Statewide Leadership Team
The State Leadership Team is one of four essential support structures:
Overview
The State Leadership Team (SLT) is an interagency group that is responsible for planning and supervising the initiative, including: funding support, policy initiatives, evaluation, data-based decision making, training and coaching, site selection, and public awareness.
Purpose
The primary purpose of the SLT is to ensure support and resources are available to sites so they can adopt and use the selected evidence-based practices with fidelity. The SLT will use the State Leadership Team Benchmarks of Quality to guide the initiative, assess progress, and plan future actions. The SLT will facilitate family engagement throughout the initiative.
The SLT will:
- form a network of coaches who can provide professional development and training to implementation sites
- select implementation and demonstration sites
- create a site evaluation plan for collecting data to evaluate fidelity of implementation and child and family outcomes at the local level
- carry out a plan to scale-up and sustain the initiative
Organization
The SLT is comprised of 10-15 people knowledgeable about and committed to using evidence-based practices and who are decision-makers for their agency/program or can report quickly to decision makers.
SLT may include members from:
- IDEA Part C/early intervention and Part B/preschool
- family members
- Head Start
- Early Head Start
- child care
- public preschool
- other programs/settings serving young children with or at-risk for delays/disabilities
- statewide training and technical assistance initiatives
- state early childhood education
- maternal and child health
- child welfare
- family organizations
- evaluators
- higher education (community colleges, four-year institutions)
The SLT can organize into work groups around action plan items from the State Leadership Team Benchmarks of Quality. The groups can include additional stakeholders with critical expertise.
The SLT should eventually include representation from the Professional Development Network of Program Implementation Coaches (PDN) and implementation sites' Program Leadership Teams.
Time Commitment
Experience shows the SLT should plan on two to three years for the development of: network of program implementation coaches (PDN), implementation and demonstration sites, and data and evaluation systems. It will take additional years to scale-up the initiative.
Logistics
The SLT agrees to meet monthly and to adopt logistics and activities that ensure their effectiveness as a collaborative team.
Logistics and activities include:
- hiring a State Coordinator to support the SLT and PDN, provide day-to-day management, and be the primary contact for the initiative
- developing a written mission statement
- conducting team-building activities to support decision making, and group cohesion and investment; incorporating effective teaming strategies
- holding regular meetings with agendas, meeting evaluations and summaries
- preparing an action plan based on the team's regular self-assessment on the State Leadership Team Benchmarks of Quality
- compiling a state annual report of activities, outcomes, and accomplishments
Sustainability
The SLT needs to prepare for statewide expansion by identifying needs and issues that could arise during the scaling-up process. See Considerations for a Written Sustainability and Scale-up Plan and Scale-up Planning Worksheet.
Tools
See: Tools