Michelle Belanger

April 22, 2014

SEI 514
Reflection #3/ Management Activity
For my management activity I decided to do a self-evaluation of the administration at my place
of employment. I am the assistant director and am the only other administrator besides the director. I
also teach in the classroom half time and work in the office the other half. Over the past year we have
experienced a lot of turnover (5-9 teachers in a 12 month period). Experiencing this turnover made us
really look at our hiring and personnel policies. In doing so we looked at handbooks, places we advertise
for hiring as well as in house attitudes and positions of current staff.
Some of the things that we changed were, moving our floaters from an upstairs/downstairs
position to adding a floater in every room and making each room self-sufficient in planning time, lunch
break and vacation/sick day outage. For example in our toddler room we had 3 teachers with 13
children and now we have 4 teachers with 13 children. We did this in all 5 of our rooms so instead of
hiring for floaters we hired for assistant teachers. We hoped that the added responsibility would make
the position more appealing. We also conducted a salary and benefit survey to some nearby childcare
centers to see where we were for pay and benefits. The results of this survey are being talked about
with the program committee to make recommendations for changes to the whole board. Although we
did find that we were pretty middle of the road for both salary and benefit packages.
The self-evaluation that I did was the Program Administration Guide. This I found to be a very
comprehensive evaluation that probed into many different aspects of the program. Although I found
out that we do most of the things outlined in the assessment, it really got me thinking about what more
we could do and how we can take our current practices to the next level. The primary examples of this
is on standard #5 where we currently offer 8 sick/personal days and to bring it to the next level would
be to offer 12 or more sick/personal days. We also do not offer any type of retirement fund for
employees.
In standards 1, 2 and 4 I can see that we really need more opportunities for feedback from staff
when they are first hired and during supervision and performance appraisals. The guide recommends
using multiple sources (parents, coworkers, observation etc.) and we really do not do that, it is mostly
just the staff member and direct supervisor for performance reviews.
The lowest scores we received were on standard #6 Staffing Patterns and Scheduling (Score of 1)
and standard #8 Risk Management (Score of 2). I wish I had some clarification around this because we
only have 1 staff person in the building from 6:30am-7:30 am most days. This is the first hour we are
open and the number of children that get dropped off at that time is small that we do not have enough
staff to cover 2 people being here that early. Also because of the turnover an administrator (myself or
the director) has been needing to cover lunch breaks a couple times a month, although things are
getting better with coverage as we have added positions. For standard #8 I found it very interesting,
that although we have indoor emergency plans in place we do not practice them. We do fire drills every
month and practice secondary regress with fire drills, however we do not practice indoor emergency
drills.
Another standard where we scored low in was the Internal Communications (Score of 4). This
was mostly around the fact we do not have any training in conflict resolution for staff. We have a
written policy in our staff handbook, but no formal training about it. This is something that I feel would
be very helpful to have training on and will be recommending this to my director.
In standard 18, External Communications (score of 4), I was very intrigued by some of the
suggested practices. We do not have anything formal for families who call; we usually set up a tour or
refer to our website. We do have a binder that holds the applications of people who are on the waiting
list and every so often we will call families to tell them where they are, likewise families can call us with
any updates or changes and we mark that on the application itself. I really like the idea of having a
written guide to train staff in providing information to prospective families who call or visit (7.3). It is
usually the director or myself who provides the tours and takes the calls for prospective families, due to
our location we have a lot of people who walk up to our staff on the playground or while on walks and it
would be nice to have something formal in place so everyone conveys the same message.
Overall I think that this assessment was very helpful in pin pointing areas that can use some
extra attention that will raise the level of quality of the center and make it a more enjoyable and
professional place for staff and families. I also think that this assessment will be useful when meeting
with the program committee to make recommendations around formal policies and things that should
be included in the staff handbook, also ways to expand our family communication as well as align
ourselves with fair and policies and salaries from other centers as well.