Kimberly Boynton on preparing children for success

Join us for a deep dive into the Building Strong Brains initiative, a transformative project dedicated to early childhood development in Elkhart County. Hosted by Marshall King and Kevin Deary, this episode features insights from Dr. Kimberly Boynton on engaging parents as key partners in their children's education. Understand the critical role of parental involvement in ensuring kindergarten readiness and the comprehensive support system being established to make resources accessible and practical for families.

00:00:26: Introduction of Doctor Kimberly Boynton

00:00:36: Doctor Boynton's role and responsibilities

00:01:01: Focus of the Coalition: Building Strong Brains

00:01:37: Genesis and evolution of the coalition

00:02:54: Importance of mindset shifts for parents

00:03:29: Elkhart County early childhood skills and research

00:05:05: Selection and collaboration with partners

00:06:39: Systemic approach to early childhood development

00:08:19: Example of collaboration: Kindergarten readiness tool

00:09:42: Partnership with Tamarack Institute

00:11:13: Importance of early childhood development

00:14:51: Doctor Boynton's background and transition to coalition work

00:16:14: Leadership skills in coalition building

00:18:03: Doctor Boynton's book on building language-rich environments

00:19:34: Challenges in running a coalition

00:20:56: Support for parents and connection to resources

00:22:52: Introduction to policy changes in Elkhart County

00:23:31: Capacity and support structure

00:24:12: Ten-year systemic plan for Building Strong Brains

00:25:01: Working together in Elkhart County

00:25:44: Healthcare collaboration and maternal health

00:26:52: Funding and grant opportunities

00:28:01: Importance of early childhood readiness

00:30:11: Advice for parents to prepare children for kindergarten

00:31:01: What gives hope for the future

00:31:35: Show credits and acknowledgments

This show is a production of the Community Foundation of Elkhart County. It is powered by equipment from Sweetwater and recorded in The Riverbend building in Elkhart's River District. Editing is done by the award-winning communication students at Goshen College, home of one of the best college radio stations in the nation. Listen to Globe Radio at 91.1 FM. Learn more about the Community Foundation of Elkhart County at inspiringgood.org You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Music is provided by Sensational Sounds. Thanks for listening. We hope you are inspired and inspire good and your community.

Transcript

Marshall King:
Today, our guest is Dr. Kimberly Boynton, who is the coalition director of building Strong Brains, the early childhood initiative at the Community foundation of Elkhart County. With a lot of other partners in her role, she is responsible for convening stakeholders, providing leadership, and facilitating efforts in order to increase early childhood development and education in Elkhart County. Kim is a speech pathologist, educator, and beloved and trusted colleague at the community foundation. Welcome, Kim. 

Kim Boynton:
It's great to be here with both of you. 

Kevin Deary:
Good morning, Dr. Boynton. 

Kim Boynton:
Good morning. 

Kevin Deary:
I think I'm going to start out the conversation with your focus of your work here at the Community foundation, which is building a coalition for building strong brains. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is? 

Kim Boynton:
Yes. So it's a really exciting initiative that brings together partners in our community who are doing great early childhood work already. And it's our organizational partners, it's stakeholders in the community, it's parents. It's really a community collective effort to ensure that children are building strong brains here in Elkhart County. 

Kevin Deary:
Now, you've put together this coalition, but what was the genesis of this? 

Kim Boynton:
Yeah. So early childhood work is not new to Elkhart County. We've been working on early childhood for many, many years and have great efforts. And we know that we have partners who are doing great work and getting great programmatic outcomes. But in 2019, a discussion started about the kids and families committee here at the community foundation, naming a priority. And through their work, they identified early childhood education and development as a priority. As a result of that, there was discussion around bringing together partners and how we build this coalition and collective effort to bring this work together, break down some silos and barriers. And so the work progressed with a book study with a small group of people around the idea of how we approach this systematically rather than programmatically. And then we started a design team that lasted about 18 months where we built the design of a theory of change and what we think we need to do to improve those outcomes. And now we've developed, we've moved from that idea to action, and we're starting to move into some mindset shifts as. 

Kevin Deary:
It pertains to parents. How would they understand how it relates to their children? 

Kim Boynton:
Sure. So we know that parents are the experts on their children, and so we know that parents want the best for their children, that parenting is hard, at times rewarding and exciting, but also hard. And so parents can relate to this in that we are trying to ensure that there's accessibility and affordability and knowledge of these resources in the community that they can access so that they can support their child in the best way for them. 

Kevin Deary:
And we understand that 50% of children are not prepared coming into kindergarten. Could you talk about that? 

Kim Boynton:
Sure. So Elkhart County developed about eight years ago in collaboration with the leadership of Horizon Education alliance and kindergarten teachers here in Elkhart County. And they developed the early childhood skills inventory and that looks at non academic skills. So physical development as well as a child's ability to interact with their environment, and we know that those are important for learning. And so what we found through our research and data collection over the last eight years is only about 40% to 42% of children have all six of those skills going into kindergarten. And we know that we want children to have those skills that so when they arrive at kindergarten, they're ready to learn and thrive. 

Marshall King:
Kim, you name six skills. I don't know if you can name them off the top of your head or not, but even a few of them, because I think they're really interesting. Like you talked that that's academic and social, but like, what are we talking about when you're looking, when you're assessing that whether a child's ready? 

Kim Boynton:
Sure. So I will give you a few of them. One of them is following directions. So we know in order to learn and do life, you have to be able to follow directions. So can a child follow directions within different environments? Can they interact with peers and adults? Can they navigate the utensils that are needed for writing? And so we want to understand that children have those skills so that they can learn and grow and thrive. 

Kevin Deary:
You talked about bringing a collection of partners together. How did you, what was the criteria for selecting them? And maybe can you name some of the partners? 

Kim Boynton:
Sure. So we have a lot of partners. Our initial team that looked at this were our organizational sponsors, our founding organizational sponsors. So the Community foundation of Elkhart County, Crossroads United Way, the source, hosted by Oaklawn, Horizon Education alliance and CAPs, these organizational sponsors came together and committed to this work for at least a decade because we know this is long work. And they all also said they committed at an organizational level, both their time, their talent and their financial. And so that's going to be really important as we move forward with this work. We've since added six additional organizational sponsors to that group. So Elkhart County Health Department and Goshen Health, Beacon Health, Goshen College, Heart City Health and Maple City Health have come together as organizational sponsors. I want to highlight, though, that it goes far beyond the organizational sponsors. Well over 200 people engaged in this work right now coming to the table across at least 60 organizations. So everyone is engaging at the level that they're. That they can, and they want to, and that makes sense for their organization. We also have parents and individual stakeholders coming together from the community. There's really no limit in who can engage in this work. 

Kevin Deary:
So you talked about a building a systemic long view to this problem. So can you talk a little about the difference between what many of us have done in the industry as far as each of us doing our own strategies and tactics to build and support young kids coming into school? But what's a systemic look like? And ten years is a long time for an initiative. So maybe you can talk a little bit about why this systemic view. 

Kim Boynton:
Sure. So we know this is long work and it's complex work, and we would have solved all of this if we could have by now. We need to look at things differently, and that's what led us to this thinking of a systems approach. So, again, we know we have partners in Elkhart County that are doing great work and are getting great programmatic outcomes, but it's not reaching a population level. We know that we need to work together differently, and we need to change some mindsets around early childhood in order to shift the system. And that's really what we're trying to do, is shift outcomes in three areas. So maternal and child health, in quality childcare and early learning environments, and in community supports for children and families. We believe, as a community of partners and stakeholders, that if we can shift those outcomes in a positive direction, that we will see kindergarten readiness increase. 

Marshall King:
Kim, there's a lot of collaboration happening here, and Kevin asked this great question about, like, everybody's kind of doing their own thing, and how do you change that to where it's a systemic thing? I mean, there's a story about a readiness tool that you've told, and it's appeared in the building strong Brains newsletters, which people should sign up for, and we'll tell them how at the end, but tell a story about, like, how this collaboration happened with this one example of this tool that somebody needed. 

Kim Boynton:
Absolutely. So the fun part about this work is that people are sitting next to get next to each other in rooms, and they're just having conversations. So we're doing the building strong brains work, but there's also time afterwards for them to collaborate. And an example of that was there was Caitlin Wynn, who works at Bristol elementary, said, I need a checklist for parents around kindergarten readiness. What are some things I can tell them that would be helpful for them to do at home. And we knew through the work that we were doing that Sonia Overman at the Elkhart Public Library already was using a tool like this. So the two of them started speaking to each other. And as a result, we put out a kindergarten checklist that is an informal way for parents to just know what are some things I could be doing with my child at home to get them ready for that next step of kindergarten? And that was an example that was within, but outside of the focus of that action team and resulted in an actual product that reaches parents and children. 

Kevin Deary:
Talk to me a little bit about tamarick. The Tamaric Institute, and I believe they're in Canada. 

Kim Boynton:
They are. 

Kevin Deary:
How did you find them? What do they do? And what's their impact on BSB? 

Kim Boynton:
Yeah. So this early group that I talked about that came together and did the book study, said, this work is hard, it's complex. We have some learning to do, and we can't do this alone. And we knew we could call upon an expert in systems work to help us with that. And so some organizations and firms were interviewed, and at the end of that, the result was Tamarack Institute was selected. And Tamarack Institute does work for the last 20 years in poverty remediation across Canada. And they've had a lot of success with systems shifting, and they had a lot of tools developed that helps with convening and facilitating and how you do this new type of thinking and working. And so we are very fortunate that Liz Weaver, the co CEO of Tamarack, got interested in our work and has been really walking along this journey with us, supporting us through our design phase, our development of our theory of change. And now, as we're moving into action and mindset shifts, she continues to challenge us and provide us with tools that will help us move forward. The exciting part is we've been able to bring some of those tools, workshops, training, to Elkhart County, to our partners, so that we're also building capacity around. What does systems work mean? How might we work differently here in Elkhart County? 

Kevin Deary:
What do you see when children are coming into either pre k or khdem? What are they missing? Exactly? And what do you see across the board? And is there a specific focus on poverty? Or is it just across the board, looking at all students who are not coming in prepared? 

Kim Boynton:
So I think what we want is we want all children in Elkhart County to be born, to thrive here in Elkhart County. And so whatever that means for individual families may look different. And our job is to really figure out what that is, what they need, what opportunities, what parent supports, what access to prenatal and early healthcare. Because we know if all of those things happen that we will have children that are ready to thrive. And so I think we're continuing to learn and we will continue to learn about the barriers that families are facing. And also understanding those pieces of are the things that we're putting out there. Are they working for families? Because we can come up with a lot of ideas, but they have to work for the families here in Elkhart County. 

Marshall King:
So I'm going to ask a little bit of what might sound like a cynical question. It's like if a child gets to kindergarten, it's in theory the beginning of their formal educational career. They can catch up. There's lots of time. They have twelve years to get all the skills that they need before they get it. High school diploma. Why does this matter so much? 

Kim Boynton:
Sure. So as a speech language pathologist and a person who's worked in early childhood for a long time, I believe that we want children to arrive feeling ready and feeling prepared, because we all know if we arrive somewhere and we're not prepared, that experience is very different. And now we are trying to catch up all the time rather than being able to accept experience, the here and the now. And so I think if we can provide that for children and for families, we want families to arrive to kindergarten feeling prepared and supported. In Elkhart County, I want to be. 

Marshall King:
Clear, I was playing devil's advocate, but it matters for this community and it matters for the long term success, because those early years, there's more and more research about how really, truly important those early years are. Like, you probably have that research cold, but the value and power of those early years, you can't go back in time, and it is hard to catch up. 

Kim Boynton:
Right? And so I have a statistic that I continue to reference back to, and it's that 1 million neural connections are made every second during those early years. And so we think about that, and then when we get past the early childhood years, it doesn't mean that we don't have neural pathways that are connecting. It just means that we're starting to prune and make those neural connections more efficient. So think about that. Think of all those neural connections that are happening during those early childhood years and what a child is missing if they don't have those experiences or they're experiencing trauma. And so we have to think about that piece of their life, too, is what are those early experiences and how do we help parents. So another piece of research that comes out is around serve in return. And that really is about the interactions between a parent and a child. And if we think about families that might be experiencing trauma or stress, it's hard to engage in those positive serve and returns that are building those neural connections that are going to be needed for later learning. 

Kevin Deary:
So, Doctor Boynton, your background is in speech. I think I may need you. Speech pathology. You've worked a lot with public schools, higher education. What attracted you to this work? 

Kim Boynton:
Oh, that's such an interesting question. So I have continued to say I started my career saying I would be a preschool or early childhood speech language pathologist forever, that that's what I was going to do. And I remember sitting in my first interview and saying that I don't want to do anything different. And the person that interviewed me laughs to this day because he says, I wondered if that was really going to be true. And I've always just been really open to understanding more and I love to learn. And so my path has taken me. It's kept me in early childhood, but taken me on a different trajectory. And each one of those stops has really led me to the next. And I think that's very true of this work. I have, over the years, seen families that want the best for their child. I couldn't always come up with the solutions, even with just talking with community partners. And so when this opportunity presented itself to come together in a new way, learn together, innovative way, to do things differently and really reach families in a new and innovative way that will be sustainable for positive impact, I couldn't say no to that. 

Kevin Deary:
What are some of the skill sets that are needed? I've led an organization and I've led it through many different times, good times, hard times. But leading a coalition has different leadership skills. Leadership skills I don't think I personally would be good at. But I look at you and how smoothly you have built and have moved and have grown this coalition. It's a different kind of leadership that personally, I find exciting to watch how you work, particularly how you build teams. Could you talk a little bit about the leadership skills specific to developing and moving a coalition? 

Kim Boynton:
Yeah. So thank you. That was very kind. I give a lot of credit to our partners. So we bring partners together who have different perspectives. There may be competition there. They may not know each other's programs well, and we really bring them together and provide an opportunity and facilitate questions that lead the experts, the true experts, to come together and be able to come up with solutions to think differently. We provide that space, and I think that inviting people to the table and really helping them understand where. Where they might engage, that makes sense for them. So everybody engages differently, and everybody has a different reason and a perspective, and so we are able to help them figure that out. A big part of leading a coalition is keeping the work moving forward and making sure that we continue to ask the questions and receive the feedback, too. Our partners have expertise and talents that help us be better as a community. 

Kevin Deary:
Wow. You are so smooth. You should write a book. Wait, in fact, you have written a book, and I believe it's almost done. Can you tell us a little bit about your book? 

Kim Boynton:
Sure. So the book that I am publishing soon is a partnership with a local audiologist. And my work prior to coming here was really around building language rich environments. And one of the pieces that is related to that is auditory processing and a child's ability to process the language and auditory information that is coming into their system. And what we know, again, is that if we build those strong connections through our interactions early, then a child has a stronger ability to process that information moving forward, and we all use those skills in our everyday life. And so that book is really going to focus on how do you build a positive and impactful early auditory environment. 

Kevin Deary:
I think that is so important for the basis of building strong brains is if they have auditory issues coming in or sight issues, hard to read or it's hard to hear and to comprehend, particularly in the brain. I love the fact that you're working with another professional in exploring that and coming up with tactics and strategies and educating the people, especially parents in schools, on how to work with these children before we can even begin to build their strong brains. So we talked about connecting with parents. We talked about connecting with partners. You have such a large coalition that's really vast, with many different facets to it. What are the challenges of running a coalition? 

Kim Boynton:
Sure. So I think we want to keep the momentum going, and we want to ensure that we are action oriented so we can sit around and talk about this for days and days, but what are we actually doing that's action oriented? And I think then pushing towards behavior and mindset shift, because we know in systems work that there's layers to this. There is changes in policy and practices, there is the importance of building connections and relationships. But if we really want to see transformational change, we have to change mindsets. Born to thrive in Elkhart County for all babies, has to become the narrative of what we do. And so I think continuing to push towards that. And also, I think, ensuring that individuals who are engaged feel like they're engaged in the right place, and that might change over ten years. So we've already had examples of coalition partners who have come to me and said, the project over there is actually more aligned to the work I'm doing now. And now that we're, we've got this project moving forward, can I move over there? And the answer is, of course, yes. Let's figure this out together. I also think a challenge is we are tackling some big barriers, and so we have to be able to sit with the data and understand the data better and realize that through our conversations, through our continued learning, that we will come up with the solutions. But it might not be today right now. 

Marshall King:
So a listener or a parent may be listening and going, well, I work hard with my kids. I read to them. I do the things I'm supposed to do. But I could really use some help on the early childhood childcare pre k preschool front. It's expensive. It's challenging for families to be able to afford that. That's not entirely what this work is about. Right. You've talked about the difference between the state level and how the state of Indiana would need to make some changes, and then how we're doing that on a practical level in Elkhart County. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Kim Boynton:
Sure. So first, I would say that if parents are needing support, we have, we are a resource rich community in Elkhart County, and so reaching out to those partners who do this kind of work, and one way that parents can get connected to some of these programmatic pieces is through our newsletter. And you can sign up for that at our website. So www. DoT buildingstrongbrains. And if you go to that website and you sign up for that newsletter, we're putting out information about programs that are happening in Elkhart County. So I think that is one way parents can get connected. There are also opportunities through organizations that parents are already interacting with to ask for that support and those we're working to build strength in those connections so that there can be referrals and there can be connections for families. We are also engaged in regional and state work. We know there are things that we can do here in Elkhart County, but we also know that there are things that are going to have to be policy changes at a bigger level. And so we're currently engaged. I sit with a group of coalition directors and leaders across the state to look at policy changes and what needs to be done. And we've engaged with policy equity group, who's a group who has done a lot of work around early childhood policy, and they're helping to guide us and build that policy platform that allows. Allows us to have a broader message regionally. We're interacting with the counties around us who are doing this work because we're better together and we can share and learn from each other. 

Kevin Deary:
How much capacity does building strong brains have? 

Kim Boynton:
So our backbone support is. There are a limited number of us. So there's me, the director. There is our administrative coordinator, Melinda, who our action teams interact with on a regular basis. Our chief program officer, Candy Yoder, does some of that work with us. She helps lead some of those teams. And then we just hired an assistant director, Brian Replogle, who started in August. And so we're very busy ensuring that we can provide the backbone support at the level that allows the community to continue to do this important work and move it forward. 

Kevin Deary:
When you look at this is a ten year systemic view of moving a lot of corporations and people all moving in one direction for building strong grains. Sounds small, but it is a huge undertaking. What happens after ten years? 

Kim Boynton:
Yeah. So I think there's a couple things that we need to keep in mind. Again, we have great partners doing great work in Elkhart County and understanding their values and their needs and the work that they're doing, because we can't do this without the work that they're already doing. I think we're coming together and trying to build a strong network that is sustainable after ten years. So we want people to. How are we working differently together in Elkhart County? How are we leveraging and aligning our time, our expertise, our funding, so that we can reach families in a new way along with the work that's being done. Where are there barriers? There's things that we can do alone, but there's things we have to do together. 

Marshall King:
So there's a lot of different groups meeting. There are practitioners, you know, this. This work started with some parent groups you named, you know, the eleven, you know, organizational, you know, coalition partners. But in that list, they're like, there's some. These are significant organizations in Elkhart County. Four of them are healthcare organizations who are coming together to support this work. That really intrigues me. Can you say a little bit about how that's going and how those healthcare organizations are even collaborating on this? 

Kim Boynton:
Yeah. So we have this action team called Maternal and Child Health Action Team, and they've done some root cause analysis around what are the barriers to prenatal and early childhood child care and also maternal health care. And through that kind of root cause analysis, we realized we need to bring together some healthcare leaders because there's going to have to be some discussion around policies and how we work together. So our two hospital systems and our two federally qualified health care systems and our health department have come together and really just looked at data and said, how can we do this differently? How can we build connections? They're both going to continue to do the work that they do, but there are ways that we can come together and collaborate in new ways that allows us to improve accessibility for families and build awareness of the importance of this early care for child and families. 

Kevin Deary:
No one likes to really talk money, but this takes money to do this. And just generally speaking, how are you funded? 

Kim Boynton:
Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that the kids and Families committee at the Community foundation set a priority of early childhood, and so there are funds from the community foundation that support this work. We also actively pursue grant opportunities for various projects for the overall systems work to be able to move this work forward. A couple of examples of that are we are in year two of a grant through early learning Indiana called the Early Years Initiative grant. And the exciting thing about that grant was it's a collaborative grant. It was between multiple organizations. We submitted the grant, the Community foundation submitted the grant on behalf of these organizations to do the important work that they do. We also received a planning grant from Lilly that is allowing us to do some research, do some training, learn more so that we can progress this work forward, and we will continue to actively pursue appropriate grant applications. 

Kevin Deary:
There seems to be a general excitement about building strong brains. And I give you and your team a huge credit for awareness, for the marketing, the communication, but also a sense of urgency that we're losing too many kids coming into elementary kindergarten that are so ill prepared. And as much as parents would love to think that they're within twelve years, they'll magically get it. That's really not a strategy that's going to lead to success for that individual child. So I love the concept of bringing in the Calvary, everyone who has expertise, from speech pathologists to the kindergarten teacher to even the parents who know their child. And I look at that system and the systemic of care, and I wonder who's missing. When you look at this and you look at all these resources, do you see something or somebody that's missing? 

Kim Boynton:
I think the coalition has continued to grow authentically. And so I believe that we will continue to bring people in from sectors we have a pretty wide representation, but we'll continue to build partnerships in all of those sectors, and it's inclusive. Anybody can join in this work and we would welcome them. Or if they just want to learn more about it, they can reach out to me and I am happy to help them learn more and talk about ways that they can plug in. We know that we're going to need partners, continued partnership from healthcare and early childhood and government, and we will continue to build those partnerships and maintain and sustain them. Most importantly, I've been around a long. 

Kevin Deary:
Time working with kids and I am so excited to see this kind of quality of depth and width. So this is very impressive. The coalition you put together, the sense of urgency they have, and they're wanting as a group to actually move the dial for children for all the right reasons. And Doctor Poynton, we're so grateful to have had you today, but I think Marshall has a follow up question. 

Marshall King:
I have two this time, but the first one is, give me three things parents can do to help get their kids ready for arriving in kindergarten. 

Kim Boynton:
Yeah. So I think reading to your child or interacting with books is really one way that you can do that, ensuring that your, your child is interacting with you. So have fun with them. It should be a lot of fun. And whether that is making a recipe or playing outdoors, you can do any of those things. And I think really just ensuring that you are talking to the professionals who are in your life about how your child's doing and get ideas from them or give them ideas on what you think your child needs. And just remember, as a parent, you are the expert on your child. 

Marshall King:
That's great advice. Last question. What gives you hope? 

Kim Boynton:
Oh, I have so much hope. This work is hard and it's complex, but I am humbled every day to sit at tables with experts who have come together and said, we want all babies to be born to thrive in Elkhart County. And the commitment and the determination and the willingness to ask the hard questions and do the hard things, because we believe we will make this mindset shift and it will be sustainable and children will learn and thrive in Elkhart County.