Senior Advisor, Kindergarten Readiness (P4)

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Summary

Save the Children’s U.S. Programs (USP) division is committed to ensuring that all children in rural America have a healthy, strong foundation to thrive as learners and in life. Our contribution to a full cradle-to-career continuum is focused on the early years, birth through elementary school; and our goals are to increase kindergarten readiness and grade-level literacy and math proficiency for children in under-resourced rural communities. Save the Children does whatever it takes to be there for children in times of crisis. Always at the ready, we are among the first to respond and the last to leave, staying as long as it takes to help children and families recover from their losses, restore their lives, and build resilience for years to come. 

We are seeking a Senior Advisor, Kindergarten Readiness. In this role, you will lead program design and innovations, support quality implementation, and successfully lead a team of national Advisors supporting our Kindergarten Readiness programming in rural America. The ideal candidate will have extensive content expertise in early learning, experience working in rural communities, and deep knowledge of effective practices for advancing early education outcomes for our youngest learners.

What You’ll Be Doing (Essential Duties)

Program Development & Design (35%) 

• Serve as technical content expert, specializing in early childhood development and education within the national Program Design & Impact team; provide strategy development support, inform design of monitoring and evaluation plans, and provide oversight of kindergarten readiness programming, projects, and initiatives. 
• Ensure early learning programs are culturally relevant, backed by research, are best practice, and effectively accelerate kindergarten readiness outcomes for children. 
• Ensure program adaptations and alignment to community needs and insights; maintain continuous feedback loop between national, state, and local partners to match program offerings to identified needs. 
• Develop new models, strategies, and resources to broaden impact and fill programmatic gaps within the early learning domain; ensure alignment to tiered strategic approach of balancing deep impact and broad reach. 
• Stay abreast of field trends, engage in continued professional learning opportunities, and utilize program-specific data to inform program design, refinements, and to enhance results. 
• Collaborate closely with key Program Design & Impact team leads to align, integrate and coordinate across programmatic areas; support seamless transition of supports and services from early childhood to and through school-aged education programming, and across community-based initiatives. 
• Provide oversight and management functions to successfully lead functional team of kindergarten readiness-focused Advisors; ensure effective leadership practices, team cohesiveness, accountability, and performance. 

Program Implementation (30%) 

• Serve in a technical advisory and trainer capacity to support kindergarten readiness program implementation; work in collaboration with state-based leadership and program staff to ensure high quality implementation of programs, practices, and strategies across rural communities. 
• Lead development and support delivery of trainings, resources, and technical assistance to build programmatic competencies of state-level staff, regional and national partners, focused on direct programs and general content to a broad audience of key rural stakeholders; liaise with Training & Integrated Services team to support Training & Technical Assistance (TTA) strategy development and delivery.  
• Collaborate with MERL team to support evaluation planning, tools, and subsequent data collection, analysis, goal setting and reporting for kindergarten readiness programming; monitor technical quality of implementation ensuring programs are on track to meet key metrics (child outcome measures, reach expectations, other grant deliverables). 
• Promote best practices and ongoing learning through community of practices, standing TA, and increased awareness of and access to professional development opportunities. 
• Work alongside state teams, state educational agencies (SEAs), and var