Manager: Zora Radosevich & Danielle Gantt

Goal: Boston will become the city with the highest quality early education and care system for all young children - infants, toddlers, preschoolers and kindergartners - in all settings: family child care, private/community-based centers, Head Start/Early Head Start, and school-based early education.

Strategies:

1. Across all early education and care settings, pursue universal accreditation, the nationally agreed-upon determinant of high quality for early education and care.

2. Create a collaboration across the four types of early education and care settings to promote joint planning, foster stability of high-quality programs, and promote alignment in curriculum, standards and assessment as children move from infant and toddler care, to pre-school, to kindergarten.

3. Enhance professional development for early educators to ensure high quality teaching and learning across settings, focusing on curriculum, assessment and best practices to promote early learning and healthy child development.

4. Improve early education and care facilities to ensure safe, stimulating learning environments for all children.

5. Improve compensation to support recruitment and retention of highly-qualified and well prepared early educators.

6. Improve access to early education and care for all children and families by decreasing financial barriers and ensuring adequate supply of services to meet demand at the infant, toddler, pre-school and kindergarten stages.

7. Further analyze for potential application to Boston existing models that provide high quality early education to children while integrating health, social services and high-level family engagement.

Ready Systems

Lead Partner: Boston Medical Center, Children's Hospital Boston, Partners HealthCare

Manager: Alba Cruz-Davis

Goal: Health care, early intervention and other systems that serve young children will succeed in earlier detection and more effective responses to barriers to chil deveopment and school readiness, including earlier detection of family and environmental conditions that can create "toxic stress" in young children.

Strategies:

1. Conduct pilots in pediatric sttings to:
   • expand and coordinate current efforts to achieve universal "welcome newborn" visits (in a location chosen by the new parents);
   • conduct universal screening for physical, behavioral, developmental, and environmental and family risk factors;
   • provide parents with information about child development and parenting; and
   • offer coordination services to ensure that children and families access and benefit from existing services to support children's growth and development.

   Prioritize methods that incorporate infant and early childhood specialists into pediatric settings, including paraprofessionals to support pediatric providers and engage and educate parents.

2. Enhance the various systems of early intervention to expand and align eligibility for services, ensuring smooth transitions between services in the infant, toddler, pre-school and kindergarten stages, and include a greater focus on identifying and responding to social, emotional and behavioral issues.

Ready City

Lead Partner: Office of Mayor Thomas M. Menino and United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley

Manager: Katie Britton

Goal: The many sectors in Boston will work together to ensure children's school readiness becomes and remains a top priority.

Strategies:

1. Track and analyze all existing public and private funding streams for early childhood in Boston, and promote comprehensive evaluation results among public and private funders to ensure long-term sustainability.

2. Create a public-private governance and operational structure to oversee the success of Thrive in 5 and help fuel a broader movement to support Boston's youngest children. This will include:
   • a leadership team/board for oversight, funding alignment and fundraising, and plan accountability, which will include a cross-section of Boston leadership as well as State representation;
   • an Executive Director and 1-2 additional staff housed at United Way;
   • a lead organization for each of the plan's components that will convene (and provide staff for) a diverse set of "implementation partners" who will refine and implement each strategy;
   • a continued DART (Data and Research Team) to serve all the partnerships and report on the indicators of success; and
   • a parent advisory group.

3. Align the work of City departments that serve families with young children to collaborate with one another and to support the goals and strategies of this plan. Coordinate all programming and initiatives of Thrive in 5 with existing neighborhood based work.

4. Develop citywide campaigns to help the general public understand the importance of early childhood and concrete roles for various people, organizations and sectors to support young children's school readiness.

5. Strengthen linkages with efforts to address broader community needs that impact the stability of families: transportation, housing, safety, adult education, employment, substance abuse and economic security.

Children Ready for Sustained School Success

Lead Partner: Boston Public Schools and a higher education institution (to be determined)

Manager: Ophelia Navarro & Katie Britton

Goal: Thrive in 5 will track and report on its success in ensuring universal school readiness.

Strategies:

1. Choose and implement within Boston Public Schools (BPS) kindergarten classrooms a comprehensive, age-appropriate assessment of children's readiness upon school entry. Align the chosen assessment with early education and care assessments, and with other current and new BPS K-12 assessments, ensuring all BPS assessments provide information to teachers, to parents, to the school system and city as a whole. Annually aggregate and report school readiness results.

2. Create city-wide understanding of Boston's School Readiness Definition and Thrive in 5's goals and strategies among parents, early education and care providers and others working with young children and families.

3. Regularly measure, track and report on Boston's School Readiness Progress Indicators to understand the impact of Thrive in 5.

4. In years 2, 4, 7 and 10 of the plan, hold an early childhood summit to ensure accountability and report on Thrive in 5's progress.