Archive for the ‘Pre-kindergarten’ Category

The work of The Early Childhood Agenda continues! We are building a stronger early childhood system.

So please join us on Wednesday, June 28, 2023, when Strategies for Children will host the next quarterly convening of the Agenda on Zoom.

You can register for the 10 a.m. session that will be in English and Spanish — or for the 6 p.m. session that will be in English.

También puede leer esta información en español.

If you can’t make either session, you will be able to watch them on the Agenda’s YouTube channel.

If you need to catch up on the Early Childhood Agenda, please check out this update from Strategies for Children’s Director of Policy Marisa Fear:

For general questions or assistance, please contact: info@earlychildhoodagenda.org

And thank you for your continued participation and support!

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For Cari Moore, being an early educator is, in part, a second chance to make up for time she lost when she was a child struggling with meningitis and severe allergies to foods, including peanut butter and chocolate. It was a tough time, but it led to a fulfilling career.

Moore’s family moved to the United States from Panama, and Moore grew up in Chelsea. Her mother spoke Spanish, but wanted Moore to speak English, so Moore decided to teach herself Spanish.

As Moore began thinking about careers, she drew on her own experience.

“I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician,” she says. “I wanted to do what doctors had done for me because I really appreciated that. But once I realized that child care and schools were an option, I realized I wanted to become a teacher. Even though doctors were important to me, so were teachers. When I missed school, it was my teachers who would come and see me. They would have packets for me.”

Moore also spent years being the youngest cousin in her family. And when a new cousin was born, when Moore was a teenager, she stepped up to babysit for that child. And, as a high school student, Moore traveled to Mexico where she worked in a camp, coming up with activities to help children learn more about their communities.

By the time Moore applied to college, she knew that she wanted to work with children, and she choose to attend Wheelock College. 

“Wheelock felt like home. It felt cozy,” she recalls. “I majored in psychology with a specialty in early education.” 

(more…)

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Cambridge, Mass., is moving one big step closer to launching its universal preschool program, the Cambridge Preschool Program (CPP).

The city has just announced that starting this winter, parents can apply to enroll in the preschool program for the 2024-2025 school year.

As The Boston Globe reports, “The move is aimed at increasing access to high-quality early education in one of Massachusetts’ most expensive cities, home to Harvard and MIT, where private prekindergarten costs $20,000 to more than $30,000 per year.”

The Globe adds, “Cambridge joins other cities, such as Boston and Springfield, in making free prekindergarten accessible for all children.”

Cambridge expects to spend “about $20 million per year on preschool, money it found in its budget without having to make cuts to other services, officials said. The city has been planning for the new costs by setting aside $10 million in next year’s budget to help start the preschool program the following year.”

City leaders are strong supporters of CPP.

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State House

Photo: Alyssa Haywoode for Strategies for Children

On Tuesday, May 9, 2023, the Massachusetts Senate Ways and Means Committee released its $55.8 billion budget proposal for fiscal year 2024.

This proposal includes significant investments in early education and care, including $475 million for C3 operational grants, $15 million for grants to early education and care providers for personal child care, $25 million in new funding for early education and care capital improvements, and $30 million for the Commonwealth Preschool Partnership Initiative. You can see more details about funding for early education and care on our State Budget Tracker.

Senators had until last Friday to file amendments to the $55.8 billion proposal. The Senate will start the debate on the budget next Tuesday, May 23. After the Senate passes its budget, a legislative conference committee will meet to negotiate differences between the House and Senate budgets.

You can continue to follow the process on the Legislature’s website and stay tuned for updates and opportunities for action!

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Sharon Scott-Chandler

Sharon Scott-Chandler has spent years trying to make change.

“When I went to law school, I wanted to be a public defender. I wanted to represent my community. I grew up in Mattapan, and I wanted to provide people who couldn’t afford really good attorneys with a really good attorney,” Scott-Chandler says, recalling the days when she attended Northeastern University’s School of Law.

“But when I was in law school, I did a couple of co-ops,” Northeastern’s required, full-time job experiences, “and I decided being a public defender wasn’t the right place for me to make change.”

The right place, it turned out, was in the community.

Late last year, Scott-Chandler became the president and CEO of ABCD — Action for Boston Community Development — one of the country’s largest community action agencies. And ABCD’s mission is rooted in change, in helping people go “from poverty to stability and from stability to success.”

A big piece of this work focuses on young children.

Scott-Chandler was exposed to early childhood policy in the 1990s when she worked for Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, and she was inviting Dr. Barry Zuckerman to conferences. Zuckerman was a pediatrician at Boston Medical Center as well as the co-developer of the Reach-out and Read literacy program, and a powerful advocate for protecting children by promoting the well-being of their parents.

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In 2020, Barbara J. Cooper was appointed Secretary of the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education by Governor Kay Ivey. Cooper is also a member of NAEYC’s Governing Board

Last month, as NPR reported, Governor Ivey replaced Cooper “over the use of a teacher training book, written by a nationally recognized education group, that the Republican governor denounced as teaching ‘woke concepts’ because of language about inclusion and structural racism.”

The book in question was NAEYC’s Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth Through Age 8, Fourth Edition, also called DAP.

In response, to the circumstances of Cooper’s dismissal, the national nonprofit organization Zero to Three released a statement, which says in part: 

“When young children enter the classroom, we should be united in making their success our top priority. That means acknowledging years of research underscoring the simple fact that kids can’t learn math, science, and reading if they don’t feel seen, safe, and supported.

“NAEYC’s Developmentally Appropriate Practice Book represents the best guidance from the early childhood education community, based on broad consultation with educators and experts, including ZERO TO THREE. Governor Ivey’s decision to reject DAP based on a few cherry-picked excerpts puts politics ahead of the best interests of Alabama’s children. 

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Parisa Maryam Fakhri

Parisa Maryam Fakhri grew up in Iran, where she always wanted to be a preschool teacher, but as the oldest child, her parents wanted her to pursue medicine.

When it was time for her to go to college, the Iranian Revolution had shut down the local universities, so Fakhri’s parents said she should study in Europe or the United States.

“It was hard to get a visa to come to America,” Fakhri recalls. “It would have been easier to go to Europe. But Iranian women are some of the strongest women, so even though it was hard, I knew there was more opportunity in the U.S. And in my geography class, they talked about Massachusetts. I liked the name, and I used to dream that one day I would go there.”

People said a visa would be impossible to get. But when the customs officer asked why she wanted one, Fakhri firmly said it was because she wanted to study. Three weeks later she had her visa. She was the only one she knew of who was awarded one. Cousins and friends said that Fakhri, who enjoyed life at home, would not succeed in America. But her parents told her that she could.

And she did.

Fakhri lived with an American family and went to college. She spent long days studying English and immersing herself in American culture. A year and a half later, she met her future husband. Marriage and motherhood led her to pause schooling to take care of her family.

“I wasn’t taking any courses. I was home,” she says, but life slowly drew her toward interacting with more young children and eventually working with them. “I was going to the playground, watching my son play with other children. I would go to the gym and leave my son in the gym’s child care. A neighbor would ask me to take care of their child.”

“The fire that started in my heart in Iran grew. I decided that I wasn’t going to do the work my parents wanted.”

Instead, she got a job at ABCD, an anti-poverty agency in Boston, as an assistant in an early childhood classroom.

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MIT pic

Photo: Yan Krukau, Pexels

“Children who attend preschool at age four are significantly more likely to go to college, according to an empirical study led by MIT economist Parag Pathak.

“To conduct the study, Pathak and his colleagues followed more than 4,000 students who took part from 1997 to 2003 in a lottery the Boston public school system conducted to allocate a limited number of preschool slots.

“The lottery created a natural experiment, allowing the researchers to track the educational outcomes of two otherwise similar groups of students when one group attended preschool while the other did not. In decades of research on preschool programs, this approach has rarely been applied. 

“The result: among students of similar backgrounds, those who did attend preschool were 8.3 percentage points more likely to enroll in college right after high school. There was also a 5.4-percentage-­point increase in college attendance at any time.

“ ‘It’s a pretty large effect,’ says Pathak. ‘It’s fairly rare to find school-based interventions that have effects of this magnitude.’ ”

“The preschool boost,” by Peter Dizikes, MIT Technology Review, April 25, 2023

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“Covid provided an opportunity to really highlight this issue in ways that we’ve never seen. To have babies sitting behind Zoom cameras, to have toddlers trying to be busy while people were working from home; suddenly all the things we knew [about families’ early education and care needs] were in the public eye.

Ellis and SFC at BPR

Lauren Cook and Amy O’Leary at WGBH

“We have not changed our priorities even though the the brain science tells us how critical these early years are. So that’s what I’m hopeful for. It’s not just the people who work in this field, who have young children who are fighting for this. There’s been this bigger awareness of why we need high-quality programs starting at birth…”

— Amy O’Leary, “Boston Public Radio Full Show 4/18: Tax Day,” WGBH, April 18, 2023

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Sidney Hamilton

“I was born and raised in Pittsfield, Mass.,” Sidney Hamilton says, “and I’m still here.”

A dozen years ago, Hamilton started working as an intern at the Gladys Allen Brigham Community Center. She was a room assistant helping with logistics and making sure children were safe. 

Today, Hamilton works at the Brigham Center as the Empowerment Director & Eureka! Coordinator, and she’s working hard to immerse girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). She’s also a member of the second cohort of our Advocacy Network.

“When I started working with kids, it came easily to me, and I really enjoyed it. A lot of people go to work for the money, and money is great, but I’d rather have a job that I can go to every day that I know I’m going to enjoy. That’s super important to me.”

Over the years, Hamilton worked as the coordinator of one of the Brigham Center’s after school programs and as a substitute teacher in its early education program. She did outreach work, educating teenagers about healthy sexuality, self defense, and financial literacy. And along the way, Hamilton earned an associate degree in human services at Berkshire Community College as well as a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in social work at Westfield State University.

Today, she continues to be engaged by the challenges and joys of building relationships with kids.

“To be able to get to know the kids, understand them better, help them with what they need is an awesome thing. And I love being in a place where we see kids grow up. We’ve had kids from birth who are still in our programs. I started working with a young girl when she was seven, and now she’s a senior who will be graduating high school. So there are a lot of full circle moments.”

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