Supporting the Head Start Workforce through Staff Wellness
Starting Small for Big Results
Early childhood educators are at the center of high-quality early education settings, building safe and nurturing environments for young children. Despite their critical role, current conditions in the workforce are often not conducive to supporting successful, lasting careers in this profession. Often, early childhood educators and staff are susceptible to high levels of stress and burnout without many options for health and wellness supports.
Even as the quality of early childhood services has improved over many years, the health and wellness of our early childhood staff has widely been overlooked. To truly create a culture of health in an early childhood environment, educators and staff must also feel supported and valued in their own health and well-being.
That’s why NHSA’s January Year of Whole Health month has been dedicated to supporting the health and well-being of our educators and staff by sharing information, resources, and program highlights to promote Head Start staff wellness.
What did we learn this month?
- Supporting staff wellness benefits children. Prioritizing the health and wellness of early childhood educators and staff can improve the culture of health in Head Start’s high quality settings. By supporting children’s earliest educators, we can influence the health and development outcomes of the children we serve.
- You don’t have to start big! Though funding is often limited in early care and education settings, many Head Start programs have started with simple ideas that have grown to exciting and effective staff wellness initiatives. Supporting the health and wellness of your staff can be something as little as providing more time for lunch, scheduling and incentivizing walks and jogs, sharing nutrition and cooking tips, having stretching breaks in long meetings, or implementing the many other ideas that Head Start programs have sparked all across the nation.
- We can learn from other programs. Just as NHSA shared on this month’s webinar, there are many programs who have started evidence-based staff wellness initiatives that have proved effective in supporting their staff, improving retention, and overall employee satisfaction. As NHSA moves forward to support this work, we will continue this peer-to-peer learning at our conferences and online communities to unify and improve our efforts together.
What did NHSA do in January?
NHSA hosted a webinar Supporting the Head Start Workforce by Promoting Staff Wellness, where we heard from early childhood staff wellness experts Dr. Lily Cosico-Berge, Clinical Child Psychologist and Sr. Associate Vice President of Comprehensive Services and Quality Improvement at the Neighborhood House Association in San Diego, and Dr. Holly Hatton-Bowers, Assistant Professor and Early Childhood Extension Specialist from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
This webinar provided more information and background on the importance of supporting the health and well-being of early childhood professionals and how their well-being can impact the culture of health in Head Start settings. This webinar also shared stories of successful staff wellness initiatives and explored tools and tips for introducing staff wellness initiatives in a variety of settings.
The 2019 Winter Leadership Institute included an interactive and lively session titled, Workforce: Where to From Here, where we heard from early education experts Marica Mitchell, Deputy Executive Director of Early Learning Systems at the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and Ashley LiBetti, Associate Partner at Bellwether Education Partners. This session provided an overview of the latest research regarding today’s Head Start workforce and ideas for successfully supporting and preparing the early education profession as years progress.
Also in January, NHSA posted our first guest blog of the Supporting the Workforce blog series. In this post, Abbie Lieberman, Senior Policy Analyst at New America, broke down the influential report, Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8, which drives much of the early education workforce efforts today. The blog post also describes how Head Start can use its findings as a tool to guide next steps for policy and practice.
What Can You Do?
- Explore NHSA’s Nurturing Staff Wellness Toolkit to learn more about where to begin and who to involve when planning your staff wellness initiative.
- Read through the report: “Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8” by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council
- Learn more about what the Power to the Profession taskforce is doing to develop a unified and prepared early care and education workforce.
- Stay tuned for the next guest blog and more information about NHSA’s workforce initiatives and staff wellness support!
If you have any questions about this topic or any other topic within NHSA’s Year of Whole Health Initiative, please contact Sarah Neil at sneil@nhsa.org.
