What is the New Orleans Early Education Network?
The New Orleans Early Education Network (NOEEN) is an initiative of Agenda for Children and NOLA Public Schools that supports caregivers and families, and helps early learning centers improve the quality of their services.
NOEEN is comprised of all publicly funded early childhood care and education providers in Orleans Parish—more than 150 public schools, non-public schools, Type III early learning centers, Early Head Start centers and Head Start centers—that serve more than 5,500 publicly funded birth to five-year-old children.
What is NOEEN’s Mission?
NOEEN works to have a collective impact on the early childhood sector in New Orleans by increasing at-risk children’s access to quality early care and education and by designing and implementing a systematic approach to improve the quality of all publicly funded early learning programs.
What Does NOEEN Do?
NOEEN is responsible for coordinating enrollment and serving as a point of contact between individual center programs and the Louisiana Department of Education for reporting purposes and coordinating funding requests. NOEEN also supports educators, conducting CLASS observations, coaching, and providing professional development training.
How Does Agenda for Children Work With NOEEN?
Agenda for Children and NOLA Public Schools serve as NOEEN’s Co-Lead Agencies. As Co-Lead Agency, Agenda for Children supports child care centers, schools and Head Start programs as they work to provide quality early care and education to New Orleans children and families.
What is NOEEN City Seats?
In December 2017, the New Orleans City Council and Mayor approved a historic investment in early childhood education, enabling the creation of fifty new, high-quality “seats” for children ages six weeks to three-years-old, known as the New Orleans Early Education Network (NOEEN) City Seats Program. A year later, the City of New Orleans doubled its investment, increasing access for 112 children citywide. Learn more
What is NOEEN Coordinated Funding?
Every year, each early childhood care and education network in the state, including NOEEN submits Coordinated Funding Requests to the Louisiana Department of Education (LDE) detailing recommendations for seat allocations to specific childcare operators for LA 4 and NSECD for the upcoming school year. The goal of NOEEN’s Coordinated Funding Request is to ensure that the limited number of publicly-funded early childhood seats are allocated to those programs that meet certain criteria. Learn more
Who Oversees NOEEN’s Work?
NOEEN’s work is guided by a steering committee comprised of representatives from schools, centers, Head Start and Early Steps. All Steering Committee meetings are open to the public and information about past and future meetings is available to the public, too. Learn more
What is the NOEEN Steering Committee’s Strategic Plan?
NOEEN Steering committee members worked with early childhood stakeholders and Bellwether Education Partners to develop a vision for NOEEN’s future, which they used to create a Strategic Plan. Learn more
Former CEO, Agenda for Children
Dr. Tony Recasner co-founded the first charter school in New Orleans in an effort to build a new type of school that offered kids many different ways to learn and engage. As Agenda’s second CEO, he fostered new relationships, visionary thinking, and launched new initiatives, such as the Judy Watts Center for Advocacy and Policy.
Agenda for Children doubled the City Seats program for the third and fourth year in a row. This year, we served 276 children through City and State funds. We also added new wraparound supports to City Seats, including a partnership with the Tulane School of Social Work, and launched the Workforce Stability Fund, to be piloted via City Seats 2021-2022.