Parents and early child care providers poured into UVI’s St. Croix Campus on Monday for the first day of the 13th Annual Best Beginnings Early Childhood Conference.
The yearly conference was started in part by Ellie Hirsh, director of Family Connection at Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands, along with a group of other professionals who cared deeply about early child care and intervention.
“We needed an opportunity to get together as professionals and interact, share expert advice, and recognize how children learn, and to bring the top research into practice,” she said.
The event has grown from over a hundred participants to more than 1,000 in the past few years. Nearly 350 people attended the first session of the conference, and although several child care professionals registered, parents and Head Start provided most of the participants because it closed its centers for the first day to ensure maximum involvement, according to Hirsh.
Erin Oldham LaChance from Oldham Innovative Research in Maine kicked off Monday’s events with a powerful keynote address focusing on the value of high-quality education and how an ordinary activity can be turned into a "high-quality event" by having rich conversations.
Next, participants filtered into the classrooms for various workshops during the two morning sessions. After an island-style lunch at UVI’s Cafetorium, attendees finished afternoon workshops in session three.
After a double session in the morning of “Puzzles & Problem Solving,” Hirsh taught a second workshop about taking positive approaches to strengthen families with the intended message of helping families avoid the possibility of youth abuse and neglect.
In another room, Michelle Sebastian-Simon and Antoinette Boissiere showed a series of short films on how to use room arrangements as a teaching strategy. They explained that most children thrive when they are surrounded in a positive environment and showed that how rooms are arranged can play a role on how children behave.
An additional workshop, taught by Elizabeth Jaeger, an associate professor of Saint Joseph’s University in Pennsylvania, focused on the role of attachment in young children. The session gave an overview of attachment relationships and how important they are in playing a role in the development of children.
As if on cue, a young mother holding a six-month-old baby, piped up and explained the reason for her bringing the child to class: when she went to drop her off at the day care, the baby screamed with separation anxiety.
“Children really depend on the physical presence of someone who is their caretaker,” Jaeger said.
Martha Raphael, who works with the Department of Education and has attended the conference every year, said she learned a lot the first day. “It has been absolutely wonderful!” she exclaimed.
One parent, Charlene Creighton, who brought her two young children to the conference, said that she has come for the past few years and it has really helped how she raises her kids.
“It was really good today…. People always told me that my son would be developmentally delayed because he had heart surgery when he was young; but he’s doing fine, and this conference has helped me realize that,” she said.
The conference runs from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Tuesday on St. Croix, then Thursday and Friday at the UVI Sports and Fitness Center on St. Thomas.
The conference is jointly sponsored by the departments of Human Services, Health, and Education; University of the Virgin Islands; Lutheran Social Services; Community Foundation of the Virgin Islands; and the Children and Families Council Conflict Resolution Organization for Peace, Inc.
