Program Restructuring to Increase Compensation

Program Restructuring to Increase Compensation

Gordon Chatham: Hi, my name is Gordon Chatham. I'm the executive director for Shasta Head Start in northern California. We serve 663 Head Start and Early Head Start slots. Coming out of COVID, our agency was facing some personnel crisis as far as finding qualified staff. In January during our planning process, our program looked at our community assessment, our current staffing levels, and we noticed that most of our families, most all of our families, wanted full-day services or longer service hours.

We looked at that, and we looked at our budget, and we ran the numbers as though we would be serving all of our center-based programs for full day. And we noticed that there was a budget savings when we did this. We used those budget savings and applied it to staff wages. We wanted to retain our current staff and to help us in this tight labor market recruit more qualified staff, and it really turned out to be a win-win situation. We started this process, as I said, in January. We submitted our grant application in June with the slot reduction, and then we implemented that slot reduction in September.

When we made our program adjustments from part-day classrooms to full-day classrooms, we were able to eliminate three sets of teaching staff because we took those part-day classes and extended them to full-day, and we had one set of teaching staff. With the savings from eliminating those three teaching teams, we increased wages. We didn't have to eliminate any positions because we were trying to fill positions. We didn't have staff. It worked really well for our staffing. It worked well for our parents. We were able to serve those parents on the full-day wait list.

It's very difficult for families in our area to only have part-day services. There are a lot of working families, so that worked out well. And our staff obviously appreciated the wage increase. I think they also realized that in our process of planning, we always look at families, but we definitely needed to look at staff. We have a great staff, and I think it increased morale considerably knowing that we weren't asking them to do more. We were just trying to compensate them in our current environment that we have.

After COVID ended, we had very low enrollment numbers. It was a good time to make big changes because we didn't impact families, the services to families, and we didn't impact employment or staff. It could be done with very low impact to our current families and staff. And in the end, I think it's a real win for our community and our staff. We serve longer hours. We had families that would wait on our waiting list the whole program year for full-day services. They weren't going to receive them. That wait list is smaller now. I think staff are less stressed. And as I said earlier, we include all of our staff in our planning process. I think they understood how we were coping with our current environment and the tools we were using that were available to us.

And at the time, our tools that we had obviously was looking at our data and our community assessment. But also when we did our budgeting, how are we going to get more resources to retain staff? And that's what it came down to. Because staff need a livable wage, and they all understand that, but our staff, they have a huge desire to serve our community. It was very ... We got a lot of questions from our staff because they're very dedicated, and they want to serve as many families as possible. I think when we went through our planning process, and we explained how we came up with the slot reduction, it was well received.

Well, I think the lesson we learned during this process was it's not the quantity of services that we provide; it's the importance of maintaining the high quality that is expected from a Head Start program and from our agency. And that not only includes services to family, but it also includes the wellness of staff that are delivering those services.