Zoie Arnold

I currently work as a behavior support manager at Neighborhood House in Salt Lake City, where I've been for about 4 years. In this role, I developed a framework that helps us reduce exclusions in early childhood settings. We noticed a pattern within our own organization where we were excluding children based on their challenging behaviors in the classrooms. Neighborhood House supports 11 or 12 preschool classrooms and 6 or 7 school-age classrooms for an after-school program, plus an adult day services program. Instead of making exclusion the first option, our framework ensures we take a child through a comprehensive process. We observe their environment in the classroom, work with teachers on environmental needs like structure and transition warnings, meet with families to understand home routines, and then collect ABC data (antecedent, behavior, consequence) for 4 weeks. Then we meet as a team with parents, families, teachers, and our behavior support team to determine what resources and strategies need to be put in place. We have partnerships within the community for therapeutic services, speech therapy, occupational therapy, and mental health counseling. We train teachers on specific strategies and track another 6 weeks while implementing these resources. We've seen a decrease of 62.5% in exclusions in our own program after implementing this framework. Because of this success, my business partner Sadie Rodriguez and I have created a consulting business outside of Neighborhood House so we can take this framework to other organizations to help them with their exclusion rates as well. I've been in nonprofit for about 7 years total, and before Neighborhood House, I was a lead teacher for Head Start. I started out wanting to be an elementary school teacher, but after my first semester in college, I realized I didn't want to be a teacher but still wanted to work with kids and support the community. So I went into child development, which was a broader major. I started working in direct services as a behavior interventionist and registered behavior technician for children with autism, implementing ABA therapy. Throughout my career, it's evolved into more of an administrative role, mainly because I thought I could do more good and solve more solutions if I was in an administrative role. I also worked in a different role here at Neighborhood House as a sensory room coordinator, where I helped develop and design a sensory room program, which gave me a lot of new information about sensory processing and how that affects regulation, especially in early childhood classrooms.