New Orleans Early Education Network

The mission of NOEEN is to ensure an excellent start for every child in New Orleans by strengthening the early education education sector. NOEEN was created by local early childhood practitioners to increase access to early childhood education, improve the quality of early learning experiences for young children, and connect organizations who work with and on the behalf of young children to resources.  

The New Orleans Early Education Network aims to strengthen the quality of the New Orleans Early Childhood Education sector by increasing access to high-quality "seats" in early learning centers, improve the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms, and connect organizations to resources including funding, data, knowledge, and each other. We aim to influence local and state?level discussions to advance this mission; increase public and private ECE funding; collect, analyze, and share unbiased data to increase transparency; help improve program quality and inform sector priorities; support parent choice through coordinated enrollment and parent information initiatives; allocate publicly funded seats to high?quality providers to meet localized demand; and increase the ability of the ECE sector to attract, develop, and retain talent.

NOEEN currently manages a network of over 150 child care centers, schools, Head Start programs and non-profit organizations, all working together to ensure that every young child in New Orleans arrives at school ready to succeed. NOEEN also serves as the Act 3 Lead Agency for Orleans Parish, manages early childhood education programming, and conducts research, advocacy, and data initiatives. NOEEN hired its first full-time Executive Director, Jen Roberts, in summer 2018 and an Administrative Coordinator in fall 2018.

In the last six months, the organization has grown its programming and scope dramatically. Among other achievements, NOEEN conducted over 600 CLASS observations of every publicly funded early learning center in Orleans Parish classrooms, managed four coordinated funding requests including the allocation of over 4,000 early childhood education seats for Orleans Parish, worked with the Orleans Parish School Board to help coordinate enrollment for all children in publicly funded seats in Orleans Parish, managed a large scale early childhood teacher training program, convened over 150 early learning centers to discuss barriers to access, quality, and funding on a quarterly basis, successfully advocated for $1.5M to support an expansion of early childhood education programming, was awarded a Louisiana Department of Education Ready Start Network grant, and led the New Orleans team for the the National League of Cities' Early Learning Nation Challenge. NOEEN also administers the Mayor of New Orleans' inaugural early childhood education pilot, providing free childcare to 50 children in New Orleans, as well as the initiative's ten program partners and the project's evaluation team and runs Making the Most of Class Interactions (MMCI) training, an intensive 12-week training series for childcare professionals at 13 locations across the city. We have several large projects which will be announced in late Spring/early Summer 2019 to further our goals and work daily with several partners in early childhood education, workforce development, public health, and k12 education to deliver on our mission.