August 12, 2004

Board hires new director to head Children’s Center

It was the parity between Yellow Springs and Northern California that first drew Joyce Dey to town to look for a job. And it was the history of child-directed learning through a rich environment that drew Dey to the Children’s Community Center, where she will start as the center’s new director on Monday, Aug. 16.

Dey has been involved in early childhood education her entire working life, and she feels her experience with Montessori and Head Start curriculums will mesh perfectly with the program at the Children’s Center, she said in a phone interview from Cincinnati Tuesday.

Dey believes that young children learn best through play and hands-on experiences. Children need things they can hold in their hands to build with and manipulate, she said. It is the teacher’s responsibility to observe each child’s process and provide the right kind of materials, based on a child’s interests, needed to push him or her to grow and reach the next level of understanding, she said.

Dey also believes that children need order in their daily lives and a schedule so that they know what to expect. For Dey, order means that everything in the classroom has its place and that children should learn to respect the materials they use and the needs of others in the classroom. It’s been Dey’s experience, she said, that both disciplinary practices and creative encouragement are essential elements to fostering a balanced education for a young person.

“Freedom in learning is based on an orderly environment,” she said.

Her philosophy has been honed from many years in various educational environments in different regions of the country. She began in a Montessori training program in New York in the early 1980s before moving to California to start her own Montessori school. From there she went to Alaska to develop a Montessori kindergarten program at a day care center and then moved into the Head Start program, where she was trained in creative curriculum and high scope.

With over 25 years of experience, Dey said she understands that one doesn’t make changes from the outside. Before she even thinks of presenting ideas she has for the Children’s Center, Dey said, she plans to spend her first six months to a year feeling her way around the existing program and tapping into the staff’s perspectives and priorities. Dey said that the relationship the staff has with the children “is really solid and good.” She wants to hear about their satisfactions and dissatisfactions so that she can support them instead of direct them and foster a cooperative growth of ideas, she said.

“I want to spend a good amount of time learning why it is that people stay so long and like it there so much,” Dey said. “I want to know what they wish they could do so that we can make changes grow out of staff, not changes that are laid on top of staff.”

Some curriculum changes will take longer to develop, but other changes, such as facilities upgrades and raising enrollment need to be addressed immediately. Dey said she is excited about being involved in creating an aesthetically pleasing space, and she wants to creatively promote the school to attract new students. One idea she has is to place the children’s art in store windows downtown that shows people what the learning process at the center looks like.

Mike Wells, the Antioch Company manager who spent the month of July evaluating the center’s daily operations and interviewing staff and board members, also developed a list of changes the center could make to shore up its resources and improve communication between the Children’s Center board, the director and the staff, the board’s president, Sean Creighton, said. Several board retreats this summer helped the board redefine its role as less of an operations manager and more of a fundraiser, Creighton said. This was one of the issues M.J. Richlen, the former director of the Children’s Center, had with the board and that contributed to her early resignation at the end of June.

Many of the changes the center is heading toward will involve the new director, Creighton said. A search committee began advertising for a new director in late May, talked to 15 applicants in July, and chose Dey a few weeks ago because her breadth of experience, administrative qualifications and her educational philosophy made her stand out from the rest, Creighton said. He called it serendipity the way Dey just happened to be in town when the center’s ad appeared in the Yellow Springs News one day before the application deadline.

“She seems to have a great mixture of connecting to kids and also extensive administrative experience,” he said. “We’re really thrilled to have her, and we want her to be on board to make some of the operational changes.”

The board also wants Dey to participate in its strategic planning process to define what the center is and what its leaders want its future to be, Creighton said. The center has just begun to explore the possible local strategic alliances that would involve “positioning the center for the future,” Creighton said.

“That might mean changing location, especially because of the financial challenges with regard to the existing space,” he said.

Whatever changes come down the pike, Dey, who is approaching 60, knows that her first priority is to guide children in her classroom because that is where she draws her inspiration.

“What keeps me working with children is their fresh eyes on the world and watching them discover the things I take for granted,” she said. “I like watching them have the aha! experience, like, aha! I can write my name!”

She also feels good about contributing to the force that allows children to keep being children, she said, something, she added, that is difficult in a society that is constantly pushing kids to grow up too fast. It is important for parents to see the wonder of childhood so they can resist that force as well, she said.

The Children’s Center is a place where some kids go every day, and it should have a sense of home about it, Creighton said.

“It’s a day care center, but we still see it as a school, where the kids get their first educational experience in a loving kind of home environment,” Creighton said. “As a parent it’s really important to me that [my kids] are at a place that lets them have fun and play, similar to M.J.’s philosophy about letting kids be kids. I think Joyce brings that.”

—Lauren Heaton