Meet Shannon Seidler, director of Building Blocks Playschool in Alliance, Nebraska. From being a registered nurse to an in-home provider to a center director, she’s never stopped looking for ways to better care for her community. Learn how Shannon’s Step Up to Quality experience has helped increase the quality of care at her center and beyond.

¿Qué te inspiró a trabajar en el campo de la primera infancia?

I came into the business out of necessity, and I stayed because of my passion for teaching children.

For 15 years, I was a registered nurse. As my family got bigger, I felt myself being pulled more toward work than my children. I knew it was time to find something that would bring me back home, so I became a family provider in 2000.

In 2023, the Box Butte General Hospital approached me to help launch and lead Building Blocks Playschool. Before the center opened, hospital employees on maternity leave couldn’t easily return due to a lack of available child care. Now, we can provide care for up to 40 children on campus.

What is the child care philosophy of Building Blocks Playschool?

We are a play-based program. I always tell people that doesn’t mean we don’t have lesson plans or that we don’t follow a curriculum.

We also spend a lot of time helping children build social-emotional skills. When they can regulate their emotions and take care of what they’re feeling, they’re more ready to go into kindergarten and be the best they can be. If we work on things like emotions and conflict resolution now, children will be able to apply those skills when learning new concepts later.

¿Cómo se enteró Acerca de Up to Quality? ¿Por qué decidió unirse?

I learned about Step Up to Quality, enrolled and achieved a Step 4 rating while I was an in-home provider.

I moved to Alliance from Colorado in the mid-2000s, and finding a quality-improvement program here in Nebraska was very exciting for me as a provider. I’m a person who is always looking for something that will teach me to be one step better, whether that’s a better care environment or a way to better interact with the kids. Enrolling in Step Up to Quality felt like an opportunity to help me really embrace that.

Being in a rural area, it can be difficult to see the value of enrolling, because we can’t use it as an advertising tool to attract families compared to areas with more competition. But that doesn’t mean children everywhere don’t deserve the highest quality care.

As I talk to people in the Alliance community, where we have a child care deficit, I hear people say, “It’s too bad we don’t have quality markers to help some of our providers improve quality.” And I say, “Oh, but we do! We have a whole guide.” I’m hopeful we can get more of these providers into Step Up to Quality.

¿Qué se siente al haber alcanzado la calificación de Nivel 5?

It feels great. My staff worked so hard, and they were ecstatic to receive the rating. They were all on board with Step Up to Quality and embraced the whole process.

They were really receptive to working with an early childhood coach and implementing her suggestions. It was never a coach saying, “You have to.” It was, “Think about this, and tell me if you think that will work.”

¿De qué manera le ha ayudado el programa "Un paso adelante hacia la calidad" a mejorar la calidad de sus prácticas de cuidado de niños? ¿Qué ha aprendido y aplicado?

When I was an in-home provider, curriculum was never my forte. I was more off-the-cuff and allowed the children to lead. I did have a plan, but I didn’t have formalized lesson plans. Step Up to Quality showed me the importance of lesson plans to not miss a concept and to have the opportunity to add a concept into those lessons.

I did not receive good scores from my first observation. I was upset, because I felt like I worked so hard. But that’s where my coach came back in and helped me to calm down, digest the report and realize it wasn’t as bad as I thought. By making the small changes they suggested, I could achieve way better scores.

I know it can be intimidating to have someone observe your program, but they’re not out to get you. They’re there to do their job. That shift in perspective is helpful. They want to set you up with clear, written suggestions for how to improve quality by making small changes to what you’re already doing.

These experiences shaped the environment of Building Blocks Playschool. As the architects were planning the rooms and furnishings, I was able to help make decisions because of the education I received from my in-home observations. We launched the center with these quality standards already in place because of what I learned from Step Up to Quality.

¿Qué palabras de aliento tiene para los proveedores que están considerando unirse a Step Up to Quality o que aún están trabajando en los pasos?

Step Up to Quality is a lot of work. But if you are truly passionate about the quality of the care you give children, this is the perfect way to improve it. There’s so much help, so many resources and so many helpful suggestions.

Just keep working at it and use the resources. Leverage the free coaching and dive into your observer reports. It takes time, but you’ll get there. It’s worth it.