Philanthropy Today
Philanthropy Today
Kansas Child Care Training Opportunities on the GMCF Community Hour Show Episode - 264
We spotlight KCCTO, a statewide Kansas initiative that delivers clock‑hour training, mental health support, and career pathways for early childhood professionals. Bronwyn Fees shares how a 65‑member team serves all 105 counties with online, virtual, and in‑person learning plus one‑to‑one career navigation.
• KCCTO’s mission and land‑grant roots
• Non‑credit clock‑hour training for licensing
• Scale of service across all 105 counties
• Director of groups and community conversations
• Mental health cohorts to reduce isolation
• Turnover drivers and workforce retention
• Statewide career pathway with stair‑step progression
• Career navigators for personalized guidance
• Simple access via phone and kccto.org
• Hub at Kansas State University with remote staff
Certainly, encourage our listeners to contact KCCTO if they have any other questions about getting into early childhood care and education or furthering their professional development
Philanthropy Today is brought to you by the Greater Manhattan Community Foundation. In this episode, we feature a recently broadcast segment of the GMCF Community Hour, as heard on News Radio KMAN.
SPEAKER_01:It is. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome to the GMCF Community Hour. Tell me a little bit about yourself.
SPEAKER_01:Well, thank you. I am a faculty member at Kansas State University in the early childhood education program, but I also have the pleasure of serving as Associate Dean for the College of Health and Human Sciences at Kansas State. And I also wear another hat as the principal investigator for the topic today, and that is Kansas Childcare Training Opportunities. It's a nonprofit sponsored project at Kansas State University.
SPEAKER_00:What is it?
SPEAKER_01:So we refer to it often as Casito.
SPEAKER_00:Casito.
SPEAKER_01:Casito, but that's because the title is fairly long, Kansas Childcare Training Opportunities.
SPEAKER_00:It's a lot of syllables.
SPEAKER_01:It is, it is, but it's easier that way than speaking the whole uh title, I guess. So as I said, we are a sponsored project of the College of Health and Human Sciences. We were founded uh in 1986 by a group of faculty members who were concerned about uh professional development for our early childhood workforce across the state of Kansas. We are um an outgrowth of the land grant mission at Kansas State University because we directly engage with the workforce across the state. We meet um professionals in all counties, all 105 counties across the across Kansas. Um we are unique, I guess, in that we are really the outreach, one of the outreach arms of the uh institution for early childhood education and and supporting the workforce. As people may also know that Kansas State University also has the pre-professional teacher education program and early childhood education, and also the extension specialist in early childhood is at Kansas State University. So we have a lot of a lot of programs and support for early childhood.
SPEAKER_00:How did this get started?
SPEAKER_01:It was, as I mentioned, started 40 years ago. So we're celebrating an anniversary here.
SPEAKER_00:Why are we just finding out about it here in 2025?
SPEAKER_01:Well, because we are, I am not sure. Um, because we're very humble, maybe we keep our our um eyes across the state of Kansas and working hard with professionals, but uh we don't always do a lot of self-promotion. But um there was originally a group of faculty members, a Dr. Steve Bowman in in um the College of Now Health and Human Sciences, were very concerned about supporting the early childhood uh workforce, making sure they had the professional development they needed. They worked with the state of Kansas for um for funding to provide at the time face-to-face training for professionals across the state. We still do face-to-face trainings, but the majority of our trainings and are um online or live virtual trainings. So um that we have expanded beyond just trainings uh to provide a lot of other services to our workforce uh beyond the in the 40 years. Um so if um if folks are interested in learning more about casido, certainly I have a lot more to share, but they uh can certainly go to our website at kccto. Um org.
SPEAKER_00:Gotcha. That's always good to have that reference, Andy. Which is why casido sounds so much phonetically, uh, you know, it's uh K-A-H-C-E-E-T-O-E. I like that. Yeah. You could have put T-O-W on there too. Would have been the same. So let's talk a bit about uh, you know, the you know, the the aspects of being involved in this program, the people that you're helping.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So um Casito has about 65 people now in our workforce, in our team. The Casito team is about 65. So we're spread across the the entire state of of Kansas. The focus is to provide uh support for those individuals who are providing early childhood care and education in any setting that they're in. That's so if they're in a center-based setting or a family home child care setting, if they are a direct service provider or let's say they're administrator, they're a director, our role is to provide uh education training for them. I should distinguish here that different from the uh academic program or the pre-professional teacher education program, which is a for-credit degree program, Casito's trainings are uh not for credit, they're uh non-credit bearing, they're clock hour trainings. So to provide um uh care early care and education in a licensed facility, all of the individuals must have clock hour training or professional development in order to provide care every year. So that is one of Casito's primary roles is to ensure that the uh workforce has access to that training. We're not the only trainer, but we do provide a significant amount of training across the year. For example, you will see on our website that we had over 37 uh,000 enrollments in 2024. So we're serving a great need for training or for professional development, and we touched over 13,000 learners across the state of Kansas just in 2024 alone. So, in addition to the um online trainings that we have, um, as well as um virtual trainings and some face-to-face trainings across the state, we also have uh uh support for directors, um, directors' groups and directors' uh trainings. We also provide uh community conversations for individuals in the um professionals across the state and their individual community. We have programs for what we call mental health cohorts that we can um that uh early childhood professionals can engage in to support them.
SPEAKER_00:Uh this is that that can be a real challenge at times.
SPEAKER_01:It can be. This is a field where they are often uh um working with very few other adults in their space, particularly if they're in their homes. So they have uh not a lot of interaction with other adults, but a lot of interaction with parents at the beginning, at the end of the day. And um, you know, the keeping our early childhood educators in the in the field is one of our um goals that there tends to be nationwide a a high turnover in early childhood care and education. Um there I've seen quotes up to 30 percent of the workforce is turns over. I don't have a figure for Kansas, we don't have a um a date, a data um point uh for our turnover, but it is fairly extensive. And one of the reasons for that is that um it's it's a work environment that is high demand but is low wage. And so the um having the mental health cohorts for early childhood professionals gives them an extra source of support when they need uh other adults to talk to, other providers who are uh in you know providing the same kinds of services and and have a sense of community with one another and to share ideas and and support for one another.
SPEAKER_00:So that's I bet that's a key factor to the success of anybody that's in the childcare industry.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a very um it's a very emotional job, if you will, because we're working with groups of children, whether you've got a group of six or a group of ten children, they are all individual children with individual needs.
SPEAKER_00:And so sometimes parents can be the bigger challenge.
SPEAKER_01:Well, our parents are always concerned about their children and they are always looking out for their best interest. And so, yes, every parent wants to be able to talk to their child care professional, find out what's happening with their child. Um, how can we collaborate to uh provide the best care for our children, not only in that environment, but when they go home at the end of the day, what are they experiencing at home that we can bring back into that environment to be as consistent as possible in the types of experiences that they have? I think our early childhood professionals are providing a lot of support, not only for those children, but for the families that that come to them.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I've only touched on a few.
SPEAKER_00:I was gonna say we don't necessarily have all the time in order to talk about some of these things. But what about some success stories that you have that you can share with us? Um what or or maybe let me rephrase that, or some of the things that you're most proud of?
SPEAKER_01:Well, yes, that we have a couple of success stories, I think, on behalf of our early childhood workforce that I am excited to share with you. Um and I know that I'm going to exclude some by by just sharing a few. But one of the initi a couple of initiatives, actually, but one in particular that we are working on with this as a partner with the state of Kansas is a career pathway for early childhood professionals. The state of Kansas designed an initial what we call career pathway that will provide a clear ladder for our early childhood professionals from high school through professional development opportunities as well as going through higher education in order to earn a credential. So we we have a, it's on our website now, we have a stair-step um process that helps early childhood professionals see where they are in their training and experience and where they can go next for further professional development. We also have a set of career navigators because this is a for many, if they're not in the higher ed space on a regular basis, that's kind of an unknown, a difficult space at first to navigate. And so we have individuals through Kansas Childcare training opportunities that we call career navigators that early childhood professionals can contact, and they will work with them directly on looking at where they are in their current professional development and their experience and helping them see what are next steps that they can take in order to either get additional professional development or to go on for a degree at one of our very fine institutions of higher education here in the state of Kansas. This has been an ongoing, highly collaborative process with state agencies here in Kansas, as well as our institutions of higher education. And we've also had some national um collaborators, partners that have helped us think through what works and what isn't maybe uh as helpful. So that is something that I'm very excited to share with you. And I would certainly encourage our listeners to look at the Casito website for that career pathway and to learn more about the career navigators that are out there that we're very interested in providing that individualized support for the um professionals in early childhood care and education.
SPEAKER_00:What's that process like for an individual to go through Casito to get involved in the program?
SPEAKER_01:All you need to do is to uh call Casito directly or look on the website um and um and contact through them. They will, we have of course people that are staffed on the phones and they will uh be very happy to talk with with you and then get you connected with the right people to help you in in uh address the questions that you have.
SPEAKER_00:So how many different locations do you have as hubs, so to speak, state?
SPEAKER_01:Well, our main hub is on the campus at Kansas State University. We are located in Kedsee Hall on the second floor. Very appreciative to the collaborations that we have with the College of Health and Human Sciences that provides the space for us. Um people could go to campus uh and and go to the second floor of Kedsy to meet some of the casito team. Um, but much of our team is across the state. They are working remotely, so they're they're in community, they're in across the state. So I would encourage individuals probably the uh to call or to look on the website, either one of those, and then they will connect you with the people that you need to visit with. They may not necessarily be located right here in Manhattan. Um, we certainly serve the Manhattan, Riley County, Gary County area with our trainings, just like we do across the state. But I think the phone call is probably the easiest, and you don't have to deal with the parking on campus.
SPEAKER_00:I don't know what you mean by that. Hey, Bromwin, this has been great. Thank you for sharing more about Casito. And uh that website once again is kccto.org. Anything else you want to touch base on before we leave?
SPEAKER_01:Um This is such a uh uh an exciting field of uh of um professional development. I'm very appreciative to have this opportunity to visit with you. Certainly encourage our listeners to contact Casito if they have any other questions about getting into early childhood care and education or furthering their professional development. Um we have a lot of initiatives and opportunities to serve the workforce.
SPEAKER_00:You're doing good work.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for joining us here. Bronwyn Fees is her name, principal investigator with Kansas Child Care, Kansas Child Care Training Opportunities, better known as Casito, the website kccto.org. Jana Ukrajenko is in the hallway. She is waiting, and she is going to be stepping in the studio to bring us up to date on some things that are happening in the community and give you a preview of what we got going on next week here on the GMCF Community Hour that we do every Monday morning at 10, brought to you by the Greater Manhattan Community Foundation. Find out more about the foundation's work at mcfks.org. Back on K Man in a moment.