Western Dairyland Collaboration

"[Our collaborations are] all different.
Every single one is unique and different.
Essentially, that’s what Head Start is about."



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The Scope of the Program

								“ My name is Nan Olson, I am the Education/Child Development manager for Western Dairyland. Our Western Dairyland program serves a little over five hundred children right now. We have seven center-based programs that we administer ourselves, and we delegate a program to the Eau Claire public schools. Within those programs of our seven centers, four … are collaboratives with public schools and EEN programs. “



Scope of the Program

								Eau Claire has one EEN/Head Start collaborative program that they administer. In addition, we collaborate with twelve different day cares in our four county area. They’re all different. Every single one is unique and different. Essentially, that’s what Head Start is about. The performance standards are designed to be open ended, so that each program can reflect the needs of their community. It’s a strength of ours.



Staff as a Community Member

								I think probably the thing that makes it work is we try very hard to have Head Start staff be a part of their community. The people have an interest in their area, they send their children to those schools, they are a part of what’s happening there. That makes it easier, I think, for the public school or the day care to collaborate actually with them,because they see them as a part of their area. I think there’s a lot of advantages to combining funding sources with funding being a difficult thing to get enough of, it really enhances any program to combine the resources.”



Avoiding Problems

								“It’s difficult sometimes, I think, when we’re all so very invested in our own programs and we all feel very strongly that what we are doing is a good program and we really are at the head of our group in doing different things. And then when you start putting together programs that all have very strong philosophies and their own funding bases. And I think that you can run into problems if you don’t really go into it with an open mind and do a lot of team development and visioning and getting to know each other philosophically before you try to put together that funding. There’s a lot of benefits to putting together programs, but I think everybody has to enter into it with the feeling that they’re gonna be willing to give some things up in order to gain other things. Not nessasarily that you have to go in and lose part of your program, but that your program will be stronger if you intergrate it.”