El Valor

(En inglés)

Enrollment Forward: El Valor

Nina Duenas: Hello. My name is Nina Duenas. I am the senior vice president of children's programs at El Valor. It is a program in Chicago, in its southwest suburbs. We service about 2,000 children. I have been in the field for about 27 years, and El Valor has been in existence close to 50 years now.

Lucero Robles: Hi. My name is Lucy Robles. I'm the data and communications manager with El Valor. I've been with the agency for 7 years now.

Nina: We wanted to talk a little bit today about how our onboarding and how we hire staff. We wanted to talk a little bit about how we are building our own in this arena of shortages of staff and trying to find the adequate and qualified staff for our children and families. Currently, we have about 20% of our staff that is a former or current Head Start parent. Because we work very closely in parent engagement to families, we're always looking for those families or those parents who regularly volunteer, who show some interest, and who as part of their goals have talked about wanting to continue school or are interested in being part of our agency as well.

That's kind of how we recruit our families and our parents who then will go on to be our staff. We have a few programs and a few situations in which parents can either join a CDA class for 8 weeks. We have helped them get their binder together, their portfolio, their professional portfolio and prepare them for that so that then they can go on and take their exam in hopes they will get their CDA. We also have good partnerships with the local universities in various capacities, whether they come and teach right on site at one of our four locations.

Recently, we also worked with one local university and wrote a grant together with them for a master's program for some of our teachers, which was granted. And this last year, we had 19 teachers graduate with a master's degree. We're very proud of that as well. And we're always looking for opportunities where our parents and our staff can continue their education with the least amount of debt so that they in turn come and give us the quality of teaching and participation with families that we'd like to see.

We also have some partnerships with the local colleges and universities on taking on interns. And our interns, we like to bring them on and say yes. Many of us in the leadership teams supervise these interns because sometimes that's the way we get to see the quality of the work that they provide. And most of our interns – I would say nine out of 10 – get hired to be part of our team as well, so that is also a gateway to recruit some of our staff. Lucy, would you like to add anything to that?

Lucero: No, Miss Nina. I think you covered everything. Now, I would really like to talk about staff retention. And I am going to cover – as the colleges say, in the brain, seven is a magic number – I will go over seven concepts that we implement, and I hope that are useful recommendations for you. First, at El Valor, staff well-being is our priority. And we encourage our staff to receive emotional support really by asking ourselves, how can we ask staff to support parents if we don't support them? We found it crucial to incorporate mindfulness sessions during the week led by our mental health team. And these groups are about 10-to-15-minute guided meditation breaks for staff to unwind from the day-to-day work. But emotional support is not limited to the mindfulness sessions. Staff are able to schedule one-on-one consultations with the mental health team whenever they feel the need for.

And number two, to further motivate staff, we implement employee of the month. I encourage you to consider implementing recognition systems for your staff and really stick to these. Be consistent. The third point I want to cover is the ongoing professional development. Focus on skills training, retraining, and cross-functional training. The skills training is focused on job-related knowledge such as for new hires or correcting performance gaps. The retraining is for the maintenance and updating of staff knowledge. And the cross-functional training helps all of our staff learn other components and perform in a variety of capacities. And it really speaks to all departments tied to the hip, so no silos. In the end, the cross-functional training enables all of our staff to advancement opportunities within the agency and growing within the agency.

Our point number four is budgeting wisely to offer tuition reimbursement. Sit down with your fiscal department and have those tough conversations around budgets to include that into your budgeting expenditures. Number five, be flexible. Have the flexibility as staff continue their education path and complete internships. Adjust the schedules if they need any schedule adjustments as long as you're meeting your program needs. And even consider providing internship opportunities within the agency. That will help you retain your staff.

Number six, we encourage teachers to own their classroom. We do not provide them with a premade blueprint on how to organize their room, and we don't tell them how to decorate their classroom either. They create their own space to the needs of their children and feeling free to express themselves through their classrooms, and the same applies for staff who are bound to office space.

And then lastly, we ensure that we are also being culturally responsive with our staff too, not just with our families. And although culturally responsiveness grants a whole other conversation, one of the things that I can say today is that it's really important for you to create safe spaces where staff can show up and feel that they have the equal power to be themselves. Did I miss anything else, Miss Nina?

Lucero: No, Miss Lucy, but I did think of a few things that I did not talk about when we were talking about recruiting parents to be our staff members. Other programs that we offer is like the food and sanitation manager certification that also leads parents to work for us. Some of them have ended up being cooks in our kitchens or even health aides.

I know there was a recent webinar where we talked about that, and there was some questions about the health aide and what the health aide does. We do have a structure where we have a health supervisor that supports the health component and works together with the other components to make sure that we're holistically covering all of the needs of children and families.

That health aide is the person ... It's an entry-level position for parents specifically. And what that position entails is, they run and check temperatures. If a child is not feeling well, they might be the person who calls the parent and say, "Jenny is not feeling well." They are responsible for stocking first aid kits. They are responsible for supporting the kitchen as well, their orders and things of that sort. And they also help us with data entry health information into our data systems. I know that was a question that had come up. I hope that answers the question.

The other information that ... Any other trainings that we hear about with other agencies or other organizations that we have partnerships with like resume writing, how to go interview, things of that sort, we're always looking for. And we are always referring our families to that. Again, I think it goes also going back to their goal setting for themselves as well and making sure that we facilitate that as best we can.

Lucero: We hope this is helpful. If you have any questions or further comments, please feel free to reach back to us.

Nina: Thank you.