Teacher Resilience Project Cares for Early Caregivers
In a livelihood devoted to the care and development of society’s youngest members, Early Care and Education (ECE) professionals spend countless hours attending to the needs of young children. These educators are the workforce behind the workforce – across Western North Carolina and the U.S – ensuring that parents and the adults in children’s lives can find safe, quality places for their children to go and learn when they go to work.
Yet too often, ECE professionals’ needs are overlooked, which affects the longevity of their careers and contributes to a persistent exodus from the profession. Buncombe County nonprofit care provider Verner Center for Early Learning is working to change that and turn the tide on a concerning trend that’s impacting families and businesses statewide.
According to the Chamber of Commerce, North Carolina loses an estimated $5.65 billion in economic activity each year due to childcare availability. Data shows a significant spike among teachers at childcare centers in the state who are leaving their jobs – up from 21% in 2019 to 39% in 2023. And, more than one in five teachers surveyed plan to leave the field in the next three years.
The stakes are high for working families and the economy. That’s why Verner is exploring new ways to strengthen workforce retention rates within their own organization and beyond.
“Our hypothesis was, if we could support teachers’ mental health by providing therapy, would we be able to better retain our teachers? And would they be able to serve children in a different way if they had these supports?” asked Laura Martin, Verner’s VP of clinical services. “We’d been thinking about teacher mental health, and we had different systems in place, but the idea of doing therapy with teachers was newer,” she reflected. “We did not have a way to do it without funding. Dogwood helped us do that.”
Charting the Course
Verner is one of 16 ECE organizations in Western North Carolina participating in a grantee cohort launched in 2022 by Dogwood Health Trust. To date, Dogwood has invested more than $23 million into ECE as a strategic priority, with $12.6 million devoted specifically to developing solutions that strengthen the region’s “workforce behind the workforce;” expand access to quality childcare programs; and improve working conditions within the industry.
“The workforce depends on families having childcare. Supply is not even close to meeting demand, and the childcare industry exists in a state of market failure,” explained Kaitlyn Guyer, Verner’s VP of grants and continuous improvement. “There’s high turnover. You can’t charge families enough money to cover the costs of providing the service because people can’t afford to pay.”
Verner is the only Early Head Start provider in Buncombe County, serving up to 200 children daily through programs such as Early Head Start, tuition-based childcare and NC Pre-K. Fully staffed, the organization employs as many as 86 professionals including 40 ECE teachers and four community-based educators.
Through their work, Verner’s leaders made note of a worrisome occurrence. “We noticed about 15 years ago that a lot of early educators in Buncombe County were struggling with mental health concerns,” remarked Martin, who was collecting and analyzing teacher scores from the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) questionnaire at the time. “Teachers were reporting that they were not well.”
With support from Dogwood, Martin and her team created the Teacher Resiliency Project, offering free individual and group therapy to ECE professionals on the clock in addition to real-time touchpoints in the classroom. To implement the project, in addition to investing in therapeutic clinicians, Verner invested in supplementing staff numbers to maintain required childcare ratios when teachers left for therapy sessions. This was accomplished by bringing in master’s degree level social work interns trained to serve in classrooms.
Retention through Reflection
Early signs show that these efforts are paying off, Martin said. “After participating in group therapy with the Teacher Resiliency Project for 10 months, teachers reported more overall well-being,” she noted. Some even extended their commitments to their career at a point in time when every teacher counts. Martin shared that two ECE staff at the beginning of the cohort were planning to exit the field within four years. “By the end of their 10 months, those same participants indicated plans to stay in the field for four or more years,” she said.
“Beyond the 10 months they’re in this program, they leave with skills that support their mental health and help them be more resilient in a field where they’re constantly pouring from their own cup into the cups of children and families,” explained Kaitlyn Guyer.
Guyer confirms that partnering with funders like Dogwood opens an important opportunity to think outside of the box and try out promising practices for future scalability.
“One of the great things about this opportunity is that there’s more flexibility in how you design the program,” she said. “You can do what you think is necessary and appropriate for clinical support. Now we’re asking, ‘what is the braided funding strategy that will allow us the flexibility to build and implement a program that is actually supportive of the teachers’ mental health?’”
As Verner explores the impact of the Teacher Resiliency Project, their team is looking into ways to expand their model and make mental health support more accessible for more ECE teachers. They’re creating a guide to help other organizations replicate their approach. Sustainability is also top-of-mind for the future, which may one day include exploring billing insurance, a complicated, burdensome process that will require appropriate infrastructure.
“We’ve learned that it matters to have an organizational culture at work where mental health is valued,” Martin stressed. “ECE teachers deserve time outside of the classroom to reflect on their practice and how their histories impact their work.”
