is something that we are statutorily required to do. We stopped doing it for a while because of the pandemic, and we thought look this is, we people need an opportunity to recover. However, based on the pandemic actually was really hard on Head Start programs, especially in the place of health and safety, and based on health and safety, because of the pandemic, our political leadership believes, and so do I, that it was critical that we brought back unannounced reviews so that we can ensure that at any given time all Head Start programs are safe. 

Unannounced reviews really are related to safety. They're really related to our ability to monitor your program to ensure that on any given day you are providing comprehensive services to children and families, and that they are safe. Nobody wants to have an unannounced review. I'm not going to even pretend that I can make that more comfortable for people. No one wants an unannounced review, but the reality of it is that we are statutorily required to do unannounced reviews on Head Start programs. And we have to resume doing that.

Jacqueline De Puy: Thank you. I think we covered all the questions in our document, we might have missed some in the chat, but we'll get a copy of the chat and try to adjust them, address them as soon as possible. Adia, do you have anything else you want to say?

Adia Brown: Well, I always wanna talk, Jacqueline. I love talking, but I know that we only have two more minutes left. We only have two more minutes. One — yes, we did — we went pretty fast, but I hope, this is our first time doing a session like this. Normally, we only do the monitoring kick off. But we know, we know with so many new staff, and with so many people coming back from the pandemic, that it was worth our time, we think, to sit down and go through everything that you need to know about the FY24 protocol, all of the performance areas, all of the things that we're gonna measure. 

I also want you guys to know that this is not your last bite at the apple. You can look at this again. We'll have this up on ECLKC. We also have, every year we put together the Virtual Expo, and in the Virtual Expo we have tip sheets. We have tip forms. We have all different kinds of things that you can try to pull down and that will help you prepare yourself for monitoring review. If there's any last ditch effort that you need, call me, I'm at the office of Head Start, and I will actually hook you up with Jacqueline or anybody on my team, and we can. We can try to help you if you have any additional questions. 

But before you call me, call your regional office, because they are actually gonna be the people that can help you the most. That's all I have to say, Jacqueline, and I hope that everybody has a really fantastic FY24 school year. I'm excited to come out to their programs. I wanna see the kids. I wanna see the staff, and I want us to get into a better position. The pandemic was hard on Head Start. It really was. All the health and safety issues are very — are really bad. They're terrible. But you know what, Head Start is a program that I believe in. As a Head Start, I think Jacqueline believes in it, and I know that all of the Head Start Directors and the people on this call believe in Head Start. 

Let's work in FY24 to show the world how great Head Start really is, and how we do a really fantastic job on providing comprehensive services, and how, even in the face of adversity of work force shortage, we are still the number one option for early child care education in America. Let's do that. Let's make that happen. Let's be the best. Let's do it even in the face of adversity, because I love Head Start, and I know you do, too. I'm gonna come out. I'm gonna see your programs. I wanna see how you are just knocking it out of the park. Everybody on this call. Thank you. Thank you very much, and you have the most wonderful day.

Jacqueline De Puy: Thank you all.