Local plan focuses on preschool kids

It’s always uplifting to discover good work being done in Fort Worth and Tarrant County, particularly because it usually involves local people devoting their efforts to help each other.

A two-day conference here this past week, called the “Texas State-Wide Early Learning Summit,” showed officials and other interested people from other communities what the local folks have been doing.

They’ve created an ambitious program to align the efforts of hundreds of public and private organizations, each of which plays a part in helping the youngest among us begin the process of learning long before they enter school.

The summit was sponsored by the city of Fort Worth; the National League of Cities Institute for Youth, Education & Families; and the Community Foundation of North Texas, with help from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Researchers long ago learned that children of disadvantaged families start school significantly behind their more privileged counterparts, if for no other reason than they’ve had far less exposure to learning opportunities and have heard a narrower vocabulary from parents who had sparse educational backgrounds and struggle to make ends meet.

The Head Start program, started in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, for its time was the tip of the spear in helping preschool children.

After almost half a century, critics bite at Head Start’s heels, saying it is ineffective at best. Head Start and its supporters have plenty of ammunition against those attacks, but they also acknowledge that they can’t conquer the influence of poverty on educational achievement by themselves.

Fortunately, many other organizations these days work to help these kids. But what a Fort Worth study has discovered and begun to attack over the past year is that these efforts are too divergent, don’t help each other enough and don’t share information.

A collaboration of 17 local entities is trying to fix that through a project called Educational Alignment for Young Children, or EAYC for short.

Partners in the effort range from John Peter Smith Hospital and The Parenting Center to Workforce Solutions and MHMR of Tarrant County, from the Fort Worth Library and the Fort Worth school district to Camp Fire Fort Worth, Children’s Learning Institute and more.

Some of what they quickly learned:

▪ There are more than 100,000 children ages 8 and under in Fort Worth, and more than 30 percent live in poverty.

▪ There are 454 child care programs in the city serving children from birth to age 4.

▪ The Fort Worth school district has worked with some of these programs on prekindergarten education plans.

▪ “However, most early care and education programs are still disconnected from these efforts and have lacked coordinated support,” EAYC says.

▪ “Similarly, too many parents and other adult caregivers of young children have unreliable access to information and support in preparing their children for school.”

The more help these kids get, the better their chances of succeeding in school, including being able to read on grade level by third grade.

EAYC’s plans cover three key areas:

▪ Assessment and data sharing “to provide parents, early educators, teachers and service providers with access to common information that will improve how each supports the learning and development of the children in their care.”

▪ Professional development efforts to help teachers and others in early childhood and elementary school settings.

And, perhaps most challenging:

▪ Encouraging “family engagement to ensure that parents are empowered to be their child’s first teacher and most important advocate.”

EAYC itself is in its infancy. It has no data yet to show it can succeed.

Still, its plans ring true and can work, given time and support.

Importantly, the involvement of the Community Foundation of North Texas and its influential donors — some of the area’s most powerful local foundations and wealthy individuals — indicates that support will be there.

It’s part of Fort Worth that local people help local people.

This story was originally published December 5, 2014 at 7:46 PM with the headline "Local plan focuses on preschool kids."