Durham PreK's Support

Durham PreK is particularly interested in apprenticeships as a strategy to:

• Continuously strengthen the high-quality care Durham PreK offers for all children and families: By investing in higher education and training for teachers and assistants in PreK classrooms, we aim to support educators in their efforts to offer a safe, nurturing, culturally responsive and inclusive learning environment for all the children in their care. Promoting young children’s physical, social, emotional, linguistic, and cognitive development requires highly specialized skills and endless creativity, and we are excited to offer additional resources and support to this amazing group of educators as they continue to grow in the profession. 
• Design comprehensive supports for current and aspiring early educators to earn higher degrees totally debt-free. Apprenticeship programs strengthen pathways for growth in wages and career opportunities. In the context of a profession still struggling against historical racial inequities and gendered bias to achieve equitable compensation, ensuring educators can graduate with their early childhood degrees debt-free is essential.
• Recruit new professionals to the classroom and support current educators with predictable and meaningful wage increases: In Durham PreK, this is especially meaningful as the pay scale for qualified Lead Teachers in the Durham PreK program is aligned with the pay scale for teachers in Durham Public Schools. By designing degree-bearing programs with early childhood students at the center, apprenticeships can make attainment of this level of degree and commensurate pay parity achievable for educators who might otherwise experience more barriers to degree completion. 
• Develop new pathways into the early childhood profession for educators that identify as Latinx and speak Spanish as a native language. Evidence is clear that young children who are English Language Learners and their families alike benefit from having teachers who speak their home language in the classroom. With this in mind, the Durham PreK Equity Plan established the goal to increase the number of Spanish-speaking teachers of Latinx/Hispanic background. Apprenticeships create the opportunity to coordinate cohorts of Spanish-speaking educators to enroll in Spanish-language early childhood courses through partnering institutions.
• Meaningfully support partnering child care centers to recruit and retain highly qualified staff: The pandemic had a particularly challenging impact on early childhood educators and centers. Recognizing the realities of the staffing challenges faced by Durham PreK sites and the broader community of child care providers, apprenticeship programs offer one new tool to support recruitment and retention in sites.