Koby Levin, Chalkbeat Detroit | Published online March 31, 2021 How do teachers captivate their students? Here, in a feature we call How I Teach, we ask great educators how they approach their jobs. In the early months of pandemic learning, Carmen Price was having trouble getting her preschool students to pay attention to virtual lessons. So she began experimenting. After some trial and error, she came across a few techniques that kept her students interested. PowerPoint, for instance, made it easy to include videos and photos in her lessons, which her students seemed to like. Her success made her wonder: Were other teachers thinking about the same things? Price consulted with the leaders of her preschool, Starfish Family Services, then invited other educators in her program to talk about their techniques for teaching young students online. “It just was awesome. The first meeting, I was surprised. All the teachers came. My heart was just so full because I … [Read more...]

By Anna Clark | Published online February 1, 2021 On a Tudor Gothic campus designed for college students, a $15 million, 28,000-square foot educational center designed for Detroit’s littlest people aims for a grand opening in Fall 2021, despite the uncertainties for both construction and school programming brought on by a global pandemic. It has been just over a year since the closure of Marygrove College, a beloved institution of higher learning founded in 1905. But a massive intervention by a number of collaborators, along with a $50 million investment from the Kresge Foundation, spared the west side neighborhood from being hit with 53 acres of vacancy. The emerging cradle-to-career program at Marygrove, or P-20, is intended to use education as a form of community investment. Priority enrollment is given to families who live within 1 to 2 miles of campus. The new early childhood center has a “foundational role” in the P-20 program, said principal Celina Byrd, but she … [Read more...]

Sherri Welch, Crain’s Detroit Business | Published online January 4, 2021 Starfish Family Services has named Celina Byrd as its first principal of the Marygrove Early Childhood Education Center set to open this fall on the former Marygrove College campus. The center, which broke ground in November 2019, is taking shape as part of a cradle-to-career education concept on the northwest Detroit campus. The Troy-based Kresge Foundation committed $50 million to the concept and efforts in the surrounding neighborhood and led development of the campus plan. It spurred creation of the Marygrove Conservancy in 2018 to keep the campus from going dark and the P-20 plan with partners including the Marygrove Conservancy, Starfish Family Services, Detroit Public Schools Community District and the University of Michigan School of Education. Byrd, who joined Starfish in 2014, has led the Marygrove ECE project for Starfish as project director for the last two years, overseeing curriculum … [Read more...]