Committees

Our executive committee meets quarterly and includes diverse stakeholders (individuals or representing an organization) from Oakland County who contribute to addressing early childhood outcomes. We are striving to understand what services are needed in our communities, what currently  is available and how we can support families in accessing services. This group helped to craft our strategic plan, guides our work through the plan,  and is the decision making body of the Great Start Collaborative-Oakland.
 

This group chaired by Dawn Koger, OS Early Childhood Consultant and is working on the state guideline that every child is reading proficiently by the end of the third grade. We would like to: provide caregivers the knowledge and resources to increase the quality of language and literacy at home, provide early childhood professionals with developmentally appropriate strategies to increase quality language and literacy instruction, and expand and strengthen community partnerships to focus on improving children's language, literacy, and communication skills. 
 

This group is co-chaired by Tammy Arakelian, Oakland Schools Early Childhood Consultant and Sue Allen, CEO Oakland County Child Care Council (4Cs).  We are working on having effective communication and coordination around a high quality early childhood workforce. We would like to create new recruitment practices, establish a continuum of learning and support and create opportunities for staff to access high quality training. This would be for careers as early childhood educators and child caregivers, as well as home visitors. 
 

This work group is co-chaired by Jennifer Champagne, Early Childhood Consultant from Oakland Schools, and Amy Park-Goeddeke, Infant Mental Health Mentor, Oakland Community Health Network. Our work is to create alignment within early childhood stakeholders around the social and emotional needs of children and families. Our first tasks are to identify baseline social emotional needs of children and families and to identify current social emotional services in Oakland County.

This group is currently facilitated by Veronica Pechumer, Oakland Schools Early Childhood Consultant. We are currently working on pre-kindergarten to kindergarten transition but we will move on to other transitions in early childhood (home visitation to preschool, etc.) Our ideas are to provide early childhood professionals with a variety of strategies to support parent engagement and advocacy and to provide strategies and opportunities for pre-k and kindergarten staff to increase understanding of each grade’s standards and expectations to support collaboration.