08/09/2026
Childcare workforce shortage is the headline right now, but I want to tell you about the day it stopped being a headline for me and started being a mirror.
We had over 100 employees inside Dixon Academy. A real team, built over years, across four locations. And when I looked around for who was ready to step into leadership, ready to run a room the way I once had to, I could not find one person I trusted to do it without me standing over their shoulder.
That is not a hiring problem. Hiring problems get solved with a better job post. This was a pipeline problem. We had trained teachers. We had never trained leaders. Nobody had. Not me, not the field, not a single program I could point to and say, go copy that.
So I built the thing I could not find. I went from classroom teacher to administrator to running four sites at once to now sitting off-site, watching people I trained run the day-to-day without me. That climb is not a resume line. That is the actual curriculum for The Launch Collective, because I am not teaching a theory I read about. I am teaching the exact steps I had to invent for myself, because nobody handed them to me.
If you are a director right now and you have the whole plan for your own team's growth sitting in your head, unwritten, that is not disorganization. That is exactly where I was. The difference is I stopped waiting for someone else to build the ladder and built it myself. Directors elsewhere are about to feel their own state shift, the way Illinois and Nebraska already have. The ones who already have people ready to lead will be the ones who are not scrambling when it does.
Save this for the director who is still the only trained leader on her team.
