Testimonials

Testimonials are a strong indicator of our capacity to meet the needs of clients nationwide. Below is just a sample of such testimonials.

Your [Sean Slade] presentation of the results of the California Healthy Kids Survey to the Marin County School/Law Enforcement Partnership was absolutely phenomenal! The data will be extremely valuable as we plan to address the issues in the critical areas you helped to identify. You also took time to point out the areas where progress is being made and thereby gave encouragement and positive reinforcement to the hard work that is being done by so many dedicated, concerned professionals.

There are times in history when there is a paradigm shift in thinking about a subject. Both of you [Ron Lally and Peter Mangione] have contributed to a shift in the way that politicians, professionals, and parents view infants and toddlers — their development, their needs, their competencies, and their vulnerabilities. Your words and the videos, materials, website, training, and resources that you developed have focused the early childhood field’s attention on babies and given them and child-care and education programs the attention they deserve.

You have touched the lives of countless infants and toddlers and you have given credibility to the professionals who devote their careers to improving the care and education for infants and toddlers.

On behalf of the entire board, we would like to express our appreciation for your [Judy Shulman] contributions to NCCE (National Society for the Study of Education) over the past four years. Your role in keeping the interests of educational practitioners in front of all of us has been invaluable; it has truly prompted a renewed commitment to the inclusion of the practice perspective in everything we plan.

I want to thank you all [Ron Lally and Peter Mangione] for the opportunity to participate in the PITC (Program for Infant/Toddler Care) Academy for Program Directors in Anaheim. You and all of the presenters brought to me your passion and knowledge of what is best for infants, toddlers, and their families. Your sensitivity to the needs of directors and your commitment to ensuring that we understand the essentials as we serve California’s youngest children was as refreshing as it was valuable.

Dr. Robert Linquanti provided valuable assistance to the California Department of Education. He was a key participant in our workgroup that was tasked with developing a new NCLB, Title III accountability system for the state of California. His expertise, dedication, and ability to interpret data greatly contributed to the success of our efforts. I am confident that the final product we designed is based on solid data that provided clear policy direction to our constituents. Dr. Linquanti was truly an asset to our team.

WestEd’s new Building Academic Literacy publications were a welcome reminder of how much Ruth Schoenbach and the Strategic Literacy Initiative have accomplished. I marvel at the on-target relevance and splendid quality of the work as well as how tenaciously SLI has stuck to its guns. You are creating a resource that is much needed and in low supply by identifying a critical problem — especially one that disproportionately affects disadvantaged children — and staying with it in order to deepen your understanding of it, incorporate teacher insights and feedback, and build it with ample care and deliberate speed. I hope and trust that your successes will keep breeding more. The world needs them.

Kudos for an excellent report! We have been waiting to have credible measures that look at the relationship between academic achievement and school level risk and protective factors. This report is an excellent beginning and will assist many of us who thrive on meaningful data to support student services work. Thanks to your entire team for a wonderful tool.

Thanks to WestEd’s team for the fabulous work you are doing for CenterSource and for Tribes Learning Communities. We are learning much from the evaluation process and appreciate your expertise, patience, communication, organization, responsiveness, clear guidance, and direction. Your excellent work and tremendous efforts are allowing us to take the next step in our journey as we address new directives and initiatives, and learn how we can best support Tribes’ schools, trainers, teachers, and most importantly, students!

It was inspiring to meet the talented individuals in WestEd's Center for Child and Family Studies who are so committed to enhancing services for vulnerable children. Peter Mangione brought to life the key elements of the Head Start and Early Head Start programs; I appreciated the opportunity to explore our preliminary thinking regarding the best approach to our intensive home visiting service and the challenges we are facing in our childcare industry. I look forward to working in partnership with your staff as we progress our strategies in New South Wales!