Community workgroup seeks to build mentorship program for child care workers

Dec. 21—TRAVERSE CITY — For Sarah Morrow, the transition to a Great Start Readiness Program classroom was overwhelming.

Before her current position at the Northwest Michigan Community Action Agency's blended Head Start and GSRP preschool at Chums Plaza, Morrow worked at a tuition-based preschool program.

The change meant she had more expectations and new challenges, but she also had mentors who supported her and helped her access resources that got her through that time, she said.

So, when she was recently asked to mentor another GSRP teacher, she happily accepted.

"One of the most validating parts (of the job) is making connections with children and people — the families that we work with, the team that we have," Morrow said. "To build those relationships is really powerful. It's powerful for the mentee, but it also can be for the mentor, too."

As part of the effort to strengthen the child care workforce in Northwest Michigan, a group of representatives from multiple child care organizations in the region are looking to develop a framework for mentorship that can be standardized across the region.

The workgroup formed through Child Caring Now, an initiative of the Great Start Collaborative of Traverse Bay. It includes representatives from Northwest Education Services, Northwest Michigan Community Action Agency, Great Start to Quality, United Way of Northwest Michigan, the local Bureau of Children and Adult Licensing, a Munson Healthcare provider and local private child care providers.

"I just feel like people leave the industry or leave the profession largely due to a lack of confidence," said Dianna Medendorp, an education coach with NMCAA and a member of the workgroup.

Medendorp said she had mentors herself when she started out in the child care industry, and she even has a mentor now, helping her navigate her new role as an education coach. In her experience, mentorship has been educational and helped her gain more confidence.

Organizations in the region, such as North Ed, Great Start to Quality and Head Start, have been implementing their own mentorship or apprenticeship programs, but the goal of the workgroup is to develop a standardized mentorship program across the region's child care industry to give more teachers who are new to the field the opportunity to connect with a mentor.

The hope is that the mentorship program would reduce turnover and bolster the number of providers and employees in child care in the region by providing help to new providers navigating the complexity of licensing and regulations and new teachers in need of a safe and knowledgeable person to ask questions or vent to about the struggles of the industry.

"By creating a strong mentor-mentee partnership, the hope would be that they have a person to turn to and that would then decrease burnout (and) increase time that they're staying in the field and sustaining early childhood programs," said Tracy Spincich, Northwest Education's birth-to-five early childhood coordinator and a member of the workgroup.

But the biggest obstacle the workgroup is facing right now is a lack of interest from potential mentees and mentors, Spincich said.

That lack of interest in being a mentor is most likely linked to the fact that child care is a busy field and most people don't want to take on any more work, Spincich and Medendorp said. Others may be hesitant to seek a mentor because they fear criticism from a more seasoned teacher.

Jessie Kieng, the Quality Improvement Coach with the Great Start to Quality Northwest Resource Center, who also is a part of the workgroup, said she knows a small group of "extremely knowledgeable" home-based child care providers in the region who want to help others start up and run their own home daycares, but she is struggling to find people willing to be their mentees.

Opening a home-based program can be daunting and expensive, and many people may be deterred by the lack of sick days, paid time off, retirement funds and other perks that come with other jobs.

But Kieng said she thinks that encouraging more people, especially new parents, to open at-home daycares could be a great way of addressing the child care shortage in the area — and mentorship would be a part of that.

The first few years in the classroom also can be very difficult. Samanatha Wagner, a GSRP teacher at Birch Street Elementary School in Kalkaska, said she knows this from personal experience.

After three years of teaching kindergarten in a public school setting, she took a year off from teaching entirely because of the emotional toll.

"All the classes and courses and certifications you take, prepare you — but not quite — for the social-emotional aspect of teaching or childcare," Wagner said. "You walk into it and you're with these little babes all day long, really assisting ... some of their earliest development and that's taxing."

Wagner has been a mentor to other GSRP teachers for four years. She said she sees mentorship as a great way for younger teachers to build relationships with fellow teachers, get support and talk to someone who can relate to their struggles.

"If I could help even just one more person out there tap into all the potential they have when they're caring for these kids, I think it's so worth it," Wagner said.

For now, the workgroup is planning to create more awareness of their efforts and buy-in from more local people in the industry. There also are plans to create a catalog of mentors with their varying areas of expertise to make pairing mentors and mentees easier and more effective, Spincich said.

They also are hoping to secure more funding to support the extra work being done by mentors.

Kieng said she thinks it will be important for the workgroup to establish a pipeline of mentees-to-mentors to make the program sustainable as well.

Spincich said the hope is to pair mentors and mentees by summer 2023 and, by the end of 2023, the process and framework for mentorship across the region would be complete.