Signal Centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee

Signal Centers is a nonprofit located in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and offers an amazing array of services to all individuals through the continuum of care focusing on disabilities, early childhood education, and self-sufficiency. They have an inclusive children’s program and have created unique programs like Adult Day Services and Assistive Technology Services to help meet needs in the community. Two innovative programs administered by Signal Centers are Child Care WAGE$ Tennessee and Tennessee Child Care Resource and Referral Network.

Signal Centers

Child Care WAGE$ Tennessee is a statewide program that rewards early childhood educators with financial incentives for their professional career development as well as their continuity of service. If you are an early educator working with children between ages 0-5 in a Tennessee Department of Human Services licensed child care program check out https://tnwages.org/ to see if you are eligible to apply for a stipend. 

Another beneficial resource is the Tennessee Child Care Resource and Referral Network https://tnccrr.org/ which is a directory of services and resources to help all children get the best possible start in life.

Resources:

Usually held on the third Thursday of May Global Accessibility Awareness Day focuses on creating digital access inclusion for persons with disabilities and impairments. This website provides valuable resources including adaptive technology and accessibility tools such as WAVE, a free web accessibility evaluation tool. https://wave.webaim.org/

“Lean Into You”  is a podcast Alex Farrell co-hosts with Wesley Mayes from Tennessee Child Care Resource and Referral Network. This podcast is aimed at creating a culture of self-care for early childhood educators and is funded through a grant with the Tennessee Department of Human Services and Signal Centers, Inc. The podcast is available on your Apple, Spotify, and Child Care WAGE$ Tennessee and Tennessee Childcare Resource and Referral Network websites.

Alex Farrell and Wesley Mayes of Lean Into You Podcast

In a recent podcast interview, we talked with Alex Farrell, a marketing and communication specialist at Child Care WAGE$ Tennessee and a co-host of the “Lean Into You” Podcast. Here is your link o a fabulous conversation.

Transcript

Marsh Naidoo (00:25):

Hi guys. Welcome to the Raising Kellan podcast. My name is Marsh Naidoo. For those of you who are new to us, I'm a physical therapist by training as well as Mom Kellan, my nine year old munchkin with Cerebral palsy. I blog it raising kellan.org as well as host this podcast where we curate resources for parents that are raising children with disabilities. In today's episode, episode number 46, I chat with Alex Farrell. And guys, if you are Ali Childhood Educators, this is the podcast episode for you. Alex Farrell is a marketing and communications specialist at Signal Centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee. As well as co-host of the podcast Lean Into You. This episode is brought to you by Move Up Physical Therapy. And without further ado, here is Alex. But right off the bat, I would love to ask the question, how did you come to work at Signal Centers and can you tell the listeners out there a little bit about the history and what Signal Centers is all about?

Alex Farrell (01:49):

Absolutely. Yeah, it's a pretty interesting story. I started frankly, I started at Signal Centers simply because I needed a job and actually started there in the accounting department. So something entirely different than what I'm doing now was placed there through a temp agency. And then over time being in that department, I kind of started noticing in their marketing department, which was adjacent to where we were that there were some opportunities for growth. And so I offered my services to be able to fill in a day here and there. And then that grew and grew and grew until I kind of stopped doing the accounting stuff and was over into the marketing world. And then one thing that I really love about Signal Centers is the executive staff here are very good at leverage. When they recognize that someone has a certain skill set, they will do what they need to do and reorder things to make sure that person is really leveraging what they're good at.

(02:48):

So over time, I proved that I was providing a lot of value in this area and so they kind of gave me more freedom and more responsibility. And so now currently in my position within Signal Centers, I'm the marketing and communications specialist for a statewide program that's funded through the Department of Human Services called Childcare Wages, Tennessee. And this is where the podcast actually comes from where a program that gives education-based salary supplements to early childhood educators. Cause we're trying to help reduce turnover and address a lack of post-secondary education in early childhood and the early childhood field. So that's what I've been doing for the last year and a half, two years almost. It's hard to believe it's been that long, but I guess the last year has kind of been a blur for most people. But, so that's kinda my story with my background with Signal Centers as far as signal centers as an organization goes.

(03:50):

It's pretty interesting because we were talking in a prep call earlier a few days ago about why you started raising Kellan and how you have a son, Correct? With Cerebral Palsy and how you wanted to start this podcast as a community for families who have a similar experience of having a family member with a developmental disability. That's exactly how Signal Center started. So in 1957, obviously this is 30 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act it was actually the responsibility of parents or at that time parents to advocate for services for their family members that had disabilities. So Signal Center started in 1957 with nine families. And at that time it was families that had kids with cerebral palsy and it was nine families, nine kids in a classroom learning from one another. And then as the research about childhood development has increased, our knowledge of developmental disabilities has increased over time that model has changed.

(05:00):

And so now where we stand today, we have a bunch of different services related to early childhood education and disabilities as well. But we implement what's called an inclusion model. So all of our childcare classes have both children with disabilities and children without learning from one another. And it's really inspiring to see, cuz you can see, I mean, as we know, children are naturally curious anyways, but to see them really encounter their peers that have such a vastly different life experience from them, you can see all of these neurons just firing and the growth happening right before your eyes. So it's really cool to see.

Marsh Naidoo (05:44):

I would like to touch on your recent Digital Accessibility Summit. Can you speak a little bit about that and what was the motivation to create the platform of the summit, Alex?

Alex Farrell (05:58):

Sure. So one of our programs in 1978 we started a program called Assistive Technology Services. And it was basically, we do a lot of stuff, but it's kinda the elevator speech of that is that program is, if you're an individual with a disability wide-ranging disability, it could be vision loss, it could be something a bit more medically fragile, it depends but we can serve a whole host of disabilities. But if you are, say you're at a certain part of your development and you want to be somewhere different we can help refer you to train you on different technologies to help you reach the milestones that you wanna reach. And in many cases, we can actually develop low-cost alternatives to different technologies that otherwise would be out of reach for people. So it's really cool to see the workshop that we have at Assistive Technology Center.

(07:01):

It's just there's stuff lying around everywhere and it's really cool to see our engineers meeting the needs of people very specifically, but creating these little devices that are transfer things that you and I might take for granted but are totally transforming lives of the people that they're giving these devices to. So assistive technology trains people on technological devices and refers people to different technologies that may suit their needs. But a huge part of what we do is we have a vision services, Comprehensive Vision Services that's funded through largely by the Ophthalmological Foundation in Chattanooga. And this is everything from teaching people how to use the accessibility features on their iPhone to how we've got a, what's called a JAWS instructor Jaws being a job access with speech. And it's really cool, there's a classroom in our accessibility or assistive technology center that is just eight computers in a dark classroom with no monitors. And our trainer instructor will come in and teach people how to surf the internet without using, I mean obviously, if they have a visual impairment of some sort or have no vision whatsoever, they don't need a computer monitor. So they do, they'll surf the internet completely using vocalization and these programs, computer programs to navigate through different websites which is the foundation of why something like digital accessibility is really important, which we'll touch on in a second I'm sure. But with that, Sorry,

Marsh Naidoo (08:41):

Go ahead. I won't lie with you about your guys' website, that was something that immediately struck me was the list of technology center. I mean that was phenomenal. I mean, you're describing jaws, so I have not had experience with this and I'm sure most of our listeners have not. <affirmative>, can you just go a little bit in-depth as to what actually that is, please, Annie?

Alex Farrell (09:04):

Sure, absolutely. So when you have a website and forgive me, I'm not a web developer, so this is gonna be I may not know exactly all the exact technological jargon, but when you have a website, there's called the front end and there's the back end. The front end is the website that we as the consumers experience. So when you go on the website type into Google, and you're interacting with the front end of a website. In order for that website to exist, it has to be developed on the back end. So the back end is all the HTML code all the web code that the web developers write to build the website. Jo, what Jaws do does is it reads the code that's behind the scenes, kind of behind the curtain. And depending on how you write that code is dependent on how successful Jaws is at maneuvering through that website. And are, when it comes to accessibility, there are best practices for developing and ordering that code or that website to make sure that jaws, which is literally kind of tabs through menus tabs through different elements of your website and reads it aloud to you that it is tabbing through in the correct order that it's actually being presented. So for

Marsh Naidoo (10:27):

The individual accessing the information through draws, is it going to be something that's verbally spoken out that the person interprets or

Alex Farrell (10:37):

How does it Right. So another way to, do it's a screen reader. So if you're not familiar with jaws, most people, many people especially those who are familiar with a disability space, are familiar with screen readers. So Jaws is a kind of screen reader. And so yeah, when you type in a URL or a website into the internet Jaws will then tab down to literally top left again if it's designed correctly, top left and read the first thing that's there and it might say homepage, and then you can hit the tab button. It'll go over to take signal centers website, for instance programs, and then the about page and it will kind of systematically tab through each one. And so the user, if they're looking for something specifically, have to actually manually tab through to access every part of that website. And so what happens too often when accessibility is not taken into consideration when developing a website is you may have a screen reader read the top left menu and then jump down to the bottom of the page and then jump back up to a different part of the page and then jump all over the page all over the place.

(11:51):

And there's no organization of information which makes it really hard to interact, impossible really to interact and have an idea of what's happening on that webpage, if that makes sense.

Marsh Naidoo (12:02):

I'm sure that they disability specific technologies as well, that's gonna be really going in depth into the field. What would be your argument for universal design as far as digital accessibility is concerned for the lay person?

Alex Farrell (12:22):

Sure. I mean, I think there's two things to consider. There's an ethical reason and then there's actually a business reason a fiscal incentive for a financial incentive for doing this. The ethical reason being there's some crazy statistic, I don't have a stat on the top of my head, but the amount of people that currently have a disability in the world is like

Marsh Naidoo (12:48):

1 billion.

Alex Farrell (12:49):

Yeah, 1 billion people. So are we supposed to develop products that only taken, that are just going to willingly leave out 1 billion people and say, No, no, you're not allowed. It's okay. I'm not going to put in the extra time, the extra work effort to understand so that you can equally access this thing that everyone else gets to access. So for me, there's an ethical incentive that if we are being good stewards of our work and our craft that we should be developing with everyone in mind so that everyone has equal access to the kinds of things that we wanna put out into the world, whatever that might be. The other part of that is, it was interesting, so last year's accessibility summit we had a gentleman on named Daniel Ryan. He is a web developer and a very good one. And he worked, did some work with the Obama campaign and has worked with different public organizing organizations really to do kind of web development for them.

(13:58):

And he mentioned something that was really interesting that he read an article that I think the stat was, if you are, what he called baking in accessibility. So if you're thinking about accessibility on the front end of when you're doing projects or developing things, instead of having that being an afterthought or something that you're reacting to after the fact, if you bake it in, it usually costs somewhere to bring in resources to bring everyone to the same table. Coworkers who might be able to think about accessibility on the front end of a project. Usually that costs about a thousand dollars to do that, whether that's labor, whatever it is if you have a complaint,

(14:50):

In other words, if you don't consider that you push your product out there and then there's some sort of complaint and you have to come back and redo everything $10,000. And then if it comes back to you in the form of a lawsuit, a hundred thousand dollars per instance. So there's a financial incentive for bus, whether it's businesses or individuals to just be thinking about these kinds of things. Whatever they produce, whatever they create as they're developing websites to make sure that it's universally accessible for everyone. Because if they don't, the strictly the financial penalty could be upwards of a hundred thousand dollars and that's per instance. So it's best practices or best practice to consider all of these things on the front end as you're in the process of creating things.

Marsh Naidoo (15:45):

I think you make a solid example there of the financial motivation of why companies need to be thinking along those lines. <affirmative>. Alex, I wanted, before time runs out, I really wanted to talk about your podcast. Early childhood educators have such a vital role in nurturing all children. However, self-care so many of us is something that's put on the back burner. Sure. Was that perhaps some of the motivation for getting the podcast going? What fed the need for the podcast?

Alex Farrell (16:19):

Sure. Yeah, Thanks for asking. So it started with my program with Childcare Wages, Tennessee, like I mentioned earlier we offer education-based salary supplements. So we're trying to just straightforward, we're trying to make sure that educators can get paid more so that if we pay educators more, they're more likely to stay in the field, which has a direct benefit to the kids that they're serving. And Wages is phenomenal and is doing a great job at addressing financial stresses in the lives of educators cuz it's a difficult job. It's an impossibly difficult job and it takes a lot out of you. And of course financial strain is one layer of the complexity of that job. But what I was noticing is that it was totally possible for educators that we serve to receive a check from us, a direct deposit from us, get more money in their bank account, thereby helping to alleviate some of that financial stress, but still walking into the classroom with their head down, their shoulders, slumped with waning passions lack of direction.

(17:28):

And so for me, I really wanted to, the motivation was twofold. I really wanted to come behind the supplements, the financial supplements that we're issuing to educators with another layer of support and say, Hey, we want to provide something for you that is going to see you as a human being, perhaps first and an educator second. Because if we're speaking to the human being first, it's the human being that shows up and is the educator. And so if we're, our mission is to serve educators, we need to serve them wholeheartedly a create a wide web of support. And so the way that we did that is wanting to have weekly conversations with mindfulness experts, with health professionals, with CEOs with, I mean it's a pretty wide-ranging group of guests that we've been able to get on the show. But just talking about things like mindset mindfulness practices, strategies that you can implement in the classroom to help just calm down a little bit more to help maybe changing your mindset about this or that so that you can start to shift a little stresses in your mind and maybe frame them in a different way to where they don't impact quite as much.

(18:51):

Everything from the mindfulness, mindfulness strategies and mindfulness practices all the way to we had an episode with Signal Center CEO talking about for directors, how do you create a culture a center culture that's based on selfcare that has the employer and self-care first? And how does that kind of change and impact the work that you do? Had an episode as last week that we recorded within someone from Harvard Medical School about mindful eating which is really interesting. Different ways that we can use food, something that we engage with two to three times a day, but often mindlessly, right? Cuz we're busy or we're doing other things, we're focusing on other things. How do you use food and meal, a meal time to help cultivate presents or to bring your awareness back to the present moment? So it was a really interesting conversation as well. So it's been all over the place and it's been a learning curve for sure. But we were really excited and thrilled about the guests that we've had on up to this point.

Marsh Naidoo (20:02):

I know my personal favorite was the chat about building resilience and to be, sometimes the air codes "brav"ee enough to face a little bit of discomfort, <affirmative> to build your resilience that way. So yeah, I You guys have, I mean, pardon me saying it's just not early educators that would benefit. I think it's quite a wide open audience that would derive benefit as

Alex Farrell (20:34):

Well. Absolutely. A lot of the things that we talk about are universal truths to, there are just good things to take into consideration whether you're in the early childhood education field or not Things about slowing down. But yeah, that conversation with Pat Stalowski about cultivating resilience was she's a tough cookie's, been working in child abuse for prevention for 45 years. And I mean, she talks about her story in that episode and it was really, really interesting and I really respect her transparency and all of that and how her story has motivated and transformed her work in developing resiliency in children and educators. Yeah, it was a really interesting conversation.

Marsh Naidoo (21:21):

Alex for our folks interested in learning more about the work done at Signal Centers as well as the podcast, how would they be able to reach out and receive that content?

Alex Farrell (21:35):

Absolutely. So the hub for Signal Centers, you can visit on our website@signalcenters.org. It's S I G N A L C E N T E R S.org. And then from there you've got links to all of our different programs. My program the Childcare Wages, Tennessee. We do have a separate website that's tn wages.org. And then another program that we do, Wesley Mays, who you mentioned, my co-host is the marketing specialist for a different program that's also statewide called the Childcare Resource and Referral Network. And that is tn C C R r.org. As far as the podcast goes on the wages website, there is a link to the podcast, but our main hub is at Lean Into You at buzz sprout.com. You can also just Google lean into you. I'm pretty sure by this point it will just pop up. But then we're also available on Spotify Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, wherever you listen to podcasts. So we produce a weekly episode. And so we hope that if you are you're listeners to your audience to tune in, they derive a lot of benefit and value from it.

Marsh Naidoo (22:44):

Thank you so much, Alex. So guys, while you are out listening, go ahead and search for Lean Into You. And I know Alex would appreciate a erase in the review as well once you've listened to an episode. So would I, Alex, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.

Alex Farrell (23:04):

You as well, Marsh. Thank you so much for having me on. Been, this has been great. It's interesting being on this side of the microphone for while. I

Marsh Naidoo (23:11):

Know, isn't it nervous? Crazy

Alex Farrell (23:13):

<laugh>. I know, but I love it. I love it.

Marsh Naidoo (23:15):

It's a whole different perspective. It really is. But I mean, regardless of whether it's a different perspective, it's still the same great information that gets put out. And I just really value this medium because it's consuming your continent while you on the go, you, you're not restricted to any desk or device. Well, I take that back, I guess you are <laugh>, you have your buts in your cell phone.

Alex Farrell (23:50):

I agree. And I think people are really into just the humanness of it. You are a human. I am a human. We are coming together, having a conversation. And it's raw. It's for the most part, unedited. I don't know if you're like me, we actually do a fair amount of editing <laugh>, but for the most part, I think people are really attracted to the rawness of the medium. I totally agree with you. Using these conversations to flesh out different ideas and topics and conversations to get people to think in a little bit different way. It's great. And I've loved it. I've loved every minute of doing the Lean Into You. I'm sure you, you'd probably say the same thing with this project. So

Marsh Naidoo (24:33):

Yeah, I think I've, on my end, I've learned a whole lot more than I thought possible. I mean, I thought I came in here feeding a knowing quite a bit, but actually, I don't. So yeah, it's a continuous learning process. And absolutely. Alex, I'm so grateful for your time and

Alex Farrell (24:54):

Likewise. Yeah, likewise. Thank you for the opportunity.

Marsh Naidoo (24:57):

No problem. And I would love to talk to you again and have an awesome afternoon and weekend.

Alex Farrell (25:04):

Thank you so much. You as well.

Marsh Naidoo (25:07):

Thank you for your time in listening to today's episode. For further information and some of the references and resources listed, pop over to raisingkellan.org where those will be listed under today's episode. Furthermore, we would appreciate you giving this podcast a rating and a review. And if you would like to contact us, you can reach us raisingkellan@gmail.com. This episode was brought to you by Move Up Physical Therapy. And guys, we look forward to seeing you the next time. And as always, remember, get to the top of your mountain. This is Marsh Naidoo, signing off.