What We've Learned About Building Early Learning Systems

In our first post, I shared how 11 school districts in the Omaha metro made the decision to work together around early childhood, building a partnership grounded in trust and shared learning. Over time, we discovered that collaboration was a foundation, but that alone wasn't enough. It's one thing for leaders to share a vision. It's another to build a system that ensures children and families experience it every day. That realization transformed our work.

Children Experience One Continuum. Adults Often Work in Many Systems. 

A 4-year-old doesn't experience jurisdiction lines. She might spend her morning in child care, a preschool classroom, or at home with family. Either way, she experiences one continuous flow of relationships, routines, play, and learning. She doesn't stop developing socially, cognitively, and emotionally the moment Kindergarten makes the day more academic.

Adults, however, often organize our work differently. Districts have built strong systems for K-12 instruction, curriculum, and leadership. Early childhood programs, family engagement, and the primary grades frequently run through different structures and funding streams. Each does excellent work individually, but children and families feel the seams and silos between them.

That isn't because districts have failed. It's because most districts were never intentionally designed to function as birth-Grade 12 systems. Strengthening early childhood programming, we realized, required helping districts build the infrastructure that creates continuity across those earliest years.

Districts do this because it helps children and families thrive. A more connected system means better outcomes for children and deeper partnership with families. It comes from treating everything before Kindergarten as part of the same system as everything after. 

Early childhood programs, family engagement, and the primary grades frequently run through different structures and funding streams. Each does excellent work individually, but children and families feel the seams and silos between them.

Continuous Improvement Looks Different in Early Learning 

Districts have long used continuous improvement to strengthen instruction and achievement. Building an early learning system asks leaders to improve something different: whether children experience connected developmental progressions rather than isolated grade levels; whether principals understand child development as deeply as instructional leadership; whether families are partners from birth rather than participants once school starts.

No program answers those questions. Districts have to organize intentionally. Over time, we asked fewer questions about which initiative to adopt and more about what children and families need to thrive.

Five Commitments for Continuous Improvement 

That experience led us to organize the work around five commitments: align, center, reach, partner, and reflect. It’s a way of rethinking early learning around connected systems, the whole child, partnership, and reflection as everyday practice, not an occasional event. 

The commitments were never meant to be another initiative or exist in isolation from a district’s strategic plan. It became a way to ask better questions every year:

• Are we creating continuity for children across birth through Grade 3?
• Are leadership decisions aligned with how young children develop?
• Do families feel like genuine partners from the start?
  

Action Planning Became Infrastructure 

One of our most significant changes was a district action planning process that places early childhood priorities inside each district's existing strategic plan, using the same goals already in place for K-12 priorities. It's not one more thing for districts to manage. It's how early childhood becomes part of everything else they're already doing.

Each year, districts examine the previous year's evidence, set early childhood priorities across leadership effectiveness, instructional excellence, and family and community partnership engagement, and decide what actions will strengthen children's experiences.

The plan becomes part of the district's continuous improvement process. It’s not a document filed once, but a rhythm: plan, implement, reflect, adjust, begin again. That rhythm builds capacity, not the document itself. 

The integration changed the conversations. Early learning is no longer planned apart from elementary learning. Family engagement is no longer disconnected from instructional goals. Districts ask one question: what do children and families need, and how do we organize to provide it? 

"One of the things that I like about this model is change can happen in multiple ways," said Andy DeFreece, the director of elementary and early childhood education at Millard Public Schools. "We see things that have happened at our School as Hub schools and then we have reflected as an organization, and we've tried to scale up those efforts. Home visitors started off in two buildings. We liked what we saw, and we got more." 

The plan becomes part of the district's continuous improvement process. It’s not a document filed once, but a rhythm: plan, implement, reflect, adjust, begin again. That rhythm builds capacity, not the document itself. 

Building Systems That Last 

Looking back over more than a decade, our greatest lesson is still about early childhood programming. But strong programming doesn't sustain itself. It depends on systems, shared priorities, and continuous reflection built deliberately, because nothing in how districts are typically organized produces those conditions on their own. 

Programs matter. So do the people doing that work. Stronger systems make good programming easier to sustain, and strong programming is the evidence the systems are working. 

As superintendents join us this fall for AASA's Early Learning Cohort site visit, I hope they see districts that have reorganized around young children's needs and a continuous improvement process that keeps evolving year after year. 

In our final post, I'll share the School as Hub for Early Learning framework in greater depth and why leadership effectiveness, instructional excellence, and family and community partnership engagement are most powerful together.