North Carolina State Consultant Meeting: Supporting Regional Coordination and Collaboration by Leveraging ESSA

State administrators and regional consultants who support local work on early learning came together at the Rural Center in Raleigh to: 

• Continue to build cross-sector relationships and act as resources to support local collaboration.
• Understand Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and other requirements and opportunities across programs.
• Support coordinated early learning systems at the local level.
• Understand how this local coordination/collaboration work connects with other state initiatives
• Understand each other’s roles and recognize opportunities to collaborate in order to achieve greater results than any one entity can achieve on its own.
• Consider early childhood data for their regions 
• Develop strategies to support local collaboration on early learning.

Attendees represented the following agencies:

• Department of Public Instruction (DPI), including the Office of Early Learning, Federal Program Monitoring, and District and Regional Support
• Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R)
• Division of Child Development and Early Education (DCDEE), including licensing, subsidy, and NC Pre-K
• Head Start
• North Carolina Partnership for Children (Smart Start)

Meeting resources are available under Related Resources (to the right). In addition:

This webpage shares all the resources Head Start, DPI, EducationCounsel and NCECF have created and shared over the last two years in our work to support the local teams, including links to webinars, guidance documents, meeting agendas, regional meeting events, MOU examples, and more. 

For more background on the work , including a timeline, check out our ESSA initiative webpage.