Monroe Smart Start
Supporting the Early Childhood Education Workforce
Launching a Qualified Substitute Pilot
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Monroe Smart Start found itself leading an unprecedented countywide effort to assist major employers that were struggling to find child care for their essential workers. Monroe Smart Start, a leadership initiative of the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County, stepped in to convene stakeholders and identify short-term solutions.
“That was a whole new world. The need for child care exploded and has not really ever calmed down,” said Jennifer Myers, Monroe Smart Start director. “The great thing about our community is the connectivity to the early childhood sector as a whole. When COVID hit, we had pathways that had already been established so we could step in and help employers and families find creative child care solutions.”
Fortunately, as the need for child care ramped up in Monroe County, so did new funding opportunities. Monroe Smart Start was well-positioned to leverage additional funding to pilot initiatives and bring long-envisioned programs and services to life. Using a shared services alliance model to support members, Monroe Smart Start is now focused on critical areas including workforce development and regional coalition building.
Workforce Development via a Qualified Substitute Pool
Monroe Smart Start had done significant work researching and strategizing about a shared services model when it received a Stronger Together grant from Early Learning Indiana in 2021. One need identified was the creation of a substitute teacher pool to support the early childhood education workforce in filling temporary positions.
Child care providers must fill seats to succeed, but they also need access to a steady pipeline of credentialed, high-quality teachers. That challenge is compounded when staffing needs are temporary. Monroe Smart Start’s innovative substitute service, Smart Start Child Care, offers a solution: a user-friendly, accessible online platform that connects qualified Early Learning Substitute Educators (ELSEs) to temporary positions in local child care programs.
Monroe Smart Start serves as a coordinating agency, allowing child care programs to hire directly while Monroe Smart Start helps prepare ELSEs for the workforce by funding background checks, first aid and CPR certifications and creating a list of preferred providers for required drug screens and physical exams. Monroe Smart Start also helps guide the ELSEs through required professional development and provides a stipend after the first successful placement.
“We are their champion, we are their supporter, we are their regular check-in. We help the new educators complete all the steps to prepare for the workforce successfully,” said Myers.
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It was important that paperwork be easily accessible within an automated system so that child care providers and teachers weren’t shuffling paper back and forth. “We had learned a lot from other states that rolled out this model and knew that one barrier was the fingerprinting and background check process. We needed to find a way for that information to be shared and to travel with the individual no matter where they wanted to sub,” Myers said. She points to a strong partnership with the Indiana Office of Early Childhood and Out-of-School Learning as instrumental in removing this barrier by utilizing the I-LEAD system to ensure licensing information for the substitute teachers is readily available.
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The substitute pool launched with one educator and 14 licensed programs participating; now three years in, the pool has 27 licensed educators and has switched focus to recruiting programs into the pool since there are more teachers than open positions, “a good problem to have,” Myers laughed. Through the substitute pool, more than $43,000 in wages have stayed in the community and child care programs have avoided the need to cut hours or close classrooms because of short-term staffing challenges.
Monroe Smart Start has expanded into phase two of the pilot, working alongside Geminus and Building Blocks to envision and launch a substitute pool program in other parts of Indiana. “We’re providing consulting along the way, sharing resources, materials and really being a thought partner to help their success,” Myers said.
