I attended at the 2019 Annual CAAEYC (California Association for the Education of Young Children) Conference & Expo t as a presenter and a Board member.
The conference was held at the Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA from April 12 to April 14, 2019.
My workshop, titled Renewing Accreditation, was geared for directors and teachers of NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children) accredited early childhood centers.
As part of its restructuring, NAEYC revised a significant amount of its accreditation process mostly to be more efficient and to digitize.
This workshop was a collaborative work among the CAAEYC Accreditation Committee, NAEYC, and a few other early professionals such as early childhood program directors and college faculty members.
As part of the workshop, there was a conversation about Power to the Profession, the NAEYC initiative to promote public awareness of the importance of early childhood education and to increase the status of early childhood educators.
As brain research proved, ages 0-7 is the most critical time of brain development. However, historically public awareness of it is still low and public funding is minimal in early childhood.
Moreover, early childhood professionals do not receive high monetary compensation. The Power to the Profession is trying to improve these issues through improving the quality of early childhood centers by accreditation and by advocating more education of the early childhood workforce.
