Empowering Families for Success

At Educare, we know that engaging with families in multiple ways empowers both our children’s success and the success of their families. It also provides parents the opportunity to learn how to advocate for their children as soon as they enter kindergarten and throughout their K-12 experience.

Getting up in the morning and going to bed at night is easy because 80% of the time I’m actively helping people and making a difference in someone’s life. I love losing myself in my work by focusing on other people. – Eric Washburn, Family Support Specialist

Resources for Educare Arizona families:

Family Support Specialists

Family Support Specialists play an important role in ensuring success for both children and their families at Educare Arizona. They communicate regularly with children’s teachers and have monthly contact with families, including at least three home visits during the school year, which extends from the end of July through mid-June.

Intake and Screening

Family Support Specialists start connecting family members with community resources as soon as their first meeting to review a family’s application for enrollment at Educare Arizona. This process enables specialists to discover what each family needs, which might include help with medical and home insurance, assistance with finding employment, or dealing with issues like domestic violence, drug abuse, and sexual abuse. Family Support Specialists also work together with families to come up with solutions to a broad range of problems, from taxes to immigration status, to health and fitness.

Making Progress

As children make progress, Family Support Specialists help families make progress as well. A specialist works with parents and families to set goals they want to achieve to move their lives forward. A family might, for example, set a goal to learn English, go back to school, find a new place to live, or sign up for a new bank account. Family Support Specialists also provide monthly training for families, covering a wide range of topics, such as language translation, financial literacy, health and well-being, and developing parent-child relationships.

Ensuring Health

To ensure that each infant or child is healthy, Family Support Specialists do preliminary health screenings and collect physical and dental reports from families, making sure families follow up with any needed treatments. If a family does not have a primary care physician or dentist, Family Support Specialists help families find these specialists, whether at BEACH, our onsite health center, or another convenient location.

Language Support

Children who attend Educare Arizona come from diverse family backgrounds and speak a variety of languages, including, for example, Somali, Arabic, and Spanish. We provide paid staff language support for these languages to build trust between our school and various communities living within the area served by Educare Arizona.

Parent Resource Library

Parents and families can use dedicated computers and resources to facilitate job searches, career development, their own education, and learn more about effective parenting practices. Parents are their children’s first teacher, so at Educare Arizona, they learn how to interact with their children, even by the way they read a book to their child.

Family Development Program

This program for families fosters the development of strong, positive relationships among children, families and staff. It promotes and enhances the parent’s relationship with his or her child, encourages them to understand their child in the context of their family, and provides information about their child’s growth and development, including information about maternal and child health and well being.

We encourage parents to get involved in their child’s education and school, as well as to build strong relationships with community organizations that can facilitate referrals for families to access services not available on the Educare Arizona site.

The program helps families use data to continuously improve and provides individualized planning for families with children-evidence based strategies.

Community Rooms

We provide space in our community rooms for family counseling, support groups, and parent trainings.