Conclusion and Ongoing Priorities

How can communities develop comprehensive systems to improve outcomes for young children and their families and how can states support this work? Maine has developed an approach to addressing these two questions in tandem. The First 10 state team serves as a structure for inter-agency collective learning and coordination of state programs, an arena for policy deliberation and development, and a network for diffusing ideas throughout agency offices and up to senior agency leaders. Maine’s 13 Frist 10 community teams embraced strategies developed in high-resource projects like those in Nebraska and Oregon and adapted them for smaller communities with smaller initial budgets. While the communities are enthusiastic about the progress they are making in engaging and supporting families and improving and aligning teaching and learning, this early experience raises an important question of dosage to be addressed in future research: at what level of intensity and at what scale do First 10 strategies need to be implemented in order to produce demonstrable evidence of improved child health, development, and learning outcomes?

Maine’s state and local leaders creatively made the most of teams formed primarily to expand high-quality preschool classrooms. Their experience suggests several priorities for work moving forward as well as for others interested in supporting cross-sector collaboration across the early childhood and elementary school years:

• Address the types of state policy and technical assistance issues raised by Maine’s community teams.
• Design initiatives that include community-based early childhood providers and community organizations such as libraries and social service providers from project inception.
• Prioritize assessment of the quality of elementary school teaching and learning from project inception.
• Identify funding for coordinating First 10 teams, staffing comprehensive family supports, and conducting collaborative professional learning around instruction.

Recognizing these priorities, Larsen sums up the state’s plans as follows:

We will continue to interact with the 13 First 10 sites to follow their progress and lend support as appropriate. We also plan to continue building out the resources through the website as well as our own collective background related to research and successful approaches. Finally, we will work to share our findings with legislators, policymakers, and potential funders in hopes of expanding opportunity to cultivate this type of model throughout more of Maine. 

The two-level First 10 structure that Maine has developed is one model for better coordinating the programs and services that safeguard and support young children and their families, perhaps suggesting ideas that can be adapted in other states and communities. In a context in which the COVID-19 pandemic and associated school closures are exacerbating yawning inequalities and taxing resources for education and social services, this type of coordination is crucially important.