In 2005, Clayton Early Learning was invited to join the national Bounce Learning Network of Educare Centers and opened the fifth center in the nation in September 2007. Educare Centers are committed to helping young children grow up safe, healthy, and eager to learn. Through a consortium of partners, we create, provide and promote high-quality, research-based, outcome-focused learning environments for families and their young children who are at-risk for school failure. Educare Centers are learning organizations, committed to implementing innovative ideas and best practices to continuously improve our work with families. In short, Educare is a partnership (to create a high quality birth-to-five program), a place (to serve as a beacon of hope) and a program (to prepare young children for school). 

Our guiding principles are:

1. We believe developing strong partnerships and securing all available resources is essential to providing high-quality experiences for young children.

The quality of our program hinges on the quality of our staff. Developing partnerships with local school districts, state government and the federal government (through Head Start and Early Head Start) allows us to hire highly qualified staff, pay them competitive wages, and support their continued professional growth and development. In addition to creating this enriched staffing pattern, blending these various funding streams enables us to provide comprehensive, full-day, full-year services. We blend these dollars so funding streams are invisible to the families we serve.

2. We believe we can send a firm message about the importance of investing in early childhood by creating a recognizable place for birth to five early care and education.  Children begin learning from their earliest days. We design our Educare Centers to allocate 50 percent of the space for infants and toddlers, to minimize the transitions that too often disrupt young lives, to create multiple indoor and outdoor play spaces, and to provide adequate space for private consultation. Our centers also serve as opportunities to educate the community at large about the importance of investing in early care and education.

3. We believe a preponderance of research shows that intellectual, social/emotional, and physical development are complementary and require equal attention in the early years. Children's social/emotional development provides the necessary foundation for all later learning. We integrate a mental health perspective into our work with children and families emphasizing positive emotional growth and the early identification of emotional and behavioral difficulties. Staff receive the training and consultation they need to meet children's emotional needs in the classroom and to help parents address their children's needs at home.

4. We believe that supporting families from the earliest moments in a child's life is the best way to promote children's healthy development. Specially trained home visitors, called doulas, begin working with families during pregnancy. Our family support and teaching staff continue to provide support to the children and families throughout the child's first five years.

5. We believe that early language and literacy development is a key component of school readiness. Staff provide children with rich language experiences in the classroom that develop early literacy skills and increase their vocabulary. We encourage and support parents in playing an active role in their children's acquisition of language and literacy.

6. We believe that the quality of the relationships directly and profoundly affects the quality of our services so we are committed to implementing Reflective Supervision and Practice throughout our program. All learning occurs in the context of relationships and is critically affected by the quality of those relationships. Therefore, building healthy relationships between parents and their children, between children and staff members, between parents and staff members, and among staff members themselves is central to our work. Young children who experience the world as predictable, supportive, and responsive to their needs will develop stronger emotional foundations that will enable them to learn. With this in mind, we pursue a relationship-based approach to all of our work, which includes reflective supervision and practice. The relationship that a supervisor has with a staff member is a model for the relationships that the staff member is expected to develop with families.

7. We believe that maintaining rigorous teacher requirements and creating clear career paths are necessary to ensure the best outcomes for children. Research shows that children do better with better-educated teachers. To that end, we require supervisors to have advanced degrees in early childhood education. In each classroom, we require that the Lead Teacher has a bachelor's degree, the Assistant Teacher has a two-year degree and the Teacher Aide has a high school diploma and CDA. We provide staff with a variety of training and professional development opportunities to enhance their skills and strengthen their ability to positively affect the developmental outcomes for children. Staff training and development is continuous and individualized, presenting ongoing opportunities to further enhance each staff member's skills and knowledge.

8. We believe that maintaining low child-adult ratios is essential to providing high quality, individualized care. We provide three teachers (a Lead Teacher, an Assistant Teacher and a Teacher Aide) for every eight children in our 0-3 classrooms. We provide three teachers for every 16 children in our 3-5 classrooms. What's more, in our infant-toddler rooms, we are committed to implementing continuity of care to minimize disruptions in the young children's lives.

9. We believe that incorporating the arts into our curriculum is an effective way to accommodate the different learning styles of different children. We place a special emphasis on the arts, embedding the arts throughout our program to build upon the individual strengths and varied learning styles of our children.