Polly Smith – introduction

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My name is Polly Smith. I am the director of the Tufts educational daycare center, and I've been here for one year. Prior to coming here I've had many years in the field of early childhood development. I started my career actually as a fundraiser at Tufts and was invited by a friend to go to the Children's School to watch the children in their classrooms through the booth, the observation booth, and I was very busy, someday I'll do it. [01:50:00] And she said, no you must come now. So I went with her, and I was so captivated by what I saw, that I decided to apply to the masters program there. So after receiving my master's degree, I did dome teaching of preschool. And then after that about three or four years of teaching I worked for Weela College, which is a teacher training college in the field of field placement, and placing teachers in settings and working with their supervisors and liaisons’. After that I started doing some research, and decided to return to school to work on my PH.D and came back to the department. After that I did a variety of work with student teachers, I worked as an adjunct faculty at many colleges in the Boston area, and trained student teachers. I also did clinical work at children's hospital with children with learning disabilities. I worked in a learning disabilities clinic, and also in a clinic called the preschool function clinic. After that I was ready to work full time, and I opened the Boston Globe and saw an ass for a position at the John Hancock Childcare Center which was a brand new child care center. I had never actually worked in childcare before, I'd worked in preschools, and I'd worked in teacher training, and I'd done clinical work, and I'd done research, and at that point child care did not have a great reputation as a place to put your children. [01:52:00] And I though to myself, that I knew so much about so many things, that may be I could blend everything I knew and make childcare something better. Make a really optimum child care center. So I went there as the assistant director, in charge of programming the center for two hundred children: infants, toddler, and preschoolers. Within the course of my fifteen years there we went from a center of no teachers to a center of 60 teachers, and had a very extraordinary program that was created for children. I left there, and went to MIT, where I was called the administrator of childcare initiatives. My major responsibility was to manage their four childcare centers. They have four different child care centers which the vendor is Bright Horizons, which is a for-profit child care company. My job was to manage their vendorhsip of the childcare centers. I did that for a number of years, and then came to Tufts.

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