Sylvia Clark, Director, Child Care Resource Office, YMCA of Greater Boston

Professional Development Needs of Out-of-School Time Staff
Sylvia Clark, director of the Child Care Resource Office at the YMCA of Greater Boston, represents the YMCA as a managing partner of AchieveBoston. We asked her to share her experience regarding supporting and training staff.

Tell us about the work you do.
The YMCA of Greater Boston has 47 after-school programs and 15 infant, toddler and preschool programs serving over 3,000 children each day. The majority of my responsibilities as the Director of the Child Care Resource Office are to provide support to staff in a variety of ways:
• Program start-up
• EEC Licensing
• Staff hiring
• Staff training
• Curriculum development
• Special Initiatives and Projects
• Program expansion
• Family resource referral

What have been your biggest successes and the biggest barriers in your efforts toward staff development?
Success is seen in the retention of our staff and the level of professional growth that takes place. For example, of our 47 After-school Directors, 38 of them were at one time Group Leaders working directly with our kids. Of the 13 Senior Program Directors who oversee multiple sites; 11 were once YMCA Site Directors.

As an Association we work hard at trying to meet the multiple needs of staff. In addition to working with individual branches, we hold monthly team meetings for directors in similar roles i.e. school-based programs, branch based programs and suburban programs. These meetings are for training, sharing best practices and working on challenges to program development.

Barriers toward staff development are the same barriers all programs face: salary, compensation and benefits, time for planning curriculum, training and high turnover rates. For our Association, these barriers are extremely challenging because we are dealing with a part time workforce. Our Group Leader positions have an especially high turnover rate. Staff need strong support, supervision, coaching, and training.

In your opinion what is needed system wide to improve workforce development?
Program quality and youth outcomes are directly tied to staff. Training is critical to the success of the program and the success of the children. More and more is asked of this field and it seems fewer resources are available to support the staff. This is why I'm a committed partner of Achieve Boston. We as a collaborative group have been working to address this reality.

There needs to be a professional development system which provides staff at all levels the opportunity to access comprehensive quality training which will increase their knowledge, develop their skills, and improve their practice; a system which allows staff to pursue an individual career path.