Screening young kids for disorders like speech delay, and getting info to parents who need it, were topics of the day as a room of child care professionals — but only a handful of parents — met again to work on a master plan focusing on children’s critical first few years.
Maybe it was the heat. Maybe August is a big vacation month. Maybe it was that another meeting had drawn some parents away. Whatever it was, the turnout of about 50 people at Wednesday’s New Haven School Readiness Council’s planning task force was about half that of the previous meeting on July 12, including just a handful of parents (that is, parents who weren’t attending primarily wearing another hat, such as child care professional or pediatrician). Still, the group soldiered on, led by co-chairs Robert Windom, a pediatrician at Hill Health Center and Jennifer McGrady Heath, vice president of Community Leadership at the United Way of Greater New Haven (pictured above in the blessedly air-conditioned cafeteria of the John Martinez School in Fair Haven).
Gwen Samuel (pictured) with Connecticut Parent Power, welcomed participants. She said her group has been meeting with state legislators to tell them what parents want and need. “There’s so much power in this room,” she told them. Click here for more of her statement.
Windom said the goal of the gathering was to come up with strategies for action endorsed by all sectors of the community that could be presented to Mayor John DeStefano and schools Superintendent Reginald Mayo. He said the group would be thinking in three phases: strategies that could be implemented quickly and easily; strategies that would require policy changes; and strategies that would require additional funding (which is available from the state for early childhood education).
Myra Jones-Taylor (pictured) of East Rock is the mother of two children, almost 2 and almost 4. She’s writing her dissertation for her doctorate in anthropology on early childhood education, so she was attending as both a researcher and a mom. She said the process so far has been good because a community-wide response to the issue of school readiness is critical. “It’s absolutely necessary,” she says, adding that she’s undecided about whether she’ll enroll her little ones in a New Haven public school.
After dinner the participants chose from among three areas to delve into more deeply and come up with specific proposals for action. They were health, including physical, dental and behavioral (mental) health; early care and education, including availability of child care, access to it, and quality; and family resources.
Windom was in the health group, and afterward he said one thing the group focused on is a behavioral health screening being conducted through the auspices of the American Academy of Pediatrics at St. Raphael’s with children from birth to three to determine if any would benefit from intervention. When asked if looking for problem behaviors in such young children may lead to pathologizing normal childhood behavior, Windom responded, “Early intervention can often help prepare children for school. For example, if they have delayed speech they could benefit from speech therapy.”
The Family Resource Group meeting included parents and representatives of a number of public and private agencies, said Joanne Goldblum, founder of the New Haven Diaper Bank. “The focus was on information, systems and services for families with young children. We discussed the need for more available information for families about child development and how the school system works. There was a focus on the fact that there are many outlets for information but, for some reason, that information does not always reach those who need it. Most families, across socio-economic lines, need information and support when a child is born and as a child develops. The services issues related to the need for agencies to be more connected with each other so that families don’t have to be involved with many agencies to get their needs met.”
Jones-Taylor attended the early care and education group and said the focus was prioritizing the wish list generated at the last meeting. “One thing that can be done now is to front money to home day care providers and child care centers instead of making them wait for reimbursement, which can take up to 90 days,” she said. “A lot of providers don’t pay themselves for months. Another huge one was infant and toddler care — everybody is dying for more. It’s so expensive and School Readiness does not fund infant and toddler slots.” She said about 5,000 babies are born each year in New Haven hospitals (of course, not all New Haven residents) and about 3,000 of them need child care the first year, but there are only 400 licensed infant and toddler slots. She added, “The critical years are 0 to 3,” so expanding access must be a top priority.
“It was a great meeting,” she concluded, “smaller than last time but people were fired up.”
In all three working groups, the focus is on what’s called Results-Based Accountability – measurable accomplishments that will lead toward the Readiness Council’s twin goals that every child be prepared to start school and that by third grade every child will read on grade level.
What’s next? Windom’s co-chair, Jennifer McGrady Heath, explained, “We’re inviting anyone who wants to have an additional discussion about what they think the strategy should be to a meeting in September for each of the three areas. From all that information we’ll try to pull it together and present it to a group convened by the mayor – the Leadership Work Group – and they will look at all the information and start prioritizing to develop a draft plan. Then we’ll take that back into the community for comment. We’re hoping to have a good draft by October, but it will certainly be open to revision.”