Home > Newsletters > Candace Vinson: Advancing the High School CDA
Candace needed support when she began teaching early childhood education in high school and helping students to earn a CDA®. “I was teaching physical education at Lakeview High School in St. Clair Shores, MI, and I just loved the school,” Candace recalls. So, she was taken aback in 2008 when her principal said the school was cutting out her position and wanted her to teach early childhood education, instead. “I couldn’t afford to lose my job,” Candace says, “since I was a single mom with two young girls, so I jumped at the chance to learn about the early education field. I went back to school to get my consumer science endorsement and found that I loved my child development classes.”
She also liked teaching high school students as she came to see how crucial it was to bring more young folks into the early learning profession. “At the time,” she admits, “I felt that I needed guidance in helping students to complete their CDA credential. And as I became more seasoned, I began to think of ways to support other high school teachers who faced the same challenge. Together with some colleagues, I started a small teacher organization to provide a network where teachers could help teachers. We worked to make that organization bigger, and now it is the Michigan Educational Careers Association (MECA), which provides educators with opportunities to grow in their careers.”
And Candace also grew in her career six years ago when the Michigan State Department of Education was looking for an education consultant. “I jumped again at the chance to do more to support teachers,” Candace says “since I have first-hand knowledge of the challenges they face. When I began teaching ECE, I didn’t know anything about the CDA or the early childhood sector. I wasn’t sure about how to help students set up their CDA portfolios and what licensing looks like in the early childhood field. As a new teacher, I also had to combat the stigma that teaching young children is less important than teaching K-12. So, now I’m helping other new teachers address these roadblocks as I help spread the word about the CDA.”
The high school CDA plays a big role in the Proud Michigan Educator LAUNCH program, which helps students get a start in teaching. The goal of LAUNCH is to meet the need for qualified teachers as Michigan strives to provide pre-K for all, as Candace explains. She has been involved in the program since 2019, when she assumed her current position. Now she works at the state level to build a system to guide high school teachers in helping students build careers in the early learning field.
Candace’s job involves everything from policy work to giving teachers personal support and more, as she explains. “One thing I do is ensure high school CDA programs comply with federal and state laws by offering chances for student leadership and providing work-based learning. I also head up a committee of subject matter experts who advise the state on policies to surmount any roadblocks that stop students from earning CDAs. And another big part of my job is answering teachers’ questions and providing them with opportunities to learn.”
One of the ways that LAUNCH does this is by partnering with different organizations, including the Michigan Association for the Education of Young Children (MIAEYC), Candace says. “Thanks to shared funding, we have been able to send our teachers to the MIAEYC state conference so they can learn more about the CDA. MIAEYC has also supported CDA coursework for teachers and paid for them to take classes at universities and colleges so the teachers would feel more prepared.” And that’s making an impact, Candace says. “In recent years, high school teachers are feeling more comfortable teaching CDA courses, and high school principals are becoming more aware of the need for teachers who actually know how to prepare students for the CDA.”
Candace also helps build the ranks of CDAs since she does a lot of professional development for teachers through the Michigan Educational Careers Association, as she explains. “I work with MECA to get more young men into the early childhood classroom, put together a monthly newsletter and serve as a subject matter expert who can answer teachers’ questions or send them to someone who can. And this year, I’m going to be the keynote speaker at MECA’s annual conference, where I will call attention to the importance of credentials for the early learning field.”
She sometimes has to work hard to get this message across to high school principals, who tend to come from outside the early education field. “Many of them don’t want to steer students into the profession because they see it as too low paid,” Candace says. “But I tell them to stop being negative about the field because many students want to be early childhood teachers and earning a credential will allow them to move up the career ladder in the field”—an argument that’s also making an impact.
“From 2020 to 2024, we expanded from 55 to 132 high school programs,” Candace says. “All these programs must guide students to earn either a CDA or Michigan Youth Development Associate credential, which qualifies students to work in after-school programs in the state. In 2020, two students earned preschool CDAs, and by 2024, this number had mounted to 78. So, principals who were slow to support credentials are beginning to embrace them, and that’s exciting to watch.”
It’s also exciting to watch high school teachers develop and help their CDA students succeed, as Candace points out. “We had a 23-year-old teacher named Tina who had come from the early childhood field and was new to the high school classroom so she was feeling a bit lost and worried she wouldn’t be able help her students earn their CDAs. So, she came to one of our teacher conferences five years ago. Since then, she’s come into her comfort zone,” as Candace is thrilled to see. “Tina has been bringing a lot of new skills to the classroom, and 100 percent of her high school students are now earning their CDAs.”
Boosting the ranks of high school CDAs helps bring equity to early learning, and that matters, as Candace explains. “All children, regardless of their background, deserve high-quality early learning, and the only way we can provide it is to have educators with high-quality credentials, like our high school CDAs. And the high schoolers also bring energy and fresh ideas to the early childhood education field.”
Granted, they may also use their CDA as a springboard to go in other directions. “Not all the high schoolers in the LAUNCH program remain in the early childhood profession,” Candace says. “Some will go on to college right after high school. Others will spend five years in early childhood settings while working on their degrees. But overall, we’re continuing to build the ranks of the early childhood field and we’re convincing more high school principals to support the CDA. There’s been a change of mindset among principals in our state,” Candace says. And the progress she’s made has given her a fresh perspective on her past.
“I still remember what it was like when the principal at Lakeview High told me that the only way he could keep me at the school was by having me teach early childhood education courses,” Candace says. “I thought of it as a forced transfer and felt awful at the time as that principal pushed me out of my comfort zone. But, looking back, I now see he was giving me career opportunities that I would enjoy.
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