More preschool power
PRESCHOOL sounds easy -- just mix children, teachers, and art supplies. But it's a lot harder to set up high-quality programs. And it will be a multifaceted challenge for Massachusetts, which is trying to build high-quality programs in many settings, including schools, day - care centers, and home-based child - care settings.
Fortunately, recent efforts promise to yield insights about how best to serve children.
In Boston, school officials asked a simple question. How good are preschool and kindergarten programs? The answer was a bruising mediocre. Researchers from the Wellesley Centers for Women found unsanitary conditions, unsafe schoolyards, and teachers with no early education training. Still, Boston deserves credit for facing these facts. The report sets a baseline, explains Superintendent Michael Contompasis. Now Boston is launching a plan to improve. A key goal is to align the preschool curriculum with the later grades. The city plans to improve facilities and staff training, join forces with day - care centers, and develop new leadership on early education. What Boston learns in this process could prove useful to other cities.
There's also good advice to be gotten from community organizations that run preschool programs. And ABCD, the local anti poverty agency, is poised to dramatically increase its expertise. ABCD has just received a $600,000 grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to run a three-year micro enterprise program. The program will train Hispanic adults who are or could be child -care providers in low-income neighborhoods in Boston and Lawrence. The participants will enroll in an early education certificate program run by ABCD's Urban College. They'll take business management courses and learn about buying homes, repairing them, and making their homes energy-efficient in order to run day - care businesses in their homes.
The potential is vast. This program would expand the number of child - care slots and generate economic activity. The participants would grow as early education entrepreneurs. Their fellow students could become a professional network that shares information about advances in child care and business practices long after participants leave the program.
The pursuit of quality also has to include better pay for staff. So advocates are asking the Legislature to invest $12.5 million in the rate reserve fund. This is money that the state uses to pay providers for subsidized day - care spots, and that providers can use to pay higher salaries or to expand.
To make all this activity more meaningful, these players must find more ways to communicate, so that innovations in any one part of the preschool system will benefit children across the state.
Correction:This editorial mistakenly said that ABCD, the anti poverty organization, had received a $600,000 federal grant. That grant was actually given to the Urban College of Boston, which was once part of ABCD but no longer is. 