Bringing Head Start programs out of the pen-and-pencil era and into the 21st century

Riverside preschooler Justice Leon loves blowing bubbles. He watches the silvery spheres rise with a look of wonder and joy on his face. It’s all captured in a series of digital photos.

Days later, Justice's teacher, Jonathan Armstead, swiped through the pictures of Justice's bubble-blowing on a tablet device. He explained to Justice's father, Manny Leon, that the child is really good at sharing his Head Start program's single bubble blower with his classmates. Leon grinned proudly. 

Head Start teachers like Armstead, who works at the Casa Blanca Head Start program in Riverside County, meet regularly with parents to share information like this and update them on their children's progress. But this iPad slideshow made the check-in more real, more compelling.

This use of digital devices to capture student information – everything from attendance to teacher observations of student progress – is new to Riverside's 43 Head Start classrooms. Around the country, Head Start programs like these are introducing new ways to use data to inform their work with students and parents.  

It's part of a wider push to improve the quality of the social services program, driven by new federal Head Start standards, released in September. The addition of technology is intended to support the new standards, which include mandates for full-day classes and new curriculum that is responsive to the latest developments in brain science. 

An app to track student progress

Head Start teachers have always been required to take copious notes while working with students.

“In the past the teachers used to [make] observations by sticky notes,” said Patricia Acevedo, a coordinator at the Riverside County Office of Education.

Others might carry notebooks and scribble observations. Those notes were then scanned at a central office and sent back to teachers so they could assess progress.

“We had to wait an extra 10 days, 15 days, to have access to the data,” Acevedo said.

But in October, teachers in Riverside began using a system of digital note-taking to track student progress. The change gives the teachers access to all of the notes on a given student in real time, which allows them to adjust their instruction to help students more quickly, Acevedo said.

On a recent Monday, teacher Armstead subtly typed notes into a tablet to update a student profile as he worked with him on the letter of the week.

Then, Armstead moved on to the dramatic play area, where children were cooking and serving food in a “restaurant.” As he asked them some probing questions, he snapped some pictures.

When Armstead later met Justice Leon’s father, he was able to show him his son in action, while also accessing the data he had just noted on Justice to inform the meeting.

There has been a technology learning curve for some teachers, Acevedo said. However, the real-time note taking has freed up a lot of time for the teachers, which has allowed them to do more lesson planning and review student work.

iPad attendance starts soon

Starting January, Riverside Head Start programs' reliance on technology will be extended to their attendance system. Right now, parents check their children in using a pen-and-paper system. Soon, they'll use a digital kiosk.

“We operate over 3,500 slots in Riverside county, so that is a lot of attendance records,” said Fernando Enriquez, who is spearheading the county's move to an all-iPad system. “There was a great amount of inefficiency in terms of printing paper, collecting paper, scanning it, then having someone transcribe that into the database."

In addition to ease of record-keeping, Enriquez is hoping that the new system will have payoffs for learning. For one thing, administrators will be able to catch students who are chronically absent much more quickly.

The technology has been tested and classrooms will begin taking digital attendance in January. Enriquez looks forward to using the data gathered to work with parents of children who miss too much preschool.

“Often they don’t see that there is an attendance problem,” Enriquez said. But when parents view the absences represented visually, they are often spurred to action.

iPads are great, but who pays?

While officials at Riverside County are embracing the federal call to be more data-driven, there is no new money coming to the county from the Office of Head Start to fund the technology upgrades, Acevedo said. It has to come from the existing budget.

So the digital tablet purchases were added to the county's "wish-list" last year, and when there was a tiny amount of money left over in the annual Head Start budget, officials made the purchases. It cost $55,860 to buy enough tablets for each lead teacher and fund the application and training costs. 

Now county officials want to buy more so that each assistant teacher can also have a device and help with the progress reports as they too work directly with the children. That's another $48,000 on this year's wish-list, Acevedo said, which means an extra iPad per classroom won't be showing up until next school year – and that's only if there is money left at the end of the school year.

"I'm very optimistic that we will be able to have a second iPad in the classroom, so we're crossing our fingers that it can still happen," Acevedo said. "The teachers are very excited so I'm hoping that it does happen for them."