As an administrator or staff member of a preschool or child care program, the safety of your children, families, and staff is always top priority—now more than ever with the continued spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). As an early childhood learning community, our top priority during this continued, unprecedented time is supporting your needs and ensuring that you, your families, and your staff are well-prepared!
Here are some essential brightwheel resources for early education programs on how to leverage available brightwheel features to prepare, respond, and communicate with your staff and families.
Features to Leverage
Utilize these brightwheel features to help keep your community healthy and informed:
Messaging: Use messaging and alerts to share updates with your families. Parents are generally more likely to read in-app messages than personal email.
Newsletters: Create newsletters for longer-form communications.
Quick Scan Check-in: Avoid contact with shared device screens.
Health Screening: Collect key health and exposure details from families.
Online Payments: Consider shifting to no-contact online payments rather than cash, check, or card-swipe payments that can carry germs.
Voice to text: Decrease the number of times you touch a device screen.
Health Checks: Record wellness checks or temperature checks that can be shared with families or logged for internal record-keeping
Lesson Plans: Easily create and distribute lessons to all your teachers on related topics (e.g., handwashing, germs, etc).
Pause Student Billing Plans: Quickly manage billing plans in the event of an unexpected closure.
Learning from Home: Admins and teachers can easily share lesson plans with parents through the brightwheel app for at-home learning materials and provide the View Lesson Plans as a Parent resource to guide them to how to access these as well.
Webinars to Leverage
Our team also continues to curate and lead helpful, live webinars on an array of topics that are recorded and then stored on our website. Click to watch any of the ones linked below related to COVID-19 or explore the entire collection by going to the COVID-19 Health, Safety, and Operations section of our Webinars page!
How to Protect Your Early Education Center from COVID-19 This Fall
(Original air date: 9/1/21)How the Most Successful Childcare Businesses Overcome Temporary Closures (Original air date: 2/10/21)
Preparing for Future COVID-19 Flare-ups and Closures
(Original air date: 7/8/20)How to Keep Your Childcare Center Safe and Successful with brightwheel (Original air date: 6/24/20)
Top 5 brightwheel Features to Help Your Center Through COVID-19
(Original air date: 5/27/20)