Investigation shows Oregon’s early learning agency faces management challenges

Mismanagement, inequity and turnovers plague Oregon’s Department of Early Learning and Care, a new story from InvestigateWest shows. The agency is responsible for more than $1.3 billion in early learning investments and has seen more than five managers and directors leave the office in the past 18 months, with some employees describing office culture as “toxic.” Kaylee Tornay is an investigative reporter who has been reporting on this issue. She joins us with more on what some workers have been facing.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Mismanagement, inequity and turnovers are plaguing Oregon’s Department of Early Learning and Care. According to a recent article from Investigate West, the agency which is responsible for more than a billion dollars in early learning investments has seen more than five managers and directors leave the office in the last year and a half. Some employees describe the office culture as “toxic.” Investigative reporter Kaylee Tornay wrote about this and she joins us now. Welcome back to the show.

Kaylee Tornay: Hi, Dave. Happy to be here.

Miller: What is Oregon’s Department of Early Learning and Care responsible for?

Tornay: Yes. So this is a really new department, just became a department in July of last year. And it grew out of Oregon’s Early Learning Division, formerly part of the Oregon Department of Education. And it’s responsible for administering the early learning system, which is this really amazing kind of fragmented constellation of childcare providers and early learning programs. The department also manages the employment related daycare subsidy that helps qualifying families afford child care. They manage background checks and licensing for providers, and they also administer publicly funded programs such as Preschool Promise and Baby Promise. And they coordinate with Head Start in Oregon to try to basically make sure families have access to high quality care, enabling them to work and their children to learn and thrive.

Miller: You opened your recent article with Priscilla Lowells, who worked on the agency’s compliance team. In December of 2022, she wrote a letter to then incoming governor Tina Kotek. What did she write?

Tornay: So Priscilla Lowells wrote to Governor Kotek asking her to step in, essentially, and take a look at the issues that Lowells had been raising over many months with the leadership of the Early Learning Division at that time. Lowells said that managers were basically failing to adequately address racial inequities within the agency and that that was having a direct impact on childcare providers who are subject to the agency’s oversight, and also on staff who she said were leaving the department as a result of the environment.

Miller: What did she try to do before she went to the chief executive of the state, her boss’s boss’s boss’s...I don’t know how many levels there are. It’s a big deal. What did she do before that?

Tornay: Yeah. So the records that we got from the Governor’s Office, from the Department of Early Learning and Care itself and also from the Department of Administrative Services, which played a bit of a role in all of this. All of that indicated that she had filed a number of complaints about comments that were made by managers or that managers had known about and she said failed to address. She had filed some human resources complaints about those things. And she also had alleged retaliation for speaking up about those and other comments.

It’s not totally clear from the records whether all of the things that she kind of raised in various ways…some were in emails that, including emails that were directly with the agency director, Alyssa Chatterjee, kind of listed a number of comments and incidents that she felt were not adequately addressed. So sort of a variety of different actions that she took. Some were formal complaints and then some were sort of putting it on her boss’s radar or her boss’s boss’s radar, before she ever went to the governor’s office.

Miller: What was she asking for in general?

Tornay: Generally a common theme that these records showed us is that Priscilla Lowells was asking for training. She asked for the department, then the division, to implement more training on bias and equity and really making sure that cultural competency was something that was really happening in the department. And she asked for that repeatedly.

Miller: How had her direct supervisors or other agency leaders responded to those concerns?

Tornay: So, yeah, I want to make clear that the department did investigate a number of Lowells’s complaints, including those allegations of retaliation. And investigators didn’t substantiate the claims of retaliation. But in some situations, they did affirm that certain comments were unprofessional, that they violated workplace policy or that they constituted what’s commonly called microaggressions, small sort of statements that are discriminatory or biased against a particular protected class of people. That was part of the response and then sometimes when she was raising things perhaps a bit less formally, she was told kind of on a number of occasions like, yeah, those things have been handled, like I’m confident that they were handled appropriately.

Miller: What did you hear from the director of the agency, Alyssa Chatterjee, about this?

Tornay: Yeah. Alyssa Chatterjee definitely made a strong defense of the department to us. She said that equity has been a core focus throughout the whole process to bring the division into its own as a department. She cited her own personal experience as a Person of Color saying that it’s a personal value of hers. And she also pointed to some new trainings that the department has implemented. Even as recently as the last few months, there’s a new sort of, I think it’s like a bias awareness and management training that is going to be required for managers. And a spokesperson told me it’s going to be strongly encouraged for everyone else to take.

Miller: What did Governor Kotek’s office do in response to this direct request for help from Priscilla Lowells?

Tornay: So her office, as far as these records showed us, she never responded directly to Priscilla Lowells. Lowells reached out twice, once in December 2022 and then again in February 2023, after Governor Kotek had taken office. And when she reached out the second time, at that point, the Department of Administrative Services, which kind of provides human resources support to a number of different agencies, state agencies, they had opened their own investigation. And so Andrea Cooper, who’s Governor Kotek’s now outgoing Chief of Staff, she simply forwarded on Lowells’ outreach to the Department of Administrative Services and said, we hear that you have an investigation going, we’re not going to respond to this person. So here you go, do whatever you want with this.

Miller: Let’s turn to the Tribal Early Learning Hub. What was it supposed to be?

Tornay: So the Tribal Early Learning Hub was created in a piece of legislation in 2021, and it was supposed to be an entity that would reduce the barriers that tribes often face when they’re trying to access early learning investments, support, and different programs, because these are sovereign governments and they have different needs than many other grantees who don’t have that sort of status. And so the Tribal Early Learning Hub was supposed to be staffed with folks who would be able to understand tribal sovereignty, to get contracts in place in a way that was respectful of that sort of government to government relationship, and in doing so increase tribes’ access to that support, to be able to provide early learning services, childcare services, to their own communities, which is very important to them. You definitely don’t have to talk long with folks to know how important it is to them to do that.

Miller: What happened to this initiative?

Tornay: The legislation put the sort of responsibility for designing this hub in the hands of a tribal advisory committee, which is comprised of people representing each one of Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes. And they went right to work and have been meeting for, I think, more than two years now. And throughout the course of those meetings, this advisory committee said that they really struggled to come up with a model that would adequately respect every tribe’s tribal sovereignty. They really wanted to, they’re not going to compromise on that.

And what they found was that they couldn’t do it, basically. That’s the explanation that I got. And when I was able to kind of watch some of the meetings once the recordings and things were made public, that was the essential kind of tension is that in practice, things like a nonprofit model - which many regional early learning hubs are nonprofits like United Way - that was not going to work for tribes without sort of infringing on their own sovereign tribal processes within their own governments. And so instead what they started turning toward was more of an early learning sort of student success plan, modeled somewhat after what the Oregon Department of Education has. And that’s sort of where the focus has been in the last few months.

Miller: Another issue you explored is the fate of Preschool Promise in 2022. Can you just first remind us what Preschool Promise is?

Tornay: Preschool Promise is a really major component of Oregon’s investment into early learning. It is a free, high quality preschool program for Oregon families who are living at or below 200% of the federal poverty level in Oregon. And so it’s a real mixed bag. Within that though, of the types of settings that Preschool Promise takes place in, and the size of the programs, those sorts of things, but all across the state preschool program, excuse me, Preschool Promise is serving families and intended to serve families who need access to preschool, and affordability is one of those main barriers.

Miller: What happened with it in 2022?

Tornay: So in 2022 the program made a lot of headlines because of issues with programs not starting on time. The timing that we hear that works really well for families is for programs to be operational at the start of the school year. And that was not the case for a lot of programs. There were, I think, thousands of families that were waiting for access to programs that were not able to open because of these delays with contracting basically. Providers were faced with a choice to open and not get paid until their contracts and everything was ironed out at the state level or to just not be open. And so it caused a bit of a stir and legislators took notice.

And then also there were issues with some reporting that revealed that some of these spots were just not even being used. Some of that is by design, because of the pandemic and restrictions on how many kids could be in a setting at one time, the pandemic certainly impacted that. But there are also some issues raised around questionable expenses by some of these providers and the fact that enrollment just really wasn’t being carefully monitored from each one of these providers. And you had no real penalties.

Miller: You note in your reporting that agency director Alyssa Chatterjee, she explained at least to some extent those unfilled spots by talking about the pandemic, as you just mentioned. What else did you learn through your reporting or public records requests about what was going on behind the scenes?

Tornay: We got a couple of resignation letters and an exit memo from some staff members who had left in sort of the months that followed a lot of this kind of flurry of headlines in the fall, who basically said that internal issues had played a bigger role than Chatterjee had let on publicly. And that included, according to them, disregarding community feedback on where parents actually wanted to send their children, right? Just because it’s a Preschool Promise environment it might not necessarily be the right fit for your kid, because kids are different.

Early learning hubs and Child Care Resource and Referral agencies, those other regional agencies, had really gathered feedback from communities kind of on a really rushed timeline back in 2021. And these staff had said, you didn’t really listen to what they wanted, and that had a direct effect on providers being ready to take on kids and [for] spots being unfilled. That was also a piece in addition to these issues with staffing shortages and the pandemic restrictions.

Miller: Well, one issue that you’re getting to there that’s woven into so much of what we’ve talked about so far is this high turnover rate among managers at the agency. Can you just give us a sense for the scale of it?

Tornay: Yeah. So, we tried to report and find out as much as we could about every one of the departures over the last couple of years. And what we found is that in those last two years alone, at least five managers and key staff involved with delivering on some of these community-centered and equity emphasized aspects of their programming, at least five of those folks had left the agency voluntarily in the last two years. Another three managers at that level were demoted or fired and then there’s a few others out there that we just don’t even know why they left, but we know that they left. So it was enough to make us take notice once we started looking into it. And so we tried to find out as much as we could about each one of those departures.

Miller: Well, how did current or former staffers explain this exodus and what did you hear from the agency director?

Tornay: Those folks that we spoke with and some of those records themselves attest to a high level of frustration, especially where we heard it from was folks in these midlevel kind of manager roles, ones who deal directly with leaders from the community level and families and providers. They are directly connected to those folks, they gather and synthesize the feedback. And a few of them that we spoke with said that feedback is not getting through to the highest level decision making in the agency, and that has contributed a lot to this frustration that’s causing folks to quit.

Miller: What about Alyssa Chatterjee?

Tornay: She told us that she doesn’t think that the turnover is necessarily unusual. The department has been going through a lot of transition and the pandemic also contributed to turnover in a lot of areas. And yeah, basically said people have left for different reasons, but in general she has reason to believe that people think that the agency is supportive and people are happy there.

Miller: Just briefly, did you get the sense that current or former staffers agree that they think the agency is moving in the right direction?

Tornay: Yeah, that’s a good question. A big one for sure, because we’re talking about a department of more than 300 people, right? And we spoke to about a dozen but the people that we spoke with are really folks who have been involved with helping shape the department. They helped write important plans, like Raise Up Oregon and they were behind the work to create the Tribal Early Learning Hub, that sort of thing. And it’s definitely fair to say that their sense was that there are some deep problems, kind of coming from the very top, that are contributing to what they feel [is] the department failing to uphold its mission and its promises to families.

Miller: Kaylee, thanks very much.

Tornay: Thank you.

Miller: Kaylee Tornay is an investigative reporter with InvestigateWest. That’s a nonprofit news outlet covering the Pacific Northwest.

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