First 5 San Benito’s staff member leaves lasting impact on
preschool, elementary children
Joyce Swett, the school readiness coordinator for First 5 San
Benito, is retiring in August and she knows already what she will
miss most about the job.
First 5 San Benito’s staff member leaves lasting impact on preschool, elementary children
Joyce Swett, the school readiness coordinator for First 5 San Benito, is retiring in August and she knows already what she will miss most about the job.
“The kids,” she said, on a recent afternoon over lunch. “The kids are just so much fun at this age. It’s so spectacular. They will tell you everything on their minds.”
In fact, she’s already lined up an opportunity to volunteer in the classroom during the coming school year. She will continue to work with the high school students who run Little Baler Preschool at San Benito High School, a Regional Occupational Program course that gives the students a taste of early childhood education.
“If I could pick one word for Joyce it would be engaging,” said Lisa Faulkner, the executive director of First 5 San Benito. “She is engaging with the kids, teachers and administrators.”
Swett has been working with First 5 since 2001 when she took a job as a teacher with the mobile preschool that visits rural San Benito County. She became the school readiness coordinator in 2004, a job that allowed her to work with many partners in the county on creating curriculum to prepare preschool students for kindergarten.
Some of the programs Swett has been instrumental in bringing to the county include “Raising a Reader,” a program that works with parents to teach them how to read aloud to children; Jump Start preschool, a five-week summer program for incoming kindergarten students that helps prepare them for the classroom; and a school garden at R.O. Hardin.
During the school year for the last five years, Swett has hosted First Thursdays, meetings for preschool and kindergarten teachers. The meeting is a chance for teachers to see if they are on the same page with curriculum and also to learn new ideas for engaging students.
“Teachers get bored,” Swett said. “It becomes a rote regiment. It’s really hard to keep students excited.”
Faulkner said one of the main things Swett has been able to do for local teachers is to connect them with ways to put recent research into action. At the lunch table, Swett pantomimed a coordination activity that gets kids to move their hands up and down, from right to left, that helps children when they begin to write.
Swett described how she shows teachers how to read with the children, explaining that they can’t take for granted that the children will know all the elements in a story. For instance, she read a story about farm animals recently and the children in the classroom didn’t know what a goose was and they had never heard of pigs eating slop. They didn’t know that a hog is the same as a pig.
“Studies show that in low-income populations one of the strongest protective factors is literacy,” Faulkner said.
Lisa Smith, a retired principal from R. O. Hardin who now teaches an after school program at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, explained that many children were coming into kindergarten with a lack of social and academic skills. The Jump Start program and the mobile preschool are avenues to teach children some of those skills before they come into the classroom.
“Words can’t express how much Joyce means to me, working with the kids,” Smith said. “She has moved mountains to get services out to families.”
Smith spoke about Swett’s work last year when Swett received the Delta Kappa Gamma Area V Public Service Award. The group honored her for her dedication to literacy and her vision.
In her time with First 5, she has written multiple grants that brought in more than $700,000 to the county and helped to implement the programs for which the grants were received. One of her recent grants was a California Department of Education garden grant for $310,000. First 5 San Benito and R. O. Hardin partnered to install a school garden on the campus. Greg Swett, a former San Benito Farm Bureau president and Swett’s husband, helped to install the irrigation for the project, saving money for the project.
Many of the grants Joyce Swett has pursued support literacy, including a Target Literacy Grant, an RGK Foundation grant, a Raising a Reader Literacy grant and more. With the grants, Swett has been able to put together book bags for families that contain four board books and ideas for activities at home.
Faulkner joked that Swett always has book bags in the back of her car. More than 640 families have received book bags.
In Swett’s absence, Faulkner said she is hopeful that the office will be able to maintain the Raising a Reader and the mobile preschool programs. She noted that the First 5 San Benito Office has been left with one staff member to do the work of two positions.
“We can do less or we can do it differently,” Faulkner said. “We need to do it differently.”
Faulkner said that she is looking to form partnerships with other agencies to continue to bring in grant funding.
“We want to focus on the ground work,” Faulkner said.
Faulkner and Smith were especially concerned about keeping up the momentum that Swett has built up as school readiness coordinator.
“We are looking at joint grants for summer school and an after school early learning program,” Faulkner said.
