Board of Commissioners - Regular Meeting

All right. We're now live.

All right. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Susan Evans, Wake County Board of Commissioners. I'd like to welcome you to our Education Committee meeting for June 22nd of 2026. And I will officially call this meeting to order. We'll be hearing from a number of different community partners about how we support our residents in lifelong learning and training for success in the workplace and also hearing from some of our nonprofit organizations that work with us in supporting children and youth. Our first item of business today will be to approve the minutes of the Education Committee meeting of March 23rd, 2026. May I have a motion?

I move approval of the minutes.

Thank you, Commissioner Stallings, and I will second that motion. Susan Evans. Anyone opposed to the approval of the minutes? Hearing none, that passes. Okay, our first exciting update today will be about the Launch Wake program. And the Launch Wake program is one of the ways that we support entrepreneurs in our region with the support of folks at Wake Tech Community College and others. So we welcome Jennifer Cornelius today from Wake Tech to talk about where we are with this program. Good afternoon, Jennifer.

Hi, thank you, everyone. Thanks for having me. So my role at Wake Tech is the Associate Dean of Entrepreneurship and Business. And I came on board in October of last year and really hit the ground running with a priority focused on launch, our launch program. So I'm excited to walk you through some of the numbers from last year and just share some information about what we're doing. We can move to the next slide. So LaunchWake County exists because we believe that entrepreneurship is one of the most powerful tools for community transformation. When someone starts a business, they're not just creating income for themselves, they're creating jobs, they're spending locally, and they're building something that their family and the community can be proud of. And our role isn't to do that for them, it's to make sure that there's knowledge, mentorship, and opportunity that they need are actually within their reach. And when small businesses succeed here, Wake County succeeds. And I recently read an article that I'm just going to share a couple of the stats from because it aligned so well with what we're doing with the launch program. And when I say Raleigh, I mean Raleigh proper within the triangle. So Raleigh ranks fourth among the nation's best large metros for small businesses because of strong startup activity. and expanding economy and a growing flexible workspace market. So Raleigh's rise reflects a larger trend across the South where population growth, business migration, and investment and innovation have created a fertile ground for entrepreneurs. And ahead of Raleigh are bigger cities like Miami as number one, Austin, Texas, number two, and then Washington, D.C., number three. So It was very special to see our name among those bigger metropolitan areas ranking fourth for best place to open a small business.

So we can go to the next slide.

And I wanted to start out by sharing a success story. So numbers tell part of the story and we'll get into some specific numbers here in just a minute, but the people behind them are what's telling the real one. So Michael Pulaski came through the launch program in Apex last year, 2025, and he just graduated and I had the opportunity to be at the Apex graduation and listen to his story, which was so timely because I went and updated this presentation to include him because his success story is really quite amazing. Throughout his time at Launch, he grew from three employees to 55 employees just in one year. And he attributed that growth to the information, knowledge, and mentorship that he got through the Launch program. He also expanded out with two sub-businesses. So he really went from a very small startup to a much bigger startup. organization within the 10 months that he was working through the launch program. So we were excited to see that. And that just happens when you are meeting the right people involved and have the best education. And I say the best because I feel like launch is really special for our small businesses because it just gives them something else to think through besides, you marking the checkboxes of the things that you need to do for Secretary of State. So it's thinking beyond that. So I was excited to add this success story into the presentation. And we can move on to the next slide. So as you know, a big part of what we do is education, and that doesn't stop at the curriculum side of Wake Tech. We do have a big focus on training our entrepreneur ecosystem as well. And we do that in several ways, not just through the launch program. So I wanted to include some of the small business center numbers in this presentation as well, because, again, the small business center at Wake Tech is huge. very closely connected to our launch program. So the SBC is working hard to reach as many entrepreneurs as they can. And last year, our small business center, which is led by Todd Lydon, worked 112 different events and supported more than 1400 individuals through workshops and counseling. These workshops and counseling directly support our launch participants as they're being introduced as other resources available to them either before they go through launch or once they complete launch. Some of our launch participants start their journey in the SBC going through this counseling and different workshops and then start into the launch program. And sometimes it's vice versa. They start in launch and they realize that we have other resources to help them and continue to support them through our small business center. So we're able to direct them to the small business center to do different types of workshops that they offer. And there are a few focus areas that we see the biggest need in, and that's financial readiness and funding. Everybody needs money. Marketing. And then back to the basics with how to start a business. And so those are the focus generally for the small business center. And then we can move on to the next slide. So this is where the real numbers are. Last year, we supported nine different municipalities, and we're happy to have welcomed back the town of Holly Springs into the program. And then we also welcomed Morrisville and Zebulon in 2025. And both of those, Zebulon and Morrisville, they started out very strong with their first launch cohort with double digits. And so we thought that was pretty incredible. Last year, we had 137 participants go through and graduate launch and start the strong foundational pieces for business ownership. And of those 137 participants, these are rough numbers, but roughly 80% were women and 78% were minorities. And we have seen a year-over-year increase of 157% in launch, and that's since its inception. So it's been growing every single year. So that's very exciting. We also provided approximately 3,300 hours of training to business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs since the inception of launch almost 10 years ago. Our focus moving into 2026 is to expand in the northern part of the county and engaging more community partners in the Raleigh proper area to offer multiple programs spread out in the city. All right, we can move on to the next slide. So this is a breakdown of all of our partners involved in launch. We cannot do it alone here with our Wake Tech side of entrepreneurship so we have over a thousand alumni in our database who we engage with for alumni events which i'll talk about here shortly we also have roughly 150 volunteer community mentors who support launch in their respective towns and these mentors continue the education and support once the launch program the 10-week program ends then their mentorship begins and generally the mentorship are three to six month long additions after the program. And so, okay, in 2025, we had four paid facilitators who covered all nine municipalities and more than 80 volunteers. And these volunteers make up chambers, rotary clubs, town employees, economic development employees, and those heavily involved in the community. And they're just stepping up to help support the different municipalities, make sure that they have a great program. And I wanted to highlight that we have several municipalities who see so much value in the launch programs that they created paid employees to be program directors to solely support the partnership and building up the program. And they've also started asking for a launch 2.0 program. because they see a need for once they have the basics down, some entrepreneurs need a little bit more support. So they're looking for the next steps. So moving into the 2026 year, we are committed to ensuring that we have strong relationships with all of our stakeholders. And we started having quarterly stakeholder meetings to share best practices and to help support relationship building across municipality borders. We also want to ensure that our participants are receiving the same experience regardless of the municipality that they do business in. And that stakeholder meeting has really been very helpful when you have some smaller communities who are just starting out versus the ones who are getting ready to start their 10th year. And we can go to the next slide. So we received a grant from Wells Fargo to put on a pitch competition and due to some internal turnover in 2025, the pitch was delayed until just recently. We did get to hold this in March. Our team set this up. to feed into the statewide SBC pitch competition. And we included three different categories with one being on the ideation stage. So there's no business formation. So they could practice on us and then apply for that bigger competition coming up. We held a three-week, six-session pitch prep that required each applicant to attend one workshop. And we had 167 people attend at least one workshop. And then of those 167, they submitted a one-minute pitch video application. So we had 167 applicants for this pitch competition. 15 were selected to compete and pitch live. And of those 15, we had nine winners. And of the nine, seven of those were either part of a current launch program or were launch alumni. So we had a really great turnout. And yeah, we gave away $50,000. And that was so exciting just to see how those can how those funds can help progress each of these entrepreneurs. And what was really special for me is that I got to listen to some of these pitchers, if you will, at the very first launch class that they were in at orientation, stand up and pitch their business. Fast forward several weeks, months later, and I'm listening to them in a totally different capacity pitching their business in this competition, and I was blown away. And so it is great. My job is really great because I get to see it from the beginning all the way through. I happen to be a judge at the pitch competition and it was just, it was special. It was a great time. So I'm glad to get to add this into the presentation as well. So we can move on to the next slide. So the community impact. So I'm happy to share some amazing stats that support our community impact. In 2025, we held another Contractors Academy with eight participants, and this focuses on teaching businesses how to secure government contracts. We partner with NC Military Business Center here at Wake Tech to do that Contractors Academy. And as I mentioned, we have provided more than 3,000 hours of training to launch participants, not including the mentoring hours from the community. We also held an alumni event for participants to showcase their businesses at a business expo held on our main campus. And again, I get to add this in, year two of the business expo happened earlier this month. And so we were very excited to see more than 60 participants come and showcase their businesses on the main campus. And so we've been happy to see that grow each year. And we've gotten statistics from our municipalities indicating that our launch businesses have grown by more than 60% in 2025, adding economic development to their towns. Lastly, we had 15 students participate in the entrepreneurship for skilled trades and professionals as well. And as we move into 2026, We are focused on updating the curriculum for the launch program to better align with new business needs, increasing our alumni networking events, and looking for more opportunities to expand launch. Our goal would be to help lead businesses from startup through their growth cycle and provide additional programs that continue to support their growth. And we can move on to the next slide. So I wanted to include this and highlight that once our participants graduate from launch, we make sure there are alumni events that they can tap into. And one of the things that we always say at graduation is that just because you're graduating the launch program doesn't mean our relationship is ending. And we wanna make sure that we let them know that they have different, types of opportunities to still tap into. One of the things that we do, I just mentioned, is that business expo. And that's a huge hit because it allows alumni to set up as vendors on our south campus where the public can walk through and support them through the purchase of products, learning about their business, and then just giving the vendors an opportunity to network as well. In this last year expo, we had about 60 or so alumni participate. Additionally, we set up a monthly virtual networking event that started out with about 30 and have gone up to 50 participants. And this is one power hour of networking in a virtual setting. And we got really good reviews on it. So we're going to keep doing this monthly. We get them into groups of four, give them 12 minutes to network, and then they move into the next breakout room. So they get to meet a lot of different people. And we talked about the pitch competition already, so I won't go over that again. But again, this is a focus for us. So now I want to take you through what's on the horizon. We're looking at the options for a larger graduation with all alumni from each term coming together to graduate on one stage. So we're looking to see if we can put that on. And we're also looking at applying for a grant to support one more pitch competition. And as I mentioned previously, Launch has been so successful that we've had several municipalities ask if we could help support a Launch 2.0 to continue educating entrepreneurs on how to grow and scale their business. business to the next steps so we're looking at some different grant opportunities that would support the curriculum design of launch 2.0 so we have quite a bit on the horizon and it's very exciting to know that the need is there from our entrepreneurs and the support from our minutes of health municipalities that we work with so that just takes us to my last slide But just thank you. Thanks for giving me this additional time to come and present to you today and share what we've done over the last year. I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the launch program can continue to grow. And I'm happy to answer any questions if there are any.

Thank you for that great information and exciting thoughts, comments, questions from commissioners on the call. Mr. Stallings, I saw your mouth moving at one point, but you were on mute. So yeah, now I see your hand. Go ahead.

I'll be quick. This is great. Thank you so much for sharing this. And I'm from Apex and serve Western Wake, so I'm very familiar with the Launch Apex program. Just so innovative and just so many success stories. But I wanted to ask you, I thought you said there's going to be efforts to try to interest the municipalities to the north. Is that some ongoing work or some future work? I was just curious if you could speak to that a little more.

Sure. So one of the things that we like to make sure is that we have very strong partners that we can engage with and rely on. And there was some recent turnover in the chamber who we generally work with in all of our other municipalities up in Wake Forest. And so we were trying to make sure they had plenty of time to get settled. But we started engaging in conversations with the new chamber executive director to make see about partnering with them for the launch program.

Thank you.

Yes. Okay. Commissioner Jackson, I see your hand. Go ahead.

Yes. Oh, my goodness. This is so exciting. Thank you for bringing this information. Kudos to a decade of growth. That's amazing. A lot of excitement going on. Entrepreneurs and small business owners have such a special place in my heart. Kuda, I'm so happy. Holly Springs will be at it next time. That's awesome. It's just so impactful. So successful. And thank you. Thank you so much. I agree. I look forward to continued launch growth and what 2.0 has to offer and 50K. That's awesome.

Yes.

It's a relatively small amount of money, but benefiting so many people. So thank you. Thank you. I don't have any questions. I look forward to some upcoming events where maybe we can join the launch graduation and celebrate all these wonderful, important contributors to our community.

Absolutely. We would love to have you at graduation.

Yes.

Well, thank you. to love this program. And you may have mentioned this earlier, but for context, when did the first launch program begin? I only think it was around 2017, maybe, but...

Yeah. So launch Raleigh and launch Apex are getting ready for their 10th year. So it would be 2016, 2017, something like that. So, um, that is incredible. And I, I mean, I just get to ride the coattails of all of the success that they've already had. And now I'm just trying to build it a little bit, a little bit more, uh, one piece at a time so we can continue, you know, helping all of the entrepreneurs in the, in Wake County.

And I'm very pleased to hear that we have a large number of mentorship volunteers in each of the communities that participate. Are those folks largely solicited by the local chamber, if one exists, or by the town staff, or just curious how we find those mentors?

Yeah, so the mentors are sought out from each municipality. So whomever it is that we're partnered with, either Economic Development, the Chamber, Rotary Club, they go out and seek out the mentors who they have involved in the community. And that has been such a huge success because 150 mentors to... be there for each of our they are one to one with the participants and so they're they set up mentor mentor mentee night so pairings so that way they can it's not just a random pairing they really focus on making sure that they are connected with the right person for their business or their industry or their need so sometimes they have a bigger need for marketing so they make sure that they're partnered with someone who has a background in marketing

That, in my opinion, is really huge because, like I said, the 10-week course for launch or program just to help folks know all the basic things they need to know to get all the paperwork done and the banking done and the things to start a business, but then to have that ongoing mentorship relationship as you're trying to figure it all out and answer questions for folks along the way, that is going to be the key. to these businesses being successful. And I love that. And I love that y'all are going to contemplate a 2.0 program for the same reason, you know, that can take a deeper dive into how they're successful in the long run. So looking forward to how ever we can support you on that. And I am glad to hear that, you know, there's a good partnership going between your small business center And the launch program as well makes perfectly good sense. And I've said this before, but for someone who spent their career doing accounting and sometimes HR work with all sorts of sizes of businesses, but I actually liked small and medium businesses. So many times I worked with startups and entrepreneurs and And they need help in all these realms because they can have a wonderful idea in whatever their technical area of expertise is or their product. They don't know all these other things they often need to know to make it a successful business. It's one thing to be able to, you know, have an idea for a product or something. And so this is just hugely important. valuable and I appreciate all the work and I look forward to you know building the program getting more looks like we do need more to get more folks in Raleigh involved and then of course the northern and northeastern community so if we can help nudge some folks along the way let us know all right I see Vice Chair Jackson's hand again go ahead

Thank you. Your question and response, Commissioner Evans, led me to think, how can you describe the industries that sort of a broad industry breakdown of graduates? Where are we seeing the small business growth? I'm always rooting for childcare businesses and hope there's at least one in the mix. And my last question is, How much do we know about demand? Like, are we denying folks? Yes. I know we're at. OK. Yeah.

So industry wise, gosh, there are coffee shops, massage therapists. There are mental health counselors. There are doctors. Woodworking, the 1347 is an educational piece. You should look up his business. It is a virtual educational piece that they're working towards. They range from so... I mean, is there... a percentage that I could say this percentage is this? No, because there's so many different ones that are going through launch. We've had quite a few, I'm just going to call them under that self-care umbrella. So people who are building out their like a Reiki practice, the massage, the like all the self-care things. And that's been incredible. to see more of those throughout the community. I think there were four of those types of businesses in the Wendell launch this last time alone. So Wendell is really gearing up for their self-care businesses, which is great. And as far as demand goes, yes, we cap our courses at 20 people each. And that's just for the facilitator because there's a lot of work to be done as a facilitator. And so class sizes really matter here. And I think one of the programs had 23, and that was this asterisk, can we squeeze these other people in because they're ready right now? And we were like, well, let's talk to the facilitator, and then yes. And so we do have to turn people away, which is why we want to grow and expand the different cohorts and make sure that they're available. So we cover two different areas. One is fall and one is spring. So half the municipalities go in fall and half the municipalities go in spring. And that's just to make sure that we can cover it with our small staff. And they do have waiting lists. And so if someone doesn't show up to orientation, then they might tap into the waiting list or they have to tell them. You have to apply next year. So there is a big demand for a launch and it's excellent. And I will tell you that where I see the most demand is when our municipalities are really pushing it. And so Apex, I mean, they are very, very strong. They have a very strong program. They've been around for going on 10 years. So a lot of their community members are saying, you should go through launch. You should go through launch. And that word of mouth really picks up their demand.

Awesome. Thank you.

Yes.

Thank you for bringing this great information. Thank you, Jennifer.

Okay. Any other comments, questions regarding the launch program from commissioners? All right. Seeing none. Thank you so much for the update. Always good to hear about these good things happening and, uh, We were in an affordable housing committee meeting earlier this morning, and there's so much intersectionality between helping people find a career path and things that lead to upward mobility and helping us solve the problem of people being able to afford housing in our area. So that's just on my mind, so I wanted to voice it, but I appreciate the work so very much. And thank you for being with us. Okay. Thank you so much. And our next topic is very intertwined with this as well. We welcome Pat Sturtevant, Executive Director of our Capital Area Workforce Development Program, to talk with us a bit about some of the youth programs they have going and give us updates in general. Welcome, Pat.

Thank you and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for this opportunity to give an overview of our youth program, which we refer to as NC Works NextGen. Next slide. So what I'm gonna talk about today, I'm gonna talk a little bit about who we serve, the types of services that we provide, as well as the impact of those services and wrap up with the success story hearing from one of our youth. So when you think about capital area workforce, our primary purpose is really to support economic development through the workforce support and services that we provide to employers as well as job seekers. For our job seekers, our primary goal is to make sure that they have access to the resources and training that they need to be successful for employer opportunities. For our employer opportunities, our primary purpose is to make sure they have access to a qualified pool of talent. So when we look at our youth program, we are really trying to work with youth and young adults so that they can gain the skills and education so that they can be competitive for the opportunities in our region, as well as empower them so that they can overcome some of the barriers and get on a path to a successful career. So let's talk, next slide. Let's talk a little bit about who we serve So for youth and young adults, our customers are ages 14 to 24. We are primarily federally funded, so we are required to serve two major populations. Our out-of-school youth, ages 16 to 24, and our out-of-school youth are those individuals that are not enrolled in secondary or post-secondary school and have some type of barrier to employment, such as Basic skills deficiency, justice involved, high school dropout, and other things that could cause them to not be successful. So that's who our out-of-school youth are. For our in-school youth, they're actually ages 14 to 21. And because of our funding source, only 20% of the youth that we serve can be in school youth. So they're enrolled in middle school or high school. And anybody that we serve with our program through our grant has to be low income and also have one of these barriers such as basic skills deficiency, justice involved, low income, and the list goes on. So that's who we serve. As a board, we actually serve five counties, Wake, Johnston, Lee, Chatham, and Orange counties. However, even though we serve five counties, 75% of the youth that we serve are Wake County residents. And of the 75 percent of youth that we serve 80 percent of them are out of school youth. So the law requires us to serve 75 percent but we generally for the last 10 years 80 percent of the youth we've served are out of school. So those are youth who don't have a high school diploma or basic skills deficient that basically not enrolled in any school. Next slide please. So when we look at the types of services that we provide to our youth and young adults is career planning and assessment. And when I say assessments, that's basic skills assessments as well as career exploration. Because a lot of the young people that come to us, especially the ones that are 18 and 19 years old, haven't really decided or don't know what their career aspirations are. So we have assessments in place to help them sort of guide them into understanding what would be a best fit for a career. We also provide education support in the form of scholarships. So far for the last couple of years, we've seen a lot of interest and provided scholarships for individuals interested in HVAC, dental assistance, CNA, and medical assistance. A few years ago, we had a lot of young people that were interested in truck driving, but the key is that we try to support them where they are and help them get on a path based on their interests. We also provide career readiness training, that's durability skills such as time management, problem resolution. We also provide financial literacy training, resume prep, just all of the things that they may need to support them in getting on a career path. Work-based learning, we actually, 20% of the funding that we use, we use towards work-based learning. That could be in the form of an internship, a work experience, on the job training. Again, 20% based on our grant funding must be spent on work-based learning. which is a good thing because, again, when you think about the individuals that we're serving, a lot of them, this will be their first job. So we use work-based learning two ways. One way is really to just get them to acclimate to being on a job, getting on time, following direction. We also use work-based learning to support if they've been through some occupational skills training to get them some practical experience so that they can start building their resume. Apprenticeships is also one of the work-based learning programs that we support. Right now, through the funding that we receive, 6% of our funding has to go to apprenticeship or pre-apprenticeships. So we've been really spending a lot of time with employers and training providers, encourage them if they don't have an apprenticeship program to partner with us and Apprenticeship NC to develop an apprenticeship program. Supported services, again, supportive services include those things, those wraparound services that help our customers to be successful. So that could be transportation assistance, child care assistance. We can even buy clothes if they, if somebody, CNA, if they have to do their clinicals, we can purchase their uniforms or whatever other support services. materials they need. Job placement. We have the word placement. We don't really place people in jobs, but what we do is we ensure that they're competitive for the job opportunities in the region by providing the occupational skills training, providing the internships, providing supportive services. And once they're in employment, we follow up with them for a year after they've been employed just to make sure they could be successful. to see if we can provide any additional supportive services so that they can stay gainfully employed. Okay, next slide. And as the previous presenter said, we can't we don't do this alone. I mean, it takes a community to really support the individuals that come through our program. So we collaborate with employers, schools and community organizations. As I mentioned earlier, 20 percent of our funding must be used on work based learning. So we work with employers to provide those internships or work experience or on the job training. Some of the key employees that we've worked with over the last couple of years is Carolina Construction, Murphy Natural, ServPro, and many others. Schools, we work with K through 12 as well as the community college for our individuals that's interested in education that we provide scholarships for. Most of them go to the community college, but a lot of them, especially for the CNA programs, attend some of the private schools that are in our area. Community-based organizations are really important. We have a few key community-based organizations that we're working with this year. One of them is the Hope Center. Our board has a major focus on supporting individuals that are aging out of foster care. And so the Hope Center is providing internships and work experiences where individuals age and out of foster care. Another community-based organization that we're working with a lot is the Life Restoration Center. And basically, we refer back and forth. They refer individuals that are just as involved who can take advantage of our programs, and they also train our staff in our centers on peer support. One of the things that's important to us, we want to make sure that if we're working with individuals and they're given their time to go through training or to go through a work experience or go through an internship, is to make sure that when they complete those activities, that there's actually opportunities out there for them. So as a workforce board, every three years we use labor market information to identify what the high growth industries are in our region. And so what we do when we work with our service providers that provide direct services to our customer, we require that they spend the majority of their training dollars, the majority of their work experience dollars on high growth industries because we want to make sure there's a return on investment for the funding as well as for the individuals. So fresh this year, our four key high growth industries are healthcare, construction, advanced manufacturing, and transportation and logistics. Up until this year, the fourth area was IT, but based on labor market information, we changed that to transportation. That doesn't mean we can't support the other industries because we do, but these are the areas where we provide the majority of our funding and our outreach in these industries. to ensure, again, that when the individuals complete training or complete work experience, there's gonna be opportunities. We also have career pathways developed for each of our key industries, except for transportation because it's new, and that's something we will be working on this year. Next slide, please. So let's talk about the impact. So this data that I'm sharing right now is from 2024-25 program year, because that's the full program year since we're still, even though we're wrapping up the end of the program year, a lot of our data, especially employment data, doesn't come through until within the next quarter. So right now we're looking at the individuals that exited our program last year, 73% of them moved into employment. For the ones that moved into employment, their total estimated earnings for those employed is $6,935,411. We served 322 youth total. I should have done the math with 75% of that being Wake County. We provided 65 scholarships and 117 work experiences. And work experiences, again, could be an internship or just a work experience to get them acclimated to being on a job. 97.5% of the individuals that we serve had significant barriers to employment. 309 were low income, 60 had disabilities, and 18 were long-term jobs. unemployed, and some of these cross connect. So basically, even though the largest percentage of who we serve must have barriers to employment, there are some individuals that may have a disability, but they're not low income. So that's why it's not 100%. Next slide, please. And I did want to highlight, we do have a standalone youth center in Wake County at 1800 Tillery Place. And I know a couple of you have probably been to the center to tour it. And I'll have an open invitation. If you ever want to tour the center, just let me know. You'll see in the middle, you see our next NC Works next gen van mobile unit. We're able to go to where youth are. We attend a lot of community events. We go to where youth are. They can enroll in a program and get information wherever the van is. So we're really happy with that. And thank you to Wake County because we were able to purchase that with ARPA funding. So again, just a view of our center in Wake County and not pictured here in the very back of the facility in Wake County, we have an area where we can do hands-on training. So one of our pre-apprenticeship providers actually does his training in our career center. He has for HVAC, he has all the equipment there and you know, which allows the students to touch and feel and not have to go to training outside of the facility. Next slide, please. So the information I shared earlier is about, sorry, is programs that's funded through federal funding. I thought it was important to highlight a program that we've had for the last year that you actually funded through Wake ARPA funding. And it was our youth apprenticeship prep initiatives where we targeted individuals ages 17 to 24 interested in advanced manufacturing and interested in education and work-based learning. We had a total of 30 participants engaged in the program. 100% of those participants got their Biowork credential at Wake Tech. 43% of them were really interested in the program and decided to get additional credentials beyond the Biowork credential. 30% of them had internships. 76% of them moved into employment or secondary education. And the ones that were employed had an average wage of $20 or more. Some of the employers we work with, Merck, Griffles, Agenimoto, which you're going to hear from the youth that was hired by them, Biogen. Again, this is an example of the types of things that we try to do. We know that there are opportunities in biomanufacturing. One of the things that, you know, a lot of times when youth come to our program, they They think about, well, I want to do CNA or I want to be a truck driver. And that's okay because that's the right career for some people. Well, one of the things we're trying to do with our program is expose them to more than what they see. So we hear individuals, some of the young ladies say, my aunts are CNA, my cousins are CNA, so I'm going to be a CNA. So when we do the career assessment and really explain to them, this is what a CNA does. She was like, no, this is not what I want to do. And so really exposing them to more. And that's what happened with this bio farmer program is really exposing them to what's out there and the opportunities to get employment that they can make set family sustaining careers. Next slide, please. And so this is one of the young men that actually went through the bio farmer training at Wake Tech and was able to move into employment. And I thought it was important to show this video because it really brings all of what we do together and really exemplifies why we do what we do. So if somebody can click the video, it's only a few minutes. Lisa, are you going to click? Can you click the video?

Yeah, there you go.

I'm not hearing anything. Can anybody else hear it?

No, I've got to find the volume somewhere.

I'm not hearing it and my volume is up.

Yeah, we might be having another technical issue.

tech glitch because it does play in the materials we received yeah that's unfortunate fortunate i know yeah because basically what he was talking about was um he was again he went through the biopharma program um he was able to do a site after he did before he did his work experience um he was able to do a tour of the location at a jenny moto And what he said was one of the things that impressed him the most was seeing people that looked like him, that was working and understanding what they were doing. And one of the things he said when he went on the tour, they actually showed the basketball court, and that's what sold him on working there. And when he was asked what was the most important part of why he chose basketball, Ajinomoto, he basically said because they show that I can have a career and make money and be able to take care of my family. And so again, this is a culmination of why we do what we do. And I can answer any questions that you have.

Thank you so much, Pat. All right, commissioners on the call questions, comments. Let me get to where I can see everyone. Okay, Commissioner Stallings, I see your hand.

Yes, thanks, Pat. This is just really informative. And I was curious, is there a typical student or person that you work with or just the real variety of stories that you encounter in your program?

It's a real variety. And again, when you think about who qualifies for our program, and who we serve, like I said, 80% of high school dropouts. So in a lot of cases, these are individuals, especially the younger ones that are 18, 19 and 20 years old, they're still living with their parents or living with a grandparent or aunt. And so a lot of them don't have a high school diploma. So one of the first things we do is work with them to get a high school diploma. So I would say the largest group of the out of school individuals that are dropped out of high school and individuals that are justice involved.

And just to follow up, I saw in your information you shared about students maybe that had disabilities or academic deficiencies. I was curious if a number of those in that category, did they possibly have identified disabilities, possibly learning disabilities or learning differences or IEPs or possibly had concerns that weren't diagnosed? I was just curious about that.

Most of the individuals that we work with that have disabilities are in school. So we work with the school system and they actually identify them. And most of the time what we're doing is covering the cost of a work experience for that individual and connecting them to the program so they can find employment once they graduate. So most of the individuals with disabilities are in school and maybe have an IEP or some other form of disability. Okay, thank you.

All right, Vice Chair Jackson, I see your hand. Go ahead.

Yes. Thank you so much, Pat, for bringing this and to your team for just making this happen. When I was just jotting down my notes, I wrote self-sufficiency at the beginning of the conversation, and it's so wonderful after graduation season and going through all, experiencing all of the Wake County graduates to think about these kinds of programs where those that aren't making it through that are have an opportunity for self-sufficiency but I love at the end of the conversation you said family sustaining careers and that is just a term that I want to lift up because that is really what um just what is essential and I love the framing for that so I've been picking up terms so I will be using that one again okay and go ahead oh um you can go I can Were you going to say something?

No, no.

Okay. All right. And so awesome to see ARPA dollars on wheels. Thank you for going to meet them where they are. And thank you for sharing the stories of the assessments and helping folks to see things that they hadn't seen before. So this is just wonderful. We've been... It's such a wonderful day in Wake County and everybody should be tuned in to all of this great work that's happening because this is truly a continuum of lifelong learning and making sure that no one falls into the gaps, all of the preventative opportunities. So thank you so much. No questions, just great appreciation for what you're doing.

And that's why we even though we are required to do 75 percent we focus a lot of energy and go up to 80 percent and sometimes more on out of school youth because there aren't any specific programs targeted for those dropouts and especially after they are 20, 21, 22, 23 years old where the individuals in school have access to more resources. And so that's the reason why we do focus on those out of school youth.

Yes. And before you call someone, I just want to I did have a question and want to just lift up the the ARPA Youth Initiative. I mean, kudos on such successful numbers. I mean, that 30 folks, just 30 young people just really showed up and showed out and are living into their fullness. And that's so awesome. My question is, I'm assuming the ARPA is the funding source. So without that funding source, how are we continuing this very successful youth initiative?

Well, we can continue it. The great thing about ARPA was that we didn't have to worry so much about eligibility. So, you know, you didn't have to be low income and justice involved, low income and pregnant or foster care. So we can continue the services with the funding that we have. It's just that they have to meet some pretty strict eligibility requirements, but we will continue. Okay, great.

Great.

Thank you for those questions, Commissioner Jackson, and I was going to be asking some of the same, assuming the ARPA-funded program has reached its end. And then my question along those lines, Pat, would be, did you experience any instability in your federal funding grants in the last year and a half?

Yeah, well, we just actually got a 13% decrease in funding this year, which equated to right at a million dollars. So we're working around that where we're trying, what we're doing, working with our providers, because keep in mind, my staff, we are more administrators. We contract out the service delivery in our career centers, and we've been working with them so that it's less impact on services provided. They're getting rid of some auxiliary staff. When I say auxiliary staff, the individuals that are not working directly with the students, like some HR techs or performance techs, and just doing what we can do to try to not lessen the number of services that we're providing to individuals. And so far, so good.

Okay, well, I appreciate those efforts that are being made to continue to keep as much focus and effort on the youth, really. And as has been previously acknowledged, this is by you, a group of folks that, you know, there aren't a lot of programs out there for. And it's so important that we get these folks employed. You know, the labor statistics for the future that I've seen are, you know, not positive as all the baby boomers are going to fall off the rolls and, you know, the birth rates are lower. And so it's been kind of mind boggling, not just in youth that have challenges, but there's a large number of folks in that. 16 to 24 year range that are not working for any number of reasons, which is kind of mind blowing to me as someone, you know, who had my first job at 15 years old. But this is so very important that we, you know, have these programs that assist folks with these challenges. And so I'm very appreciative about the work you do. I was very pleased to hear that you're able to, you know, even use some of your funding to assist with childcare, transportation, whatever those supportive needs are. And, and I've also appreciated the focus on looking at what the high growth industries are because that, that is absolutely what we need to do. And I, When you mentioned that IT fell off of that list, I wasn't surprised. I have a 30-something-year-old daughter who was working in the tech industry for about four and a half years who lost her job last year as a result of the supposed effect of AI coming into that environment. And so now IT jobs are not. They're not recommending anyone going into computer programming or any of that at this point. So I'm glad that, you know, y'all recognize that. And I'm glad to see that we've added transportation and logistics to the list and that you'll be working to build that program out. And I'm involved in a lot of the transit and roadway project stuff, being on the Campo board and the Go Triangle board. So if I can... helping anyway, making any connections that would be useful, I offer that. So thank you for all the thoughtfulness that goes into this. But seeing the results is really, really huge. And I just appreciate it so much. Any other thoughts, questions for Pat? Okay. Well, we appreciate you being with us today. We started supporting our adults and now looked at how we can support our young adults. And now we're going to turn our attention a little bit more to the youngest in our community. And we're going to invite a couple of the nonprofits that we support with some county funding to give us an update on their programs and the impacts that they're having on the youngest folks in our community. So it looks like we're going to start with the East Wake Foundation and we welcome Shannon White and Brooke Atkins to give us an update on your programs.

Hello. Hello. Thank you, Commissioner Evans. I was kind of thinking the same thing that you said. It's interesting that we kind of gone backwards. We started with our adults and then we have our the youth development. And now we're going to talk about our preschoolers. So I'm Shannon White. I'm the director. here at East Lake Education Foundation. I have our program director, Brooke, here with me. She's gonna help me out when we get to the meat of our program to tell you all a little bit about that, because she is the brains behind that and does an amazing program for us. But I just wanted to thank you for the opportunity to be here today. We always love sharing what we do with the community and anybody that we can, so this is a wonderful opportunity for us. I am going to give you just a small description, brief description of what we do. So we work with low income underserved families in Eastern Wake County, providing free preschool services. We are a little bit unique because the parent or caregiver does stay on site and participates in the activities with their children, and it allows us to serve the entire family. Next slide, please. So our mission is to provide young children and their families in Eastern Wake County access to quality preschool and a network of educational and developmental resources. And the interesting part about our mission is that this is a fairly new mission for us. In 2022, the commissioners came to us with a project in preparation for our funding request to put together a business plan. And we worked together with our programming committee and our board of directors to kind of envision ways what we should put in this business plan, where are we going, who are we. And in doing that work, we realized that we needed to revise our mission a little bit. We realized that we were doing more work with connecting parents to resources than we were really kind of giving credit to in our mission. So we developed this new mission in 2022 out of some work with the Wake County Commissioner. So I thought you all would appreciate that history on that. Next slide. And I'm sorry, this should say our vision over here. My apologies. But we also came up with a vision statement through that work as well. We did not have one prior to that. And so our vision is just one day that every child will reach school age with a strong foundation ready to succeed. We are currently working with a development consultant through a grant that we received with John Rex Endowment. The grant has since ended, but she has also played a big role in kind of the direction that our organization has been going with the capacity building work that we're doing. And she was a big part of our new mission and vision statement as well. But it's something, like I said, that the funding has ended, but our board has prioritized keeping her on just because they see the importance of the work that we're doing with her and the growth in our organization and the stability of our board through the work that we're doing. Next slide. So a little bit about the history of our organization. We have been around since 1993. We were originally established to support the local schools, but after the founding group consulted with our area principals, they identified a critical need, and that was many of the children in our area were entering school without the foundational skills necessary to succeed. So they accepted that charge and created our mission, and then started supporting that need in our area. We have always had a preschool program, but it's been a 30-minute program. And since 2018, we have moved that to an hour program, and we have added some more, some other curriculums to that so that we can better prepare those children for kindergarten. In 2022, we received some ARPA funding as well that allowed us to expand our program. So one of the things was is that we would say that we supported Eastern Wake County, but with one location and transportation and other things being a barrier for our families, we didn't feel that we were reaching the entire community. So the expansion of our program with those funds allowed us to meet families closer to their homes. So we have a satellite location in Zebulon, and then in 2023, we started a satellite location in Nightdale. And then in 2024, the fall of 2024, we became a Kaleidoscope Play and Learn affiliate. And we are the only KPNL affiliate in Wake County. And that is a evidence-based learning model that paired very nicely with the work that we were already doing, but just allowed us to have some more It allows us to have some outputs through a survey that they provide for our families and just a better learning structure with the parents involved with their children and learning, kind of guiding our practices a little bit better. Next slide. In the last three years, you all have been a wonderful supporter of us, allowing us to keep our program at no cost to our families. So you can see the funding that you have given us over the last three years, and we're so appreciative of that. Next slide. And I'm gonna pass it over to Brooke.

So I'm Brooke. I'm our program director. I've been with the foundation for nine years. And so this is my favorite part because I get to share about all the things that I love doing and how we serve our families. I will start with our family and child enrichment services. And those are for children birth to five and their parents or caregivers. So sometimes it is grandma. Sometimes it is mom. Sometimes it's dad. Sometimes it's an aunt that brings them. And during the time that they are in our program, we are we say we're kind of like a marbles mixed with a drop off preschool. We are play based. We have preschool activities just like you would see in a standard preschool. We do themed activities. We have story time. We do music. We do art. We do science. But the caregiver is with them. And alongside helping the kids with their activities, we're trying to show the parents how easily they can do those types of activities at home. So the idea is that the things that the parents see us do at our program, they can extend at home when they're not in our program. We do a lot of make and take. So parents are making puzzles out of cardboard boxes and the kids get to decorate one half, but the other side is their child's favorite snack. And so we are providing materials every month for them to take home some sort of activity that is cheap, free, that they can find in their house and not have to spend a lot of money on. While parents are here, we also have the opportunity to talk with them about behavior things. My kid is struggling with bedtime and it's taking us two hours to put them down. We are really struggling with when I say it's time to leave someplace, we're having a meltdown. My child's three and they don't know their letters and kind of knowing what milestones there are and what expectations they have. Sometimes we find parents' expectations are a little high, and I'm like, nope, that's normal. That's typical for a child of their age, so don't panic. But because the parents are with them, we have so many opportunities to talk with them about their child and also set an example. So if two children are playing together and they're struggling sharing, the parents will overhear us as the facilitators talk the children through how to use their own words. Instead of give that toy back, we're helping the parents find ways that the child leads that initiation of how to ask for a toy, words that they can use. We are play-based, so our kids spend the majority of their time. They're educational centers. They're learning all kinds of things in our buildings. In our window location, we do have signs that let parents know, why are these things important? Why does it matter that my kid is building in blocks? What are they learning during that? At our community programs, we have things that we post and we put up because those are pop-up classrooms. Um, and, um, our community programs, we go into the, um, currently it's at the Zeppelin Community Center, um, and Crosspoint Community Church in Nightdale both offer us space at no cost. And we set up a classroom for two days and then we take that classroom down. So as Shannon shared, that ARPA money that we received to start that program, we continue to do programming in both of those locations two days a week. Then we, I didn't even look at the slide, but we do offer it in Wendell, Nightdale, and Zebulon. At our Wendell location, we offer our preschool hour. So what that is, it's for children three to five, and we use Wake County School Cutoff so they have two years to participate in that if they don't choose something else. During that time, we go through a second step, which is a social curriculum, handwriting without tears, and a growing with mathematics curriculum. We also begin introducing Letterland and letting parents know that that is something when they get in the elementary schools in Wake County that is what Wake County is currently using we also practice separating from their parent their parent stays on site but they go back to a classroom with a viewing window so they can practice some of our kids have never been away from mom and so we start that process of how do I separate from mom how do I listen to a teacher in a group setting and How do I use glue sticks? How do I use scissors? And all of those kindergarten readiness skills that they need that will help them as they go into kindergarten. And with that, we educate the parents. Parents think they need to know all these academic things. After talking with plenty of elementary school teachers, I reassure them. If they can socially get along with peers, if they can listen to instruction, if they can follow the teacher's lead, the teacher will teach them all those academics. We do start introducing all of that, but it's more helpful if they know, how do I sit at circle time? How do I sit at a desk? How do I use a pencil? And those kinds of things. This past year, we got a grant from Smart Start. We're starting small with our preschool group and their siblings where we started RAR, which is raising a reader. And what that is, is every week our students go home with four books. All of our books currently are bilingual because a large population we serve are Spanish speaking students. as well as English speaking. And so they go home every week with four different books. And then they bring those books back. And then the next time they come in, we send them home with four new books. And the goal of this program is to encourage reading at home. At least 20 minutes a day is what we encourage parents to do because we know that studies have shown reading at home increases their test scores come third grade. In preschool, we do evaluations. We use the curriculum assessments. We do them in the fall before we kind of start our school year. And then we do them again at the end of May when we are closing out our school year. And so we use all of that information from the KPNL assessments, our parent surveys in the fall. and our Raising a Reader surveys to kind of evaluate our program as a whole. What are our parents learning? What are our students gaining? And what are the gaps that we need to fill in? Next slide, please. There was a lot there. Here are some numbers for you guys. So total children that we served in our FACES program was 84 last year. And I know that number doesn't look really high, but they are coming, those 84 kids came twice a week for the most part all year from September to May. And so it's not just about the quantity of students that we're serving, but it's about the consistency in which they're participating. 23 of those students participated in our preschool hour. And then we had 99 parents or caregivers that we serve. So that's 99 parents or caregivers that participated in our program that we had conversations with about milestones, behaviors. We met for 127 days in Wendell, a few less in our community programs, and then our preschool met for 113 days. The total number of visits of children in our doors last year was 2,185 visits. Next slide please. So here we have some data from our programs. As one of the other presenters said, there are a lot of numbers and data that say a lot, but there are so many other things that show growth. So here are just a few things. From our preschool hour assessments, 100% of children showed growth of at least 20% or more in every area that we assessed them in. Some of that's lower because if the child already knew the basic colors, then there wasn't areas of growth per se there because they knew the information we were giving. 93% of our parents said their child has shown growth socially. And with our math assessment, 60% of our children showed growth in at least 19% of the areas. And I think there's like 30 plus areas in that assessment. For our FACES program, we do a fall assessment that we give out. And with that fall assessment, we give it out in December. 95% of our parents reported that their children grew academically and socially. And 100% of the parents felt that they had been helped by our program. um our kpnl survey we just gave out in may um and so that is the assessment that we give at the end of the year and this assessment is mostly about what the parent is gaining as part of our program so it doesn't focus so much on what they feel like their child is learning but what them as a parent um and so two of the the data points we wanted to share was 84 of our parents reported they understand what to expect from their child at different ages. And 84% feel that we have, that they feel supported as a caregiver in the community. Something else that we do that I forgot to mention is we work really hard to connect our families with community resources. So we are early childhood, We are skilled in the early years. However, our families have needs outside of that. So we partner with a nonprofit in Zeglin to give out clothing coupons. Many of our families use Go Wake for transportation. Many have used We partner and share about food distribution, and we've also partnered with Project Enlightenment in Raleigh for any kind of assessments, developmental needs, or extra resources for our parents. We also try as part of our program to, I always say we try to give our kids what they would get in a five-star center. And so that includes field trips and visitors. So we have the police officers come out. We have the firefighters come out. We go and visit the library. We actually go to the fire station. Marbles hosts us for a night. We have readers come in, whether they're from our board, they're from the local towns, they're local authors. we do a couple of different events where we have, we do an egg hunt in the spring where we had 11 partners from Wake County that offer different services out. And then we did an egg hunt for our kids. And so it was a great way to pull all the different community resources that we partner with into one spot. So our families can learn a little bit more about the things that we share with them on a weekly basis. So that's, I always say I feel like there's always more that we do. That is the gist of the things that we do. Next slide.

So we wanted to share this picture with you because this is just from the end of May. We did our full access night with marbles, which is an evening where they allow our families to come in at no cost. And then we provide dinner for our families. And we had 104 people come to this event. So it's Children enrolled in our program with their families. And so I don't know that everybody is in this picture, but we tried to get as many as we could. But I thought it was pretty powerful and pretty neat for you all to see a large majority of these families that we're serving. And again, just like Brooke said, and just like the two other presenters said, we cannot do this alone. As Brooke was stating, we have a lot of other organizations that we work through to connect families with any type of resources that they need outside of what our expertise is. But we definitely could not do this without Wake County and your continued support of this work that we're doing. We invite anybody to come out and visit our facility. We love giving tours and letting you be part of what we do. And if you're ever interested in coming out to read, we would love to have you come out and read to our families too. They love having visitors in and hearing about different community partners that we collaborate with. So just want to invite everybody. If that's something you would love to do, reach out to Brooke or myself and we can get you connected to a date.

Well, thank you so much, Shannon and Brooke. I'll look to my commissioners now to see if there's questions or comments they'd wish to lift up, and I'll be surprised if I don't see Vice Chair Jackson's hand up. knowing how passionate she is in the early childhood space.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all that you're doing. You said when you were done, there's so much more. I know there is so much more that you are doing. to help our youngest learners and early families get off to a great start. That's so awesome. Thank you. Especially knowing how our three school program is continuously maxed out. And, you know, we know the benefit of full day exposure, but so wonderful that preschool hour is there and we see just what one hour is able to do. So thank you for providing that hour and also implementing the Kaleidoscope program. And kudos to those families that are overcoming barriers like transportation or other forces to be able to show up twice a week from September to May. That's awesome. So kudos to those families. I hope they're listening. This is so awesome. And I just want to acknowledge, too, you all said we started with the adults and worked our way back to the youngest, the most vulnerable, the most important. And we also started our Commissioner Day with the most foundational, which is housing and knowing how housing from. birth to adulthood is so essential for helping our neighbors take advantage of these resources and for us to be successful in partnering with them. So, you know, it's just wonderful that transportation is available for families that can make it. So just thank you. I don't have any questions other than like we need them in every corner of the county.

And Commissioner Jackson, you mentioned the three school and they are ones we work with them and NC Pre-K for families that don't get into one of their programs. They share their lists with us. And we have had families that maybe they were looking for something full time and couldn't get that. And then we have some families who their situation changes and they need full time or now their child is four and they're ready for their child to go to a four day program. And so we partner with them as well in referring families to their services. So it's a great collaboration where we're filling in gaps for one another, depending on the family situation.

Yes, this is so awesome. Well, I will look forward to learning more about the program. And, you know, fortunately, in North Carolina, there is a program called Try Share, where in some cases, those families who don't qualify for three school may have an employer that wants to provide that subsidized care and employee benefit, actually. So this is just so wonderful. So wonderful. Thank you. I did have a quick question, but I lost it.

We can come back to you. Go ahead, Commissioner Stallings.

Yes, I'm really just echoing a lot of what Vice Chair Jackson said, but just for some clarifying information that I think was partially answered. So you've got three centers in Zebulon, Knightdale, and Wendell. And for the most part, these are part-time hours for the children and family or family or caregiver comes into your centers. And I was also going to ask about our three school and our NC Pre-K, which is great. You're just another example of these partnerships and trying to plug and stand in some of the gaps. it sounds like for our children and families. So just thank you so much for that. And just with your kaleidoscope, the curriculum, is that assuming some type of a standardized curriculum that you're using that would include some type of standardized pre and post assessments as well to look at progress?

So this, so Kaleidoscope Play and Learn is, they are an evidence-based and they do not have like a set assessment that we have to do outside of the parent survey. And so, but what it is, is it's a program that talks about connecting families to resources in the community, creating community parent engagement and education as well as the child. So when we partnered with them and became an affiliate, it was a way for us to go, here is this evidence-based curriculum that solidifies what we're already doing. Like when we went to the training to go, okay, what aren't we doing that they're wanting us to do? We were really doing all of it already. Um, and so, but we have started implementing their, um, survey that they give out once a year. Um, and they, they are based out of Washington. Um, and while we are the only location in Wake County that has them, Johnson, they, they're all over the state of North Carolina. It's becoming more popular. Um, and so, um, we send all of our data, they get all of our data for our stuff and then they, um, kind of do their process to pull all that data together to help. So it's not necessarily an assessment for the children. It's more revealing what the parents feel like they have gained as part of our program.

Very good. Thank you.

And I'll tell you, us becoming a KP&L affiliate came out of some work with us talking with Smart Start. So just trying to align ourselves to be more competitive for funding through them. They would like for you to be following an evidence-based learning model. And they took a lot of time and sat down with us and kind of went through their catalog and helped identify this as a good fit for us. And when we read it, we were like, oh, my gosh, this is us. This is what we're doing. So they were instrumental in helping us get set up with KP&L. And we appreciate that because it's been great.

Good to hear. And kudos to Smart Start.

Well, I'm away. I wouldn't come back to Commissioner Jackson. But I'm just so appreciative. I'm appreciative that, you know, back. In the 90s, you heard the call and you listened and you heard the school district say, what we really need is more help with basically kindergarten readiness and that you chose that as your mission. And that's so critically important for getting our kids off on the right start. You may or may not know, I was on the school board for a few years before I became a commissioner. And I remember when we were talking about some of these challenges and the kindergarten readiness assessments that were done. And I'm not an educator by any means, other than having been a parent. I didn't spend any time in that arena. And it was eye-opening to me to hear during those discussions that there were children who show up for kindergarten that don't even know the proper way to hold a book. much less a pencil and things like that. And so it's so critical that the skills that you're going over with them in this preschool and also the family engagement programs are so important. Commissioner Jackson and I are both, well, all three of us on this call right now are engaged with Wake County Smart Start. Commissioner Stallings and I both serve on the board for the local affiliates. And I know that that's a big part of what they do. I mean, they're focused on the programs for the children, but they're also focusing on how to make families be able to be more effective in supporting their children in their learning. And that's huge. I also just wanted to highlight, I appreciated the ROAR program that you mentioned because I was also one of the early learners. collaborators on the wake up and read project was on the school board then and but just happened to be one of a couple of people that participated in the early brainstorming for that as part of the community collaborative and learned so much then about how reading early on and uh for kids it expands their vocabulary and how much difference that makes you know in their educational journey and how much further behind kids are that aren't exposed to many books and just how that alone can just make such a tremendous difference. So I want to say kudos on that project. Thank you. You're welcome. And I'll now turn it back to Vice Chair Jackson.

And I'll say thank you for your work on Wake Up and Read because they give us books every year to give to our families.

They do.

So they do a great job of sharing books and bilingual books that we give out to our families to help build their home libraries.

It's a great program. And I know Commissioner Stallings and I both participated at one school recently in the book distribution part of the program. And that's always so heartwarming to see the kids getting to take those books home. And I remember being asked the first time I did it, you know, the younger kids, I don't have to bring these books back. They're just amazed that they get to keep them. It means so much and wonderful. the community has really embraced that program and the donations have grown tremendously and we're able to support so many more students in schools as than we were in the early days. But thank you for acknowledging that. And it's good just to have all these partnerships and know we're all working together with the same goals. All right, Vice Chair Jackson. Yes.

build on where you just left off around literacy and how critical it is. Brooke and Shannon, are all the families signed up for DPIL? Do you all have that partnership going on? Awesome, awesome.

Sorry, when you said the initials, I was like Dolly Parton. I'm sorry, Dolly Parton. Yes, and we have recently shared that they just opened things back up. Yes. And we've had a few parents donate books to us as they clear out stuff, but it's cool when we read those here because then the kids are like, I have that book at home because they got it through the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. So as I was pulling stuff, I was like, oh, we need this book to be read this year because it's from Dolly Parton. But yes, we have we love sharing that resource and we're super excited that it's like open back up for more capacity for families.

Yes, it's so exciting. The team that I work with at North Carolina Partnership for Children manages the Dolly Parton Imagination Library program. Also, Try Share. So and also the catalog that you mentioned. um and i my team really helped put that together so it's so awesome to hear that you found it valuable found a great program and now look the wonderful things that are happening for families in um wake county so awesome my question is for the uh faces program uh The description, it says it serves low income families. Can you describe a little bit more about how low income is determined and also what your outreach strategy is?

So we have a family information form that we ask all of our families to fill out to see if they're eligible or not. So all of our families are living in a household that's 200% of the poverty guidelines. They are not enrolled in any other preschool program, and they live in Knightdale, Wendell, or Zebulon, so that eastern Wake County area area. So once they submit the form to us, Brooke will look it over and let them know. So that is the guideline that we're following when we're saying that we're serving low-income families. Okay, got it, 200%. Thank you.

As far as recruitment, Facebook is one of the biggest ways we recruit families by posting. They'll fill out our form. Families hearing from another parent is a huge way that they hear about us. I was just looking. I think it's in an email. I just tally like how many we heard about from where we also like go to the library story times. They allow us to come in and share about our program. We go to community events and we participate in pop schools in the park in Zebulon. In each of the towns we serve, we try to participate in one of their community events. If not multiple throughout the year. We've met with Zebulon Parks and Rec does a lot because we go in there. Parks and Rec flyer. We've met with the Nightdale Parks and Rec and, you know, strategize different ways that we can partner with them. And so it's a variety of ways. And every year we go, what's working? What's not? How are we reaching people? We'll have park days with our families. And part of that is having our families come and see the community parks going, hey, I'm going to know somebody there. But it also is a way that we reach families that maybe would be interested in our program.

Awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Well, there's a Kaleidoscope affiliate in Harnett County that you may be connected with. Yes. But it is great to see Kaleidoscope growing across the state.

Is that Linda? I think in Harnett County. I think that's where I did my training. I think they do trainings for North Carolina facilitators.

Yes, the Harnett County Smart Start may be working with a partner there too. Very cool. Thank you. So awesome. Thank you. Well, once again, good work.

Appreciate all the work that you do, Shannon, and Brooke and your organization. And thank you so much for the update. Unless there are any more questions for these ladies, we're going to move on to our last but not least conversation with folks from the Methodist Home for Children. And we welcome Charlicia Williams and Ellen Scarborough. to tell us about the great things happening there. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon. My name is Charlizia Williams and I am an education coordinator at the Barbara Curtis Center. I'm here with my director, Julie Glasgow. And before we start, we just wanted to say to Shannon and Brooke that we are so excited about the wonderful work that you're doing in Eastern Wake County. It was just great and refreshing to hear that. So thank you for that. We will definitely get started with a little history and I'll turn that over to Julie. Next slide, please.

So Methodist Home for Children started as a Methodist orphanage and that was located at Fletcher Park, which is at the intersection of Wade Avenue and Glenwood Avenue. And that happened in 1899. And I remember when I had first started with Methodist Home in 2001, we were always like, oh, yeah, it was a little over 100 years ago. And now you can't really say that anymore because it is well over 100 years ago. But they have evolved from traditional campus-based orphanage to community-based services. And so moving on to Methodist Home for Children, we are a private nonprofit organization. providing different parts. So our agency provides foster care, adoption services, specialized group homes, assessment centers, which is fairly new to the agency, childcare centers, and transitional living, which is also fairly new. The childcare centers, next slide, please. Like I said, Jordan Center was our first center that opened up in 2001 in February. And then we had come in 2019 here at the Curtis Center. And I think C wants to talk a little bit more about that.

So when we started in 2019, it was right before COVID, we had a partnership with DHIC. They wanted us to run the child care center. And we are located right in the middle of an affordable housing community by the name of Washington Terrace. And so the point of having us here was that the residents would have accessible access transportation, public transportation, and childcare for their residents. We are a five-star center. We specialize in the education of children from the ages of six weeks to to five or kindergarten. We provide many services. We serve children who are typically developing and children who have differing abilities. We have our resident therapists here. When children start with us, we are definitely trained to Kind of notice and understand the development of children to the point where if we see something that's a little alarming, we will kind of talk to the parents and with along with the parents. could find them the connections that they need to get services for their children if necessary. So we partner also with Wake County Early Childhood Services. We partner also with Project Enlightenment. And we have various therapists, like I said, occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech therapists, that come and they serve our center. We use the creative curriculum, which is also a play-based curriculum. But in the play-based theme, there is definitely learning happening. You'll see the children in the classroom, they might be putting together a puzzle. Well, that puzzle is teaching them how to problem solve. They may be writing their names in the sand. That is teaching fine motor and how to hold a pencil. So it runs the gamut. We have also our behavior management program, if that's what you call it. I think behavior management or social emotional aspect is called... conscious discipline. And with conscious discipline, we use more positive feedback and redirection to address the social and emotional needs that the children have. We serve a variety of children. We have children who are in foster care. We have children who are adopted. We have children that the state will call us and say, hey, we have this child who You know, are you able to help us? And of course, we accept everyone. And if we find that we do not have the means to meet their needs, we keep them here. We don't, you know. tell them that they have to leave. We help them find the proper place for them that will meet their needs. We also do our assessments. We use the Brigance assessment. And with the Brigance assessment coupled together with the creative curriculum, we have a continuum. So each child is, there are anecdotal notes, documentations, pictures, videos that are taken of 30 goals and objectives in the creative curriculum, which address all of the developmental domains. And so this continuum goes from when they come to us until they leave us. And if the program is offered in their school, then it also follows them through kindergarten. So that is a little bit about our program. Next slide, please. So funding, we have received over the last three years about $240,000 in support from you all and we definitely appreciate it. We are able to support Partial tuitions, full tuitions, just it runs the gamut. So we've had families to come to us, especially in the neighborhood, in the community who need child care, but they aren't able to work. because they don't have childcare. And that's where we come in too. So we have families that we have supported with full tuition scholarships so that they could work. And once they worked, they went to a partial scholarship. We have families that have come in that kind of fall between the cracks financially in that they don't make enough to qualify for subsidy. They make too much, I'm sorry, to qualify for subsidy, but they do not make enough to pay a tuition for childcare. So then that family would get partial, they receive partial scholarship. We have families that are on the wait list for subsidies. So we don't turn those families away. We accept them, they have full scholarship until their subsidy comes through. And so even when parents, have subsidies, sometimes they are not able to pay the cost of the parent fee. And so we supplement that as well. We provide scholarship for that as well. The annual, I guess if you would call it the qualifier, which we are not firm on this qualifier because there are different circumstances. We are a circumstance based. um organization when it comes to the subsidy for families because each family has a different need but um subsidy eligibility for a family of four is sixty four thousand dollars so if a family of four makes more than sixty four thousand dollars they are ineligible for child care subsidy the average annual cost or market rate which is you know everyone doesn't do market rates especially five-star centers like us is sixteen thousand nine hundred and eight dollars so you see kind of the disparity between the two, we are here to fill in that gap and that is what we do. The funding supports access for child care for at least 10 to 12 children per year on full or partial scholarships, which is substantial because otherwise they would not have access to child care and maybe the parents would not be able to work, which is not which is a contributing factor to socioeconomic standards. Next slide, please. So in our community, we serve at least five to seven families, like I said, that are seeking employment, but are not able to work because of childcare, lack of childcare. We serve at least eight to 10 working families on childcare subsidy on the wait list, which now actually the wait list is no longer at this point because of funding. So now we're seeing more families receive subsidies and we're able to help more families that are coming in. On average, we have about 70 children here in our center. We're the smaller center, we're smaller than Jordan Center, but we're able to have a greater impact as these families. So for instance, if a family is on a full scholarship, because they were waiting for a subsidy once they received the subsidy. Even if they have to have a partial scholarship to help pay their parent fee, that frees up the funding to help another family. And we have six to eight working families who, like I talked about earlier, kind of fall between the cracks where they make too much to qualify for subsidy, but not enough to pay for child care. So it has a great impact on the community. We have parents who come in and they're like, you have scholarship? And we're like, yeah. They'll ask, you know, what is the current price, you know, amount? and they hear what it is and immediately they're like, no, I can't afford it. And it does our hearts so good to be able to say we offer scholarship. And the amount of families that come through our building and are able to have childcare, it's just remarkable. And we're so thankful to be able to provide that.

Next slide, please.

So here are a few examples. We have Jabari. Jabari came to us when he was a little over two. He was nonverbal. He was also a child that was on scholarship here, a partial scholarship. We talked with his mom about just what we noticed in his development. And she was on board with getting him services. We went through Wake County early education. Well, first, you know, he had the IFSP and then he transitioned to the IEP. But now, you know, he came in not talking at all. And now he comes in and he's running down the hallway and he won't stop talking. So that is one of our success stories. And on the right, you'll see Joe. Joe came to us. His parents called us and said, you know, Joe had a stroke when he was very young, when he was a baby. And so physically he was affected. Well, his whole development was affected. And they're like, you know, would you all be willing? And of course we are. And so he came and he joined us when he got here. He was not able to walk. He would sit. But with the therapist and his teachers working with him, he is now running up and down our hallways. And so these are. two of the examples, but there are many, many more examples of just how subsidy child care, your funding has helped impact the lives of children and families. Next slide. And so we want to thank you because without you, without this funding, we would not be able to do or we would be more limited in doing the things that we do in helping families and children in the community. And we definitely appreciate it. And I'm here for any questions. We're here for any questions.

Thank you. All right. Commissioners. All right. Vice Chair Jackson, I see your hand. Go ahead.

Okay, sorry, I was muted. Yes. Thank you both for this presentation, for the work that you're doing. It just fills me up to see this very important work happening and how much we're able to contribute and be partners in the work, particularly for those that you described as filling in the margins. It's just so critical. And we all know that child care is for child development as much as it is for workforce development. And those that are on the margins and that don't qualify, it's just wonderful that you all are there to be able to provide support. And like the last presentation, we just need more. We need more until every child everywhere has the kind of opportunities that you share, that you ended with. Jabari and I got the other. Joe. Joe, yes. And when you ended that way, it's so wonderful. I wanted to hear more stories because I know that there are dozens and dozens. So thank you for your longstanding history in our county and for the work that you're doing now. Thank you.

No, I just also. And I want to give a nod to the vision of DHIC to want to have this facility on the property for the Washington Terrace once they reopened that beautiful housing development that is nothing like what used to be there years ago. And I was happy to be at the ribbon cutting for the development.

You know, it was funny because they had done a survey for families that were coming back into the community as what you wanted in your new community. And a child care center was one of those things that families had wanted. and see, it just reminded, reminded me that when we started, she had, you know, she had said families would come in, we'd tell them what the price is, and they're like, oh, no, we can't afford this, um, and that's where, you know, we brought a lot of families in that were some form of scholarship, and, um, we helped them apply for vouchers and get them, you know, we didn't get them the vouchers, but we, we got them on the right track to receiving vouchers, so, um, It was just really funny to me that a lot of families wanted this here, and then they didn't come to us when we were open. And, you know, we had to go door to door and say where we were and who we were, and we wanted your family here. And it's been great to have certain families with us since the time we've been open until now.

Well, that was one of the questions I was going to ask. What's the rough percentage of the children that you serve, children and families that you serve that do live in that community?

Yeah, so when we started, it was a lot. And then it kind of died down a little bit and not sure why. And it might have had something to do with funding with subsidy. We were just talking about that. And then all of a sudden, you know, we we've gotten more calls for subsidies and vouchers. And right now, I believe we have 12 children in the center that live in the community.

right and one employee oh even two employees two employees oh yes two two employees yeah i love that and as vice chair jackson highlighted you know this the work that you folks are doing and the service that you're providing to these families accomplishes two things that helps the children um with their early learning, but it helps the families with being able to have childcare and being able to work. And that is extremely important for our economy. I just enjoyed hearing about this a lot and glad that we can partner with your organization in this way. Any other comments or questions from the commissioners? All right, well, keep up the good work, everyone that's been on this call today. As someone mentioned earlier, it's days like these that warm my heart and make me know all the minutia of the other days are worth it because we've got all these good things going on. Okay, well. unless anyone else has anything else to raise up for the Education Committee today. I will then declare this meeting adjourned. Have a great rest of your afternoon.

Thank you.