HILLTOP Early Childhood SERVICES is a consulting agency that succeeded HILLTOP Early Childhood CENTER. The center was a non-profit nursery school and kindergarten that Ellen founded in Queens, NY in 1983. Since 1983, the name HILLTOP has meant excellence in:

• quality early childhood education
• nurturing of children, staff, and families
• advocacy for high-quality, appropriate, child-centered, inquiry-based education suited to each child’s needs.
• positive relationships with licensing and regulatory agencies

Hilltop Early Childhood Services is more than 20 years old! We are proud to Help Adults to Help Young Children in so many ways. Not full time now, but always interested in new avenues to help. Very grateful for all of the clients – some of them for years and years, the friends, the great times, the hard and yet rewarding work, the advocacy which seems even more critical now, the students, faculty, families, and especially, my fellow wizards of early childhood education who I’m proud to call friends. Thanks for everyone’s encouragement during these past years, and now, onward to the next challenge!!!

Since the start of the pandemic, our founder, Ellen Cogan has provided online group and individual consultation to programs and families. On site services are now also available. She can help you with behavior difficulties related to and not related to the pandemic.

Ellen is an Implementation Planner for the Early Head Start/Child Care Partnership, one of only 40 experts selected nationally by the Office of Head Start and the Office of Child Care.

She is a member of the New York State Cadre of Master Trainers for the Pyramid Model, she has earned the New York State Training and Technical Assistance Professional Credential as a Professional Development Specialist – Early Childhood/School Age, and she is a registered trainer in the Aspire Registry.

Her training sessions qualify for EIP funding from NYS. This only applies to programs in New York State.

 Our Founder, and principal consultant, Ellen Cogan, has been active in Early Childhood Education for very many years. Her last name has changed. She started life as a Shapiro. During college, MS Ed program, teaching, supervising and consulting, her last name was Hofstetter. Consulting and teaching on the university level, she was a Jaffe. Finally, in late 2011, she became a Cogan. Looking back, staying Shapiro would have been so much easier, but times have changed so since those early days.

Ellen earned BA and MS Ed degrees from the Early Childhood Education department of Queens College of the City University of New York. She was the only Early Childhood Ed major to minor in Home Economics. Education of young children was connected to home and family from the start.

• Teaching in public and private elementary and preschools
• Adjunct teaching undergraduate and graduate levels
• Directing Head Start and private and publicly funded preschools
• Consultant to small and large Head Start and other programs
• Advocate for high quality early childhood programs and for the children, families, and staff of these programs
• Grant writer (with clients)
• Published articles in Early Childhood magazines and journals
• Speaker at conferences and forums.

Mrs. Cogan, a life member of NAEYC, was an adjunct instructor in child development in the Childhood Education program in the School of Education, Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture at The City College of New York (CCNY), City University of New York (CUNY), located in New York City, and in other branches of CUNY.

She was a member of Teaching Strategies, Inc. (publisher of The Creative Curriculum)’s Staff Development Network. Ellen was trained by Teaching Strategies to train directors and teaching staff in implementation of both The Creative Curriculum for Preschool, Fourth Edition, and The Creative Curriculum for Infants, Toddlers, and Twos. As a member of this group, she provided Creative Curriculum training to many programs throughout the United States. She continues to support many of the original concepts of The Creative Curriculum as she moves on with other consulting venues. Since she left their network, Teaching Strategies published new versions and products on which she has not trained. Ellen independently continued to offer seminars to help people understand and use some of those products. This was based on her attendance at conference sessions, purchase of new materials, and her vast experience in early childhood. There is no connection to or endorsement from the publisher.

Clients include individuals, small agencies (both for-profit and non-profit), large multi-site agencies, resource and referral agencies, major corporations and consortiums of corporations and child care organizations. She has presented at many conferences – local, city-wide, state and national, including NAEYC.

To Help Adults to Help Young Children – through practicing the 5 core values of:

• Honesty/trustworthiness
• Respect for self
• Respect for others
• Respect for the environment
• Good citizenship (not political, but as as member of any and all groups such as faculty, classroom, etc.)

• Kindness
• Compassion
• Knowledge of child development
• Knowledge of current research and methods
• The belief that EVERY child can benefit from and deserves to be offered high quality early childhood education
• Knowledgeable, well-paid, and kind staff