My name is Nathanael Gale I'm a program officer for SETA Head Start For those of you that don't know SETA Head Start is the grant grantee for the County of Sacramento I'm Denise Gale I'm an Education Coordinator, also with SETA We have been going into our 5th year of implementation of Teaching Pyramid in a good portion of Sacramento County We thought to share a little bit on the vision that we have tried to create in our program Some of the things that have gone well and the challenges that we have had Much like a lot of you when you probably entered into this situation, this Teaching Pyramid situation as we call it You were potentially very confused and I know for the first year or two we were clueless We would sit on our Leadership Team and everyone would go around the table and have such wonderful, fabulous things to say and we would still be like "I don't know? We are still trying to figure this out." Our agency is moderately sized We serve thousands of children county wide in Sacramento Our SETA operated programs, the grantee serves, I believe 2500 children We have 100 different classrooms at 30 plus different sites So it's a large program What we have done, what we are beginning to be in the process of doing is a cultural shift in our program Prior to Teaching Pyramid, our mental health services, our social-emotional curriculum, our services in the classroom had a lot of variety to it Often, people would talk and they would be talking a different language So we had a very fragmented situation With Teaching Pyramid, one of the most important thing it has done is given us a common language What was pretty challenging for us to push forward because being in a middle management admin situation and I'm bringing a social-emotional, or mental health perspective to mental health experts And telling them, "Hey, you know what you were doing? That's really cool and you work really hard, but we want you to do this" I think some of the success that we've had is that we've had some pretty strong driving agents in our program I think if you are going to be successful, you need to identify one or two people in your program that don't really take no for an answer That are able to remove obstacles because there will be a lot of obstacles One of the obstacles again is getting people to participate We have had to become comfortable with transitioning from volunteers to volunteered and selecting people We have a couple of our teachers that we have volunteered to participate in our Leadership Team Also, volunteered them to be mentor sites It doesn't make you the most popular people but in the end it's worked very well because we have identified people that will drive the ideas and will carry them through If anybody works in Head Start, then you know we got a new pair of shoes every program year A new focus that we have to have So having someone that stay true to that course and promotes Teaching Pyramid We have successfully, and at this point, we've got complete management buy in Our deputy director knows what Teaching Pyramid is We remind her that she needs to be friendly and respectful **audience laughs** Obviously this is a long process, so I'm not going to sit here and tell you that all of our classrooms are CSEFEL strong, if you may, but we are making progress We have plans on how to move forward with this I also wanted to bring up, first of all we train through the county in small pieces Some from each agency, that's how we started Then we decided internally, just in a SETA operated program, how are we going to train our 300 plus staff We had just a sprinkling of just 2 or 3 sites at that point that had gone through all 4 modules.. The 3b thing throws me I need it to be 1, 2, 3, 4 just so you know **audience laughs** So we started with module 1 and broke it down to 3 smaller trainings so our staff would come in We had to repeat it 8 times in order to have all of our staff go through that training We just started off that way and it took us about, and then we did the same thing for module 2 and then 3a and 3b That was all of our staff, through 1 and 2, including our teacher assistants Then module 3a and 3b were training our Head Start teachers and site supervisors only at this point That is basically how we found a way to train everyone in our agency And we struggled with our coaching, we are still struggling to build that pool and make that stronger I'm thinking there is something else she wanted me to cover Oh! The other thing I wanted to talk about just really briefly about is the shift for our mental health Nate mentioned it a little bit, but we have Ronald Dent, who is here and has been a part of it the whole way And Shondell who is now a portion in Ambar as well To speak for Ronald as far as what happened to him He was giving his services for years and years and years and we came in and said, "Your services are going to change a little bit" And it really is bigger than that, but Ronald's, the transitions he's made is from a mental health specialist to a Teaching Pyramid coach So he is still working with some of those children at the top of the pyramid who have referral But more than that the job has evolved into a coaching position essentially That is what they are solely providing and have been providing it to all classrooms whether the have referrals or children at the top of the pyramid or not So that has been a big shift that has effected our policies and procedures We had to completely rewrite our policies and procedures that surround mental health We've also modified all of our forms and our flow charts in regards to mental health services to meet the pyramid model Now we are in the process of actually melding our special education and mental health services into one very similar process using a lot of the same strategies to meet the children's needs in our program