Meet Susanne and Brittany, a mother-daughter team enrolled in the Alexandria Community Network Preschools, a private, nonprofit preschool system that serves more than 125 children and their families from low-income neighborhoods in Alexandria, Virginia.
Brittany, a bright 5-year-old, enjoys writing and art and is always thinking of new things to do in the classroom. Her older brother and sister have also attended the preschool, and her mother, Susanne, became a paid parent assistant several years ago. Susanne's experiences at the preschool led her to apply for another training program to become a licensed home day-care provider. After several months, she received her license and now cares for several children in her home.
According to Barbara Mason, the Executive Director of the Network Preschools, this family and many others now have a chance to break the welfare cycle that dominates the lives of many people in their neighborhood. The story of Susanne and Brittany is one of many Network success stories.
The Network Preschools follow the principles for a high-quality early childhood curriculum formulated by the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation (Schweinhart et al. 1993), and they are accredited by the National Association for the Education for Young Children (1997). The curriculum is based on a child's natural development—particularly in language skills, social and emotional growth, and physical motor development—and encourages children to be independent learners. Speaking, listening, singing, looking at pictures, running, skipping, hopping, hugging, drawing, coloring, playing with blocks—all these are in the curriculum, as well as cleaning up, sharing, and saying thank-you.
Parents are important partners in this curriculum. For example, parents volunteer in the classroom, take basic education classes offered at the school, obtain training and employment as paid parent aides and child-care providers, and work with teachers who visit their families at home.
Preschool Beginnings—and Strategies
The Network Preschools began with five children in 1984. A group of mothers living in a public housing project started a school when they found out that all of their children had failed kindergarten. Local churches helped them set up their new school, offered with no charge to the parents. Results of that first year? All the children who attended the preschool passed kindergarten. The program has grown to four schools and nine classes—and tuition is still free.
Because preschool is not part of Alexandria's public school system (except for special education preschools), there is usually a long waiting list (30-50 children) for the Network schools, which are separate from the local Head Start schools. Even those schools have a waiting list of 160 children—more than the Network preschools could accommodate. It is difficult to estimate the total number of unserved preschoolers in the city, because many of them come from families who are undocumented immigrants. But if you simply add the waiting lists, you get at least 200 known children—and families—who still need a high-quality preschool program.
Where do the funds come from for such programs? That's a problem the Network Preschools struggle with daily. The program receives no state or federal funding (apart from the school lunch program). One-third of the Network's funds come from the city of Alexandria; one-third, from private foundations; the remainder, from private donors, including the United Way. And a new Target Department Store in Alexandria just announced a gift of $1,000 to the preschools. Mason says she spends most of her time writing grants—when she would rather be focusing on school programs and the needs of children in the community. Mason also recently attended the White House Conference on Child Care, where Hillary Rodham Clinton called the state of U.S. child care an "invisible crisis."
Preschool Where the Action Is
All Alexandria Network Preschools are located in the communities they serve. Two are in recreation centers in public housing projects, and two are in apartment buildings in low-income areas. In one building, the preschool is across from the laundry room. At one recreation center, the preschool is at the hub of activity, located next to the new citizen project, down the hall from meetings of a support group for young black males, and near the gym where neighborhood adolescents play basketball. Because the schools are part of the community, young mothers and fathers regard them as "a trusted friend," says Mason.
One mother and her 4-year-old daughter, Juanita, recently found how true a friend the school could be. One day Juanita just stopped coming to school, and the staff sent note after note home, finally preparing to drop her from enrollment. After three weeks, the mother came to school in tears and told the horrifying story of how her child had been raped and hospitalized, and that now all Juanita wanted was to come back to school. Mason said the hospital provided this non-English-speaking mother with no counseling—just a business card printed in English. So the staff welcomed mother and daughter back into school and found crisis-counseling services in Spanish.
The school provides similar services to all enrolled children and their families (including siblings). Regardless of the level of trust, the staff knows that many cases of rape and abuse go unreported. Mason often tells Juanita's story to teachers, saying, "Don't you ever think that what you're doing is not meaningful."
What Is High-Quality Early Childhood Education?
- Use developmentally appropriate practices with young children. Children learn through play: That is the essence of a high-quality preschool program. Mason says, We set up an environment that is conducive to learning so that every toy or item available to a child can be used in a mode of learning. But the child makes the choice; the child charts his or her course, and the teacher asks the right questions to guide the child. Children have many choices in the classroom, from playing in the house corner, to playing at the sand or water tables, to painting at the art table, to listening to tapes, to playing with blocks. They visit the library often for special story times, and students from metropolitan elementary schools come to the preschool to read to them.Many of the parents take a class called "Answers," which engages them in hands-on activities that show how young children learn—and why the preschool doesn't focus on the ABC's of reading and writing. According to Mason,Some parents get upset when their children come home and say they played all day. But we show parents that when children play in the house corner, they're creating a story—their own story. And when they are building with blocks, they're doing math.
- Enable and encourage parent and community involvement. Many parents serve as both paid and unpaid assistants in the classroom; others participate in literacy programs or child-care training programs. Area churches, businesses, and city agencies participate in Community Service Days; workshops on parenting, immigration issues, health and safety, and fire and home safety; and the family literacy project (recording children's books on tape; see box, p. 76).
- Provide for the health and nutrition needs of children and their families. Children receive healthy lunches and snacks at school, and parents who are home-care providers receive meals for their families. Regular vision and hearing screenings and referrals keep children—and parents—healthy. The school was bequeathed an annual gift of $5,000 to help pay medical expenses of families that are not paid by Medicaid or another source. Mason says,If a child needs eyeglasses, we take the child and the parent to the optometrist and pay for the exam and the glasses. If needed, we pay for the child's required physical exam, and we pay for neurological and other exams that are not covered.
- Provide connections and easy referrals to social services. Preschool staff include social service interns and therapists who provide direct services to children and help parents find food stamps, transportation, and other assistance.
- Employ specially trained staff and parent aides, with a low student-teacher ratio. All Network teachers have degrees in early childhood education, and some have master's degrees. In most classrooms, the ratio is four adults for 15 children: a teacher, two assistants, and a parent aide. Recent monthly workshops for staff and parent aides have included "Using the C.O.R. Assessment Tool" (a way to record observations of children), "Adult-Child Interaction," and "Movement and Music."
- Provide safe and secure settings. In inner-city neighborhoods, many children are either victims or witnesses to domestic violence. In an era of drive-by shootings and a rising poverty rate, schools like the Network Preschool provide a safe haven for children and a way for parents to learn nonviolent childrearing practices (see box, p. 75).
- Include children of poverty, children from limited-English-speaking families, and children from all ability groups, including children with disabilities. Families served by the preschools are mostly black and Hispanic, and all live in low-income neighborhoods. One school serves Spanish-speaking immigrants new to the area. Children with mild disabilities receive all needed services at the preschools, and children with more severe disabilities attend a special education program for half the day at a city school. About one-third of the children receive special services of some sort, and 97 percent qualify for free lunches (provided through the U.S. Department of Agriculture school lunch program).
- Provide child-care services for families who need them. Extended day-care services are available at one preschool. In addition, a new program provides interested parents—like Susanne—with training in becoming licensed day-care providers in their own homes. The preschool employs these providers, equips them, and supervises them, and even provides evening and weekend child care to those who need it.
- Consider the needs of the community. A new, rapidly expanding Parent Literacy program attempts to meet the needs of community members for basic education and instruction in English. In learning to read, parents also learn good parenting behavior and improve their chances at employment. Parents attend English classes while their children are in school—down the hall—and they practice reading to their children in the classroom and at home, during home visits by staff. None of these programs is required, but many parents participate in the classes and workshops that the school offers. Mason says, "Our parent education program is developmentally appropriate, too; just as we take the children where they are, we take the parents where they are."
Positive Results
Walter exemplifies the success of the Network Preschools. As his teacher watched this busy 4-year-old work a puzzle, she reflected on what Walter was like just nine months earlier: "He couldn't sit still and pay attention. He couldn't play with the other children. He didn't speak a word of English, and you couldn't understand what he said in Spanish."
When he was 3, Walter's parents looked for a preschool for him, but couldn't afford any. They were afraid that their son would enter kindergarten hopelessly behind, like many children with limited proficiency in English. They found the Network Preschool, and by January of his first school year, Walter was playing with other children and speaking English sentences. Walter's father sings the school's praises:I have seen how much it has helped Walter, how it has been good for his well-being. Everyone has been working together—the teacher, his friends, and the whole system.Mason adds, "Walter's a fully functional child in 1st grade now, doing high-level work—he's fine."
But to the preschool staff, it's not enough to cite the success of children like Walter, Brittany, or Juanita or to say that none of the preschool graduates have failed kindergarten in the past five years. What is important is that the program changes the lives of families. Mason says:What makes us special is how much growth we see in both the children and the mothers. While the child learns in the classroom, the mother is taking English classes and also works in the child's classroom. She also may take child-care provider training. And specially trained home visitors follow "nurturing curriculum" lesson plans to help parents incorporate what they have learned into the home environment. It usually starts with the mother—then the father, who has been watching all along, begins to join in, and then the other kids learn, too. Our program really has a big impact. It's a holistic approach that brings the family together.
