MEMORANDUM TO: Instructor   FROM: Student   DATE: date   RE: Organization   Please find the information you requested regarding “Children’s Coalition: Early Head Start Program” below

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MEMORANDUM

TO: Instructor

 

FROM: Student

 

DATE: date

 

RE: Organization

 

Please find the information you requested regarding “Children’s Coalition: Early Head Start Program” below. Please advise if further information is needed.

 

Antionette Hoard

Antionette Hoard has been involved Early Head Start Program since the grant was granted to the parish in 2002. She has worked her way up and is now the Early Head Start Director (promoted in 2012) and also became the Chief Operating Officer under the Children’s Coalition Director, Lyn Clark, in July. With her job as Early Head Start Director, she is doing many tasks at once. She oversees the program and is the contact point person with grant funds and regulations. Much of her job as Director focuses on compliance and training those under her to do their jobs properly. Mrs. Hoard is also a certified backup substitute teacher for the EHS program when needed. She says she is rarely sitting in her office and that a lot of the work she does is in the field. Her hands-on approach involves frequenting the five centers and only staying in her office to complete paperwork and other required inside work. The inside work includes official reports to the granting entities that must show the collected data and the details of expenditures from each year.

As Chief Operating Officer, Mrs. Hoard handles any other stand-alone grant or funding that does not fall under a specific program that has already been created. This also correlates if there is a problem of there not being a specific point person who could be in charge of or manage those accounts. Mrs. Clark will pass on anything that falls under that criteria to Mrs. Hoard if she elects not to handle those accounts herself. For all of those stand-alone grants, she serves as the approver of funds and activities and monitors to ensure the regulations set in place by the granter are being followed.

 

Children’s Coalition

The Children’s Coalition is a membership driven 501(3) non-profit organization that prides itself on being an agency that is "creating communities where children and their families thrive." Their events and outreach cling to this motto. They are essentially serving each child by helping their parents or guardians by being a "one-stop shop" organization. The Coalition is a multifaceted entity that has programs that aid with early childhood development to healthy living that aim to educate. Children of all ages are helped as there programs that stem from infancy to late teens. There are currently nineteen programs in four areas: Early Care and Education, Healthy Living, Parent Education, and Youth Development. In total, these programs aid fourteen parishes in the state. Seven of the programs are funded by the state and three are directly funded from the Federal government. It is not easy to describe the story of the agency and its programs because the agency itself is fluid and everchanging to help meet the needs of the community.

Mrs. Hoard details how she feels that the organization is never truly finished trying to meet the needs of the mission because the community is always in need of something. Their office is located in the heart of downtown Monroe and the Salvation Army is right there. The same people who need their help are the ones located right across the street so the desire to aid them grows stronger every day. With that in mind, any resource or program that could be of use is offered to anyone that truly needs them. Another highlight of this is that if the Children’s Coalition does not have a direct resource that helps them, they will work to find one. Most of the time, they will have a contact of another program or resource on file that could help. A team member of the Children’s Coalition will always work to help whoever needs that assistance in making the initial contact. Since they would never want anyone to fall through the cracks and not receive adequate aid, they continue to do periodic check-ins to ensure that active steps to help them are being taken. This is also a requirement set by the agency.

 

Early Head Start Program

The Early Head Start Program was created in 2002 after the parish received a grant from the federal government. This specific program only serves Ouachita Parish families and other parishes do have grants from the federal government, but Mrs. Hoard is not the overseer for those other programs. The development of the program sprang from an assessment completed by the Children’s Coalition a couple year prior and it showcased that the community needed aid in child development. Mrs. Hoard detailed that the importance of this program as the following: “a child’s readiness for school depends on meeting his/her comprehensive needs. This includes: physical and motor development; language and literacy; social and emotional development; approaches to learning; and cognitive development and that is the focus of the program.” The end goal is to ensure every child is Kindergarten ready when they leave. In addition to what the children in the classroom, their parents are also learning. Through the home-based teaching, Mrs. Hoard’s team is teaching parents to be the teachers as well. A child’s first teacher is his or her parents and everything learned in the classroom must be reaffirmed in the household to help the child develop those long-lasting cognitive learning skills. This is a widely appreciated program for this area and it serves families in five locations around the parish.

Based off of last year’s data from Mrs. Hoard’s Program Improvement Reporting (PIR), the EHS Program had 132 slots for families. Altogether, the number was 186 families because the other 54 either dropped out or transitioned out from the program. This is a great increase from 2014 when the number was at 60 families. Additional spots for children were added in 2016 when the need in our area grew.

This option to reapply before the five year ends is also a possible course of action that arises without much warning. Mrs. Hoard says that the option to readjust their numbers and reapply to request additional funding arose this year, but they chose not to. This is because they did not want to completely overwhelm themselves. A couple of years ago, the licensing for the program moved from the Department of Health and Hospital to the Department of Education. This created a major turnover to occur and also many changes in policy matters and details regarding outcomes needing to be met. In order to create a better footing in order to gain some stability while attempting to still come to terms with the changes, Mrs. Hoard stands by her decision to keep the program as is right now.

 

EHS Funding

The EHS Program runs annually and with the same time frame as schools (August to May). Their funding is awarded every five years and the agency can choose to renew once that five years is up. The money is awarded through a federal grant which means it is federally regulated and that there is no state involvement because of this. The budget for the program also affects the overall target numbers, which the organization determines based on the need for funding. Mrs. Hoard does have a specific Financial Manager that has been appointed to oversee the funding she receives for the EHS Program. They are required to meet face-to-face at least once a year, tend to email about two to three times a week, and only speak on the phone up to three or four times a year.

 

Local Contacts

The proportional amount of work Mrs. Hoard has to do involving her local contacts is quite low. At most, it is on a monthly cycle and at some points, pushed back to quarterly contacts. The frequency of these contacts is second to national because of the number of local programs run in Ouachita Parish. The local contacts Mrs. Hoard have been very cooperative. She has an all-around healthy interpersonal relationship with those contacts since the local contacts required in “having a presence” with their respective contacts to ensure the needs are being made. There is some ease there because all of her local contacts are simply a phone call away and are great with their turnaround time to get their tasks accomplished. Their agency does receive state and federal funding, but about 15% of their budget is through local fundraising efforts accomplished throughout the year.

State Contacts

Mrs. Hoard does contact her state contacts more frequently than any other entity, even though this is due to the high volume of reports she must send their way. Every expense made with state money is invoiced and recorded in great detail for the monthly expense reports. Every financial decision they make must show clear justifications so that the state does not question the invoices because about 35% of their budget comes from them. The state of Louisiana has to approve any changes as well and that means that clear justifications would be required again. Overall, the state contacts Mrs. Hoard has to speak with are relatively cooperative, but it all depends on the grant she is working with them on. She spends about 15% of her work monthly having to use state contacts to discuss details with other state officials and administration.

Each grant she oversees has different point people and she is, at times, a mediator between that state-appointed point person and one of her staff members. That means that every time a staff member or the point person need to contact each other, they must go through Mrs. Hoard. Another example is with the unnamed grant Mrs. Hoard mentioned in the interview. With that grant, she has her contact for the Department of Education but they usually need approval from someone above them if edits are needing to be made. There is a hierarchy or chain of commands that have to be delicately followed to keep their relationship in good terms. This does create some difficulty in cooperation because it takes a great deal of time to hear back from the state which pushes back certain predetermined timelines. Due to this, the frequency of contact is once or twice a month with a handful of emails here and there.

 

National Contact

The national contacts Mrs. Hoard has are some of the most important ones because of the EHS Program. She is in contact with these appointed point people directly about two to three times a year but does contact them fairly frequently through email and the occasional phone call. Her national contacts are cooperative, but the least cooperative of the three. This is because these are the contacts that are the hardest to catch directly. She may email them for a simple question, but may not get a response until a couple of weeks later. The same issue she faces with the state regarding editing approvals, she faces at the national level. The national contact also sets new implementations and regulations that have to be acknowledged by a certain time and that can be a hard process. This is because there is not always enough information initially from them and Mrs. Hoard has to contact them for more.

It is extremely important that Mrs. Hoard has adequate contact with the national level because 50% of the budget just this year alone comes from them. This is consistent funding and the Children’s Coalition as a whole relies heavily on this support for many of their programs. With the EHS Program, Mrs. Hoard has to meet with her appointed Program Manager face-to-face at least once a year. She emails back and forth with this contact once or twice a week and speak on the phone two to three times a year. At this level, her contacts serve to revolve more around regulations. Each grant has different outcomes you are supposed to meet according to what the requirements of the grant are. With the outcomes in the grant and comes the regulations you have to follow or they will lose their funding. With the EHS Program, they have to follow the ACT III. Act III involves the outcomes that must be met, the regulations that have to be followed, deliverables, and ensuring the upkeep of state licensing within the program. This is precisely why Mrs. Hoard has to complete outcome reports on a monthly basis. Desks reviews are also conducted for regulations reviews based on if the grant is quarterly, annually, two times a year, etc. and that depends on the regulations the grantees have set as checkpoints for monitoring purposes.

The state also has a state association for the program called the Louisiana Head Start Association that serves to represent the state for the national government. Every state that has a running EHS Program has one. It houses the state conferences and training sessions to ensure that each program is running in the same cohesive manner across the state. Each one should be the same, no matter where they are located. This allows for the creation of a state board that consists of EHS Program leaders to come together to provide additional support to the programs. They are able to discuss issues or situations that have arose and are then able to work collectively to find solutions.

 

General Observations via Antionette Hoard

For this section, I asked Mrs. Hoard to be honest about any general observations that she has acknowledged through her intergovernmental work. At the national and state level, there is an issue with policies that contradict each other. When I asked how she determines which policy to follow, she simply said, “the policy that is stricter.” This disconnect in policy and implementation at the national level makes creates “sticky situations” that are hard to navigate. There is also a disconnect at the national level about what they want states and agencies to do, but what they can do based off of financial ability. Most of the policies that are implemented are not always followed through because of this and every single time that happens, they must justify why it was not implemented at a 100% rate. Many times Mrs. Hoard can argue rural limitations and the lack of additional resources from the national level when it is needed. At the state level, there is also confusion in how the information is given to the local entities. The rules come from the national level before coming to them and it ends up being a game of telephone. Many pieces of vital information can become lost through this form of communication. Another observation is a perk at the local level because it has gotten to be more hands-on. They are able to make policies as they go and that makes it easier for everyone.