Setting Early Childhood Education Career Goals
SPONSORED BLOG The task of sitting down and writing out all of your early childhood education career goals can feel daunting. Where should you start? How far in the future should you plan? And, once...
“Caring and learning go hand in hand at Kids Villa,” says Hwaida Hassanein. She runs the company’s five centers, along with her parents, husband and two siblings. Her sister is the centers’ attorney, her brother is the CFO, and her husband manages all the IT needs. “We are a family-owned and operated business,” says Hwaida’s mother Mimi. And it shows in the way Mimi thinks of an early childhood teacher’s role. “You’re almost like a mom for them,” Mimi says. “You really have to care for them since warm feelings make a huge difference in how children develop.”
So do warm, inviting surroundings, Hwaida explains. “That’s why we designed all our centers to look like beautiful mansions with cathedral ceilings, lots of windows and natural lighting. If children are going to spend an entire day in a classroom, they should enjoy being there. So, we wanted our centers to be like a child’s second home,” she says. Her goal was to combine the most rigorous standards of teaching with the greatest respect for all cultures.
That matters for the diverse families Kids Villa serves in Montgomery County, Maryland, and its environs. Many are immigrants like Mimi, who came to the U.S. from Egypt over 50 years ago. She knows the challenges newcomers face when they first arrive here, and she has solutions. “I’ve always believed education is your passport into integration. If you want to fit in, you need to have an education,” she says. “You should also be sure to learn about your new home and serve the community as a volunteer.”
Mimi has done that as a longtime advocate for children who believes in “building bridges between families of different cultures.” After her marriage to a businessman, also from Egypt, and the birth of their first child, she joined the PTA. At the time, she didn’t speak English too well, but she built bonds by bringing her wonderful, homemade baklava to PTA meetings. Baking gave her a platform to broadcast her message of diversity and inclusion. “You have to educate teachers and parents before you can educate the children,” Mimi says. “All children should feel happy, safe and secure in the classroom,” she insisted as a committed member of the PTA.
Mimi has continued speaking out for diversity as a staunch community activist and advocate for multicultural education. She currently serves as senior fellow and Middle Eastern community liaison for Montgomery County, a position she’s held since 2014. Before that, she served with many other groups, including Montgomery County’s Child Care Commission, EXCEL Beyond the Bell Program for Montgomery County Youth and the Montgomery County Muslim Council. As a board member of Empowered Women International, she helped low-income immigrant and refugee women living in the Greater DC Metro area feel at home in the U.S. and become financially self-sufficient.
Mimi also gave her children the tools to succeed and urged them to start their own business, as Hwaida would do after earning a degree in international day care management and a certification in early childhood education. She wanted to find a way to work while staying faithful to her religion and her roots. The Muslim culture with which she grew up reveres a woman’s role as a mother and manager of the family “So, my goal was to open and run a child care center where I could also raise my own kids,” Hwaida says. And she had her family’s complete support.
“In 1996, my mother, father and I built our first day care from the ground up,” Hwaida recalls. “My father arranged for the construction, my mom connected us with the community, and I designed a curriculum based on respect for each child’s unique interests and needs. While teaching in the program, I would always tell the children that this is not just my classroom. It’s also your classroom. So, what would you like to see going on in it? Our daily schedule is not law, it’s a guide.”
But it was hard for Hwaida to find teachers who shared her ideas since everyone was used to the old approach of handing out ditto sheets and having children sit in assigned places all day long. “I wanted teachers who would share my belief that we are the next best thing to mom. So, I called on people I knew in our Muslim community. I found a lot of good-hearted people, and they just needed to be certified and trained.”
So, in 2001, Hwaida started H&H Child Care Training Center, and since then she has trained over 10,000 people in the Muslim community throughout Maryland and Virginia. “Now they’re family child care providers and directors of child care centers,” she says. “Normally, these women would have stayed home and simply filled their traditional roles as wives and mothers. But the training has opened up a chance for them to have an income and hold jobs to which they could bring their kids. They’re still taking care of their children, but they’re taking care of other people’s children, too.”
Many of these women have succeeded in ways they never imagined, Hwaida explains. “We had Amal, a student from Pakistan, some time ago. She couldn’t have any children of her own and that’s hard in our culture, which expects women to be moms. Her husband had left her, and she came to our training center broken. At the time, she didn’t speak much English, so I walked her through the process of getting her degree sent from Pakistan and gave her the added training she needed to be a teacher here. Now she’s a completely different person. Her English is fluent, she feels empowered, and she directs a large government child care center that serves a diverse body of families. All the children there call her Mama Amal, and she’s well known beyond the Muslim community from which she comes.”
So is Hwaida since she has expanded to serve a diverse body of rising teachers worldwide, now 20,000 in all, including the initial Muslim contingent. H&H has offices in Maryland, Florida and Cairo that offer both online and in-person classes. “We mostly give CDA® training,” Hwaida says, “because we value the way it connects coursework to practice in the classroom. We offer coaching and mentoring through all steps of the CDA® process from the coursework to applying for the credential. I encourage all my teachers at Kids Villa to earn it,” Hwaida says, and H&H makes that convenient for all the CDA® candidates it serves. “Besides having a training and mentoring division, we have a PD Specialist on staff who can do observations in the classroom, and we partner with PD Specialists in different states. All this makes us sort of a one-stop shop for the CDA®.”
H&H is also able to customize training to fill the specific needs of different child care programs, Hwaida explains. “For example, the director of a preschool recently called me to say she was having trouble getting her staff to cooperate and treat each other with respect. So, the director and I brainstormed to come up with training that would address her situation,” and it didn’t take long. “We can design a training and have it approved in seven to 10 business days,” Hwaida says. “And I’m super excited that we can offer child care centers exactly what they need right now.”
In addition, H&H offers a wide range of timely, standard courses—professionalism, child development, health, safety, nutrition, curriculum, special needs and more—that cover everything teachers need to be licensed. And it’s all in 52 languages to meet the needs of the diverse folks that H&H serves. “Our training is sensitive to the customs and restrictions of all groups,” as Hwaida explains. “For example, when we provide in-person training for Muslim women we send the word out to the community that there won’t be any men in the training, and we provide Arabic-speaking trainers.” In addition, H&H respects the dress codes and customs of an Amish school where it provides in-person training, and an Orthodox Jewish preschool it serves in the Baltimore, Maryland, suburbs.
“Orthodox Jews are very strict about their Saturday Sabbath,” Hwaida says, “so we offer them training on Sundays. We also send trainers who speak Hebrew and the trainers wear skirts like the women they serve. Orthodox Jewish women, much like their Muslim counterparts, are very modest in their dress and cover their hair,” Hwaida explains, “since they believe a woman’s beauty should be for her husband’s eyes alone.”
This keen awareness of different cultures is one of the beauties of H&H training. So is the way it changes life for young women like Suzy, another one of Hwaida’s big successes. “Suzy came to us as a teacher’s aide at the age of 16,” Hwaida recalls. “When she was 19, she married a member of the U.S. Armed Forces and quickly got pregnant. When Suzy’s husband went to Afghanistan, Kids Villa watched her infant while she went through our training to become a teacher. As time passed, Suzy’s husband was often away on active duty, so she was largely on her own. Yet she was able to teach for us and earn her AA because we watched her five children. We had Suzy with us for 15 years until her husband came home for good. Then they moved to Florida, where she’s now the director of her own child care center. And we like to think that we were a one-stop shop for her on the road to success.”
Women like Suzy are proof that H&H “builds bridges to a world of learning,” our motto as Hwaida explains. “We connect our training to people’s philosophies, cultures and needs,” so they have the tools to open up the world for young children. “With the right teacher and the right support, young children can do anything,” Mimi adds. So, she and Hwaida want to use the businesses they’ve built to make that true for children of all backgrounds. At H&H Training and Kids Villa, reverence for good teaching and respect for tradition go hand in hand.
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Vice President of People and Culture
Janie Payne is the Vice President of People and Culture for the Council for Professional Recognition. Janie is responsible for envisioning, developing, and executing initiatives that strategically manage talent and culture to align people strategies with the overarching business vision of the Council. Janie is responsible for driving organizational excellence through strategic talent practices, orchestrating workforce planning, talent acquisition, performance management as well as a myriad of other Human Resources Programs. She is accountable for driving effectiveness by shaping organizational structure for optimal efficiency. Janie oversees strategies that foster a healthy culture to include embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion into all aspects of the organization.
In Janie’s prior role, she was the Vice President of Administration at Equal Justice Works, where she was responsible for leading human resources, financial operations, facilities management, and information technology. She was also accountable for developing and implementing Equal Justice Works Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion strategy focused on attracting diverse, mission-oriented talent and creating an inclusive and equitable workplace environment. With more than fifteen years of private, federal, and not-for-profit experience, Janie is known for her intuitive skill in administration management, human resources management, designing and leading complex system change, diversity and inclusion, and social justice reform efforts.
Before joining Equal Justice Works, Janie was the Vice President of Human Resources and Chief Diversity Officer for Global Communities, where she was responsible for the design, implementation, and management of integrated HR and diversity strategies. Her work impacted employees in over twenty-two countries. She was responsible for the effective management of different cultural, legal, regulatory, and economic systems for both domestic and international employees. Prior to Global Communities, Janie enjoyed a ten-year career with the federal government. As a member of the Senior Executive Service, she held key strategic human resources positions with multiple cabinet-level agencies and served as an advisor and senior coach to leaders across the federal sector. In these roles, she received recognition from management, industry publications, peers, and staff for driving the creation and execution of programs that created an engaged and productive workforce.
Janie began her career with Verizon Communications (formerly Bell Atlantic), where she held numerous roles of increasing responsibility, where she directed a diversity program that resulted in significant improvement in diversity profile measures. Janie was also a faculty member for the company’s Black Managers Workshop, a training program designed to provide managers of color with the skills needed to overcome barriers to their success that were encountered because of race. She initiated a company-wide effort to establish team-based systems and structures to impact corporate bottom line results which was recognized by the Department of Labor. Janie was one of the first African American women to be featured on the cover of Human Resources Executive magazine.
Janie received her M.A. in Organization Development from American University. She holds numerous professional development certificates in Human Capital Management and Change Management, including a Diversity and Inclusion in Human Resources certificate from Cornell University. She completed the year-long Maryland Equity and Inclusion Leadership Program sponsored by The Schaefer Center for Public Policy and The Maryland Commission on Civil Rights. She is a trained mediator and Certified Professional Coach. She is a graduate of Leadership America, former board chair of the NTL Institute and currently co-steward of the organization’s social justice community of practice, and a member of The Society for Human Resource Management. Additionally, Janie is the Board Chairperson for the Special Education Citizens Advisory Council for Prince Georges County where she is active in developing partnerships that facilitate discussion between parents, families, educators, community leaders, and the PG County school administration to enhance services for students with disabilities which is her passion. She and her husband Randolph reside in Fort Washington Maryland.
Chief Operations Officer
Andrew Davis serves as Chief Operating Officer at the Council. In this role, Andrew oversees the Programs Division, which includes the following operational functions: credentialing, growth and business development, marketing and communications, public policy and advocacy, research, innovation, and customer relations.
Andrew has over 20 years of experience in the early care and education field. Most recently, Andrew served as Senior Vice President of Partnership and Engagement with Acelero Learning and Shine Early Learning, where he led the expansion of state and community-based partnerships to produce more equitable systems of service delivery, improved programmatic quality, and greater outcomes for communities, children and families. Prior to that, he served as Director of Early Learning at Follett School Solutions.
Andrew earned his MBA from the University of Baltimore and Towson University and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland – University College.
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Jan Bigelow serves as Chief Financial Officer at the Council and has been with the organization since February of 2022.
Jan has more than 30 years in accounting and finance experience, including public accounting, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. She has held management-level positions with BDO Seidman, Kiplinger Washington Editors, Pew Center for Global Climate Change, Communities In Schools, B’nai B’rith Youth Organization and American Humane. Since 2003, Jan has worked exclusively in the non-profit sector where she has been a passionate advocate in improving business operations in order to further the mission of her employers.
Jan holds a CPA from the State of Virginia and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lycoming College. She resides in Alexandria VA with her husband and dog.
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