001going to call this work session to order for the Anchorage School Board on October 21st at 4:02 him. Um, we do have in the room member Higgins, member Donley, our superintendent. I see that President Jacobs is online who is not feeling well and did not want to infect the entire school district or the public. So, he's participating from home. And they're on or Okay. Member Wilson and member lessons are online as well. So with that um we do have an agenda in front of us. We are going to change the order and hear from AASB second but lead off with a report on right sizing um to the superintendent. You have a four. >> Thank you Mr. Chair. Um, so I'll hand it off to our team in just a moment. Um, we're joined by
002Jim Anderson, our chief operating officer, and our guests from Thread. We're excited to share more about the childcare initiative that we referenced, but also we'd like to share some more in-depth details as it relates to the the right sizing proposal at large. Uh, Mr. Anderson, >> good evening. Um, we're going to start with uh some discussion uh with Stephanie Bergland. She's the CEO president of KCI. >> Good evening, good afternoon, I guess. Um uh thank you members of the school board and uh leadership at ASD and um and all uh the public. I'm Stephanie Berglin, the CEO of Thread. And if you're not familiar with our organization, we are uh statewide nonprofit um focused on a vision of strengthening access to affordable and highquality child care. So we provide a large menu of services and
003supports to the sector and I am excited to share a little bit of some of those details with you uh this afternoon. But I want to start by um thanking you all for considering how you can strengthen the partnership um including your infrastructure in child care. Child care across the state and in Anchorage um continues to be in crisis. There's a huge gap in the need and demand for child care um with the supply available. Um we were just looking at recent numbers and in Anchorage alone there's a gap of over 8,000 children who don't have access to child care that they need it. That means all of their adults in the household are working and don't have access to quality child care during the day. So thank you for considering um how there there
004can be uh options for partnership with the school district. um colllocating child care with other sectors and industries is a trend that's we're seeing um grow across the country uh where there's partnership for collocation of child care in senior centers, government buildings and school districts like you're considering. So I want to acknowledge your effort and the research that you've done so far and u commend you for exploring this. Um as I described, Thread is a private nonprofit working across the state. We are primarily a social service direct service organization and I gave you all our brochure which is a helpful frame of our services. We provide uh services to families to early educators to early childhood education programs and also businesses and community. And this afternoon, I just wanted to highlight some of the specific
005services that we provide to early educators and to early childhood education programs since that's an area specifically that you're focused on and looking at. When I say early childhood education programs, Thread is a hub of supports and resources for all early childhood education programs. So that includes child care, Head Start, and Early Head Start. It includes our prek programs including in the in the ASD and other school districts across the state and we are providing services and supports for our tribal and military trial child care programs as well. So we offer um like I said a large menu of services and wanted to highlight a few of those for you today. for early educators. Thread is the largest um provider of training and professional development supports and services for our early educators in the state.
006We provide um free training and access to individualized supports to help our early educators through their professional development um trajectory. um you're the perfect audience to know that the number one indicator in a classroom of quality is the teacher and that's no different in early childhood. So thread works closely to offer targeted training and targeted technical assistance to our individual early childhood teachers across the state. So we do that through training. We do that through technical assistance and con consultation. Um teachers can contact us to ask about individual classroom support. We're often helping with teacher modeling in the classrooms. We're helping with maybe room arrangement or transitions. Um, a large conversation has been more children showing up to child care with challenging behaviors and needing additional support. So, we're offering that technical assistance to teachers
007to help them feel more competent and confident in the classroom to um to support their professional development. We also house and manage um our our larger system for early education development that's called SED is also in uh one of the flyers I provided for you. And SED offers really a pathway for individuals to advance their professional development. What's great about SED is we also often have financial resources available to teachers. So that helps offset their higher education costs. we can give them um pathways for scholarships and uh sponsor some of their access to training that we don't provide. And to programs um since you're considering um partnering with childare programs, I wanted to share that for licensed child care across the state, we offer our largest menu of services right now. Um all of our
008training that I mentioned is free and many of our supports and resources for programs are also free of charge at Thread. Our largest area service is uh I mentioned that technical assistance for early education, but we also have targeted initiatives that we are um offering annually on a short-term basis to help programs with their quality improvement. So based on maybe a program or classroom's goals, we're helping them with targeted training, technical assistance, and then connect that to financial support. Right now, uh, we have an exciting, um, entrepreneurship, I guess, opportunity called Start a Business of Caring, and I also brought a brochure for that. Um, the application unfortunately opens is only open until next week. Um, but when we have funding available, it's a line of business. We intend to keep growing and expanding at
009Thad. I mentioned at the very beginning of my remarks that we have a huge access issue for childare across the state. So thread is looking at how we can continue to raise money and resources to help um more entrepreneurs start up child care. This the business of caring initiative is really focused on how we can help people work through um the licensing process and achieve a licensed um child care um status. And also that