The unification of the Education Partnership of the Permian Basin and Educate Midland under one umbrella and the potential expansion of the POWER Bag Initiative were part of the discussion during an Early Childhood Action Network Zoom meeting Wednesday.
The ECAN is a spinoff of the Education Partnership of the Permian Basin and supports other early childhood programs.
A POWER Bag is provided to every mother who gives birth at Medical Center Hospital, Odessa Regional Medical Center and Midland Memorial Hospital. Efforts are being made to expand to Reeves County Hospital in Pecos and Scenic Mountain Medical Center in Big Spring.
Upon discharge from the hospital, medical staff provides mothers with information about the importance of speaking, interacting, and reading to their newborn. New mothers also are provided with a link to the POWER Bag website and other important resources and information, the site said.
The name of the unified organization is still Education Partnership of the Permian Basin and Adrian Vega is its executive director. Mike Mills and Becca Myers, both formerly of Educate Midland, are new staff members. Three board members also are being added.
Vega said this creates a major backbone organization focusing on education from cradle to career and improving education outcomes in the region.
The next immediate steps, Vega said, are to start working on a strategic plan.
“I have had conversations with some individuals who are experts in that area,” Vega said. He added that he will provide more information as that moves forward.
“We are very excited about this next phase and all of you are a part of it,” Vega said.
Mills said it is nice to be under one umbrella together with the Dallas Federal Reserve and Advance Together.
Through a three-year grant, they get funding and technical support. Mills said one of the pieces of that technical support is a Boston-based consultant named Diane Gordon.
“What Diane has been doing with us is to work on building out a logic model and working on what data are we going to track as an early childhood action network that shows that what we’re doing in our community, in our region is actually affecting the numbers we’re looking at because ultimately we’re looking at kindergarten readiness,” Mills said.
Data has shown that 63 to 65 percent of children in the Odessa-Midland area were not kindergarten ready.
“We know that’s a symptom of what’s going on in our community and that’s something that’s happening before our kids even get into our k-12 systems, so Diane is working with Becca and I and Adrian, but also with our chairs from the Early Childhood Action Network. We’ve included each of our chairpeople to be in on these Zoom meetings with Diane. We are really working at distilling what is it that we need to do,” Mills said.
Myers said having Gordon as a third party who is objective is “helping us kind of remove our biases of what we think early childhood means and is in our region.”
“We’re truly having to drill down and define terms. …,” Myers added.
Mills said they are probably “a few meetings away” from having content they can bring back to ECAN and share.
“Then as we look at our work groups what is that going to look like for each of our work groups? What are our goals; how are we going to get there because what we’re learning in this work is there’s so many different causations for why our kids are not kindergarten ready and so it’s looking at all of that globally and then stepping back and saying how do we make that practical and then give us direction,” Mills said.
He said the other piece is to have data they can track so they can tweak or change things.
Midland Memorial also has reached out to ask if the Education Partnership can help them develop a POWER parenting class because they want to start a class that focuses on brain development and the importance of reading, singing and speaking to children.
“We have started a series of meetings … Once that’s built out, we feel it can be duplicated at any of our hospitals, with any educator, or any parenting program that may exist with our nonprofit partners as well,” Mills said.
