Our 2021 Director’s Conference focused on self-care and resilience in the face of the ongoing pandemic. The hilarious and insightful keynote presentation by national speaker Ron Culberson showed participants how to make their lives, their work, and their relationships less stressful, more fulfilling, and more fun.The conference also focused on living intentionally and with purpose, both for yourself as a person and as a leader for your staff. Day 2 featured the National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching, and Learning (NCECDTL) with Responsive Transitions to focus on School Readiness skills in anticipation of students returning to centers from mostly virtual environments during the 2020-21 program year.
As of March 2020 we were all thrown into uncharted territory which elevated our concern for Head Start children experiencing chronic stress and trauma in their lives. Childhood trauma impacts the success of individuals in our community. The revolutionary Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study and subsequent research teaches us about chronic toxic stress and its burdens. This impacts both physical and mental health. As those who work with and care about children, youth, and adults in our community, it is imperative that we partner with consumers and families to heal. One of the first steps in this solution is assuring a trauma informed foundation for all direct care staff in behavioral health and social services, their system leaders, supervisors, teachers and educators, and all those who care for and about children. In a comprehensive approach, anyone touching the lives of a person who may have been touched by trauma needs to understand the basic principles of the impact of trauma and the hope of building individual and community resilience.
Responding to this need, our 2020 Director’s Conference focused on a trauma-informed course that provided participants with an understanding and skill base in the five following areas:
- Trauma- The Most Basic Public Health Issue
- Trauma- The Impact on the Brain
- Trauma- The Impact on At-Risk Behaviors
- Resilience- Building Individual Resilience into Everyday Action
- Resilience- Building Community Resilience
The 2019 Director’s Conference provided a wide-variety of relevant topics and networking opportunities for our Head Start leaders. Such topics included:
- What New Directors Need to Know about Monitoring the Education and Family Services Components
- Transforming More Than Classrooms: Safe Early Learning Environments
- Building Systems to Support Staff Wellness
- Supporting Highly Mobile Students in Head Start
- What We Do and Why it Matters: language and narrative to use to help tell Head Start success stories to legislators
- Legal Topics for Head Start Directors
- Discussion of the Current Landscape of Early Childhood in Virginia with Virginia Early Childhood Foundation
- Updates from Region 3 Regional Office
Directors enjoyed having a choice of workshops each session time-frame during our 2018 Director’s Conference. Due to this, there were double the sessions provided and many leadership teams split up into different groups in order to cover all of the topics. We were also able to network and debrief after each workshop.
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