City Native Returns To Take Helm Of Children’s Museum/Creating Kids

The Board of the Connecticut Children’s Museum submitted this article.

The board of the Connecticut Children’s Museum is delighted to welcome Jessica Bialecki as the new executive director and third leader of the institution.

The museum lives in New Haven’s Children’s Building, at the corner of Orange and Wall Streets, which also houses Creating Kids Childcare Center, the Early Childhood Resource Center, and a myriad of programs that reach out into the community. 

Its roots go back to 1973, when June Levy started the Museum in a school bus. The museum found its way into a building on State Street with the support of then-Mayor Frank Logue and his assistant, Rosa DeLauro. When that building was taken for the widening of State Street in the 1980s* (woe is us!) it moved to its current location, a mansion that had been bequeathed to the city to serve its children. 

In 1999, upon Levy’s retirement, the Building was taken over by Sandy Malmquist and the Creating Kids board, beginning a new life. With Sandy’s passing last year, the board of the Children’s Museum was lucky enough to attract Jess to carry the project forward. By way of welcoming the New Haven native back home, we’ve asked her a few questions for us:

You’ve been in the saddle for three months now. Tell us about one of your favorite moments.

There have been so many amazing moments already — it’s hard to choose! One of the best was earlier this month, when beloved New Haven early childhood leader and puppeteer Betty Baisden brought a Roxi Fox puppet show to Creating Kids Childcare Center to celebrate the Week of the Young Child. In an example of what a fantastically small town New Haven can be, I was a preschooler at United Community Nursery School in the late 1980s when Betty was in her first years as director there! It was so heartwarming to watch our kids at the center experience the same magic of Roxi Fox and friends that I did growing up!

Many of us know that New Haven is The Greatest Small City in America (#GSCIA). You grew up here, went to Conte-West Hills and Wilbur Cross, attended Yale, worked post-Katrina in New Orleans and more recently in New York City, and on the way got a Masters in Education at Harvard. What drew you back to New Haven?

My wife Meghan and I were excited to welcome our twin daughters, Jayne and Louise, last summer. As an early childhood educator, I’m quite familiar with the demands of young children, but there is no substitute for grandparents! We are extremely lucky to have my family in the New Haven area, and that played a big role in our decision to move.

Beyond the child care support, I have dreamed for years of coming back to New Haven to carry on a family tradition of making this city an even better place to live. My mother, MarLou Davis, taught second grade in New Haven Public Schools, my father, Tony, was a fixture in City Hall’s Office of Economic & Business Development, and my brother, Justin, is a battalion chief for the New Haven Fire Department. Public service in New Haven runs deep in my blood, and I am proud to join an incredibly robust non-profit and early childhood community here in the city. 

New Haven is also a wonderful place to raise a family! Meghan, Jayne, Louise, and I are looking forward to many walks up East Rock, pizza dinners from Modern (always #1 in my book), lazy beach days at Lighthouse Park, and, of course, visits to the Connecticut Children’s Museum!

You’ve worked at a much larger scale before in both New Orleans and New York.The potential for impact in those situations was both greater and less than what you have here in New Haven. You had the option to work for a policy organization at more money and less stress, but you opted to be closer to the ground. Tell us about that.

I spent the last five years working on early childhood policy for the City of New York as we sought to expand access to free, high-quality early childhood services to over 100,000 children. I am a deep believer that those making education policy should never get too far away from where the real action takes place – alongside teachers and children in centers, schools, and family child care homes. While the scale of the work I was doing in NYC was impressive, the depth of impact that is possible here in New Haven, and in this role specifically, was very appealing to me. 

Leading the Children’s Building is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reconnect to my background in direct service as an early childhood educator and administrator, while working in partnership with others in the Connecticut early childhood community to identify solutions to current and future challenges in our sector. I am deeply honored to step into this role, and to work with such a committed group of educators to build on the tremendous legacy that June and Sandy created.

The Children’s Building houses Creating Kids Childcare Center, the Early Childhood Resource Center, and the Connecticut Children’s Museum, serving young children, early childhood educators from family child care homes, community-based cares, and public schools, and families at large. How did the organization fare during the height of COVID-19 and what are your plans as, hopefully, things start to loosen up?

COVID-19 has been challenging for us at the Children’s Building, as it has been for so many small nonprofits across the city and state, but I have been blown away by the resilience demonstrated by our entire community. Thanks to the truly heroic efforts of our staff, Creating Kids Childcare Center has remained open and has been serving families in-person, with a few brief interruptions, since summer 2020. We are currently enrolling families for September 2022.

Our Early Childhood Resource Center (ECRC) pivoted to professional learning workshops via Zoom, which are continuing every Thursday evening through June. Our online workshops have been consistently attracting nearly 50 early childhood educators each week, drawn from centers, family child care homes, and schools across Greater New Haven. The enormous response we’ve seen to our ECRC online offerings is a testament to the diverse and robust early childhood community that Sandy cultivated for so many years.

Throughout the pandemic, we have also been proud to continue our partnership with All Our Kin on the Family Child Care Tool Kit program, which provides materials and support to help unlicensed family, friend, and neighbor caregivers meet health and safety standards, fulfill state licensing requirements, and become part of a professional community of child care providers. We are now working with All Our Kin to expand the Tool Kit program to New York City.

Our physical museum space has been closed to field trips and to the public since March 2020 due to COVID-19 restrictions and our recent leadership transitions. I am thrilled to share that we anticipate re-opening the Museum for field trips from local early childhood centers, homes, and schools in late May, and to the general public in early summer 2022 (COVID-dependent, of course). We are currently fundraising to support our reopening efforts — see our Great Give campaign — and are counting down the days until we can fill our Museum exhibit rooms with the sounds of children laughing and learning again. We will share updates on our reopening on our website and Facebook page, so please stay tuned!

* Page 95 of New Haven, Reshaping the City, 1900 – 1980 by the New Haven Colony Historical Society at https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/oJPH7u1B3_gC?hl=en&gbpv=0