I like this article on core curriculum because I don’t quite understand why
there is so much time wasted on non essential education and so little time
afforded to the important subjects. We are so busy teaching children how to be
social, we forget that they don’t know where their state is in comparison to
five others, or that events occurred before they were born.

As for teacher planning, what happened to homework? If kids have to
spend hours and hours doing rote homework, why shouldn’t teachers have to spend
time planning?

If more independent study could replace homework, and more
teachers were willing to read kid’s work, the education result would be
outstanding. Judy

Our View: Don’t shortchange students on school days

2005-08-16

If you’re under 18 and go to public school, you’re in luck: Many of you will spend fewer days in school this year. (State of Washington)

The state Board of Education has waived the 180-day requirement for 70 school districts — including Northshore, Federal Way, Seattle and Tacoma. Students will spend from one to five fewer days in class in those districts and teachers will receive more planning time.

“As long as students learn what they’re supposed to, it doesn’t matter if they did it in 175 days as opposed to 180,” rationalizes Larry Davis, state board executive director.

Sorry, Larry, but it does matter. U.S. students slip lower every year in the worldwide academic race as other countries accelerate their education programs.

According to William L. Bainbridge, University of Dayton professor and president of an education research firm, here’s how we stack up during the final four years of secondary school,
* U.S. students spend an average of 1,462 hours on core subjects — math, science, language and social studies.

* Japanese students spend 3,190 hours on core subjects.

* French students spend 3,285 hours on core subjects.

* German students spend 3,628 hours on core subjects.

It shouldn’t be a battle between classroom time and teacher planning time. “The waiver days have not hurt education; if anything, they have helped,” argues Pat Eirish, state Board of Education research and assistance program manager.

Our state Constitution says education is the paramount duty of the state. Let’s live up to that and give our children more time in class, not less, to succeed.

If that includes giving teachers more time to plan, then it’s up to the Legislature to provide school districts with the money for that as well.

Like their young students, Jewish preschools growing rapidly in Boston

Currently, there are 37 Jewish preschools in the region, with just over 2,000 children enrolled in them. Some are small, serving 20 or 30 families. Some, such as New England Hebrew Academy in Brookline, educate more than 100 children. Then there are the Jewish Community Center Preschools, which enroll more than 600 children at their six sites.

Jewish preschools are alive, well and a force to be reckoned with,” said Lisa Kritz, director of the Erna and Julius Hertz Nursery School at Temple Israel of Sharon.Enrollment at the Jewish preschools has shown some fluctuation in recent years with shifts in demographics and the economy. But the interest in early childhood education seems not to have waned.

The JCC Preschools recently commissioned a study that found “young Jewish families are leaving areas such as Brookline and Brighton and moving north and southwest to areas where they can afford homes,” said study director Sherry Grossman.

Enrollment figures also correlate with the number of early Jewish education options available in a particular community. “It depends on how many Jewish preschools there are in the area,” she said. “Also … young families who are moving further out are not interested in a long commute for preschool.”

The city of Cambridge has added a preschool year to its public school, affecting enrollment at Alef-Bet Preschool, director Judi Zalles told the Advocate. “Some families just can’t afford to send [a child] to a Jewish preschool if the public school has a free program,” she noted.

Most Jewish preschools appear to be keeping their enrollments up, but, as one school director conceded, “we have to work at it.”

“Here at Temple Israel,” Kritz said, “we are starting a new Shabbat morning program for parents of toddlers. We need to work with the congregations and tap into where young families are and make them aware of our programs.”

Administrators at Jewish preschools also report that they are serving an increasingly diverse group of families. At the JCCs, 80-85 percent of the children “have at least one Jewish parent,” Grossman said. “We …are careful to make our programs welcoming to families from all across the board.”

Among the 39 families whose children attend Alef-Bet, Zalles said, “we have some that are Orthodox and a few that are not Jewish.” People who are not Jewish enroll their children in the program “because we are careful to make them welcome,” Zalles said, “and they have an appreciation for the reverence for family life, community celebration, values and ethics we share.”

Often Jewish parents themselves have little knowledge about Judaism and, as Zalles suggested, may use the preschool as an entry point into the community. “Many families come here as a doorway for them to Jewish life,” she said. “They would like community support in raising a Jewish child.”Similarly, a Newton nursery school administrator sees preschools providing a foundation on which to build a broader Jewish community.

“The community has begun to see preschools as a first step in the Jewish education ladder,” said Janet Perlin, nursery school director at Temple Shalom of Newton. “We have created a real Jewish environment for the community. Now, how do we help these parents continue their and their child’s Jewish education? We don’t want them to say, ‘That was a lovely experience,’ and drop it because they can’t sustain it on their own.”

Zalles finds that the most effective way to help the parents is to offer a preschool program in which “there is a vibrancy and celebration of life.”Orthodox schools, too, are seeing a variety in the backgrounds and goals of their students’ families.

“Still, there is no question,” said Esther Ciment, early childhood program director at New England Hebrew Academy, “that parents who send their children here want a strong basic Jewish education. They are happy that we are inspiring their children with a love for Jewish tradition. We hope it will rub off on the parents, too.”Families who choose her program, Ciment finds, are particularly interested in the strong framework of values and ethics she tries to communicate to the academy’s students.

“When children learn these things so early,” she said, “there is a good chance that they will end up holding onto them throughout their school career.”

The issue of children with special needs is an important one for Jewish early childhood programs as they strive for inclusion.The JCCs receive support from the Ledgewood Special Needs Program, which provides early identification and intervention for children ages 3-5. Researcher Sherry Grossman credited this on-site support for what she said has been “a rise in the number of children with special needs.”We serve our children, including children with special needs, up to 50 hours a week,” Grossman said, “so we have an interdisciplinary team of specialists available to work with families.”

Other schools without those resources say they are making sure that their professionals have the skills to handle special needs issues effectively. “We want to include children with special needs, but we need to make sure our teachers receive the professional development to do that,” Ciment said.

Ina Regosin, dean of students at Hebrew College in Newton and director of the college’s Early Childhood Institute, reports that there has been increasing interest in the college’s certificates in early childhood Jewish education and in early childhood Jewish education leadership.

“Preschools need to have educated professionals,” she said. “This is part of a national push as well.”

That interest apparently includes non-Jewish professionals, too. “We have had non-Jewish teachers participate in our certificate programs,” Regosin said. “They have committed to teaching at a Jewish school and want to do it well.”Or, as Grossman put it, from the perspective of parents, “People are looking for quality first.”

I’m publishing this that I got from a good friend. It’s well worth reading especially now that there has been such a huge disaster down south. Read this in case. God forbid it should happen to you.

Insurance Claims and Disasters

by Mary Biever

First comes shock. You’ve lost your home, don’t know where you’re going to live, and may be walking around in borrowed clothes or donated shoes. It does get better. Four years ago, our home burned, and the following are things I learned which might help.

Safety first. Loved ones matter more than things. Don’t risk yourself for any belonging. Make sure tetanus shots are updated. If/when you work on your house, wear pants with knees in them. Secure the perimeter. If you can, put temporary patches on holes in roofs or windows. It might help prevent further damage.

Educate yourself.

Do you have replacement insurance coverage or actual insurance coverage?

If you have replacement insurance coverage, how does it work and what must you do

(how are receipts handled, etc.)?

How is your insurance organized?

Ours was divided into 3 categories: temporary housing (save receipts from meals); content replacement; and rebuilding our home.

How much coverage do you have?

If your house is older, do you have code insurance?

In our city, older homes must be rebuilt to current code. Without code insurance, this is out of the homeowner’s pocket. With our company, the actual value of a lost item was calculated with a formula they had which calculated the difference between replacement cost and the age of the item. That ten-year-old couch you had when you first got married isn’t worth much.

Simplify your life.

If you have suffered a major loss, you have just inherited an intense, temporary part-time job that will seem to be full time. The better you organize it and the harder you work, the faster and more fully your family will recover from the disaster.

Delegate. Who in your family has which strengths, talents, and time? I get excited at the prospect of putting together a binder, so I inherited the claim. My husband’s stronger at finishing tasks, and his job the last year of the claim was pushing me so I wouldn’t quit, which I wanted to do on several occasions. Teams accomplish more than solo acts.

Organize quickly:

Buy the following first so you can organize better as you go.

You will need to have a portable, packable office:
File bucket (with handle) to be packed with the following:

Top compartment:penspencilspostit notescheap calculatorpaper clipsbinder clipssection or envelope for business cards

Bottom compartment:Baby wipesBand-AidsLatex glovesTrash bagsZiploc bagsMulti-subject notebookAnti-bacterial hand wash which doesn’t need waterPocket foldersCamera with extra film rollsPaper towels

Cooler:Buy water bottles and ready to eat snacks. A large hard cooler can also become a chair.

First, organize the notebook, with a bright, gaudy, easy-to-find cover. I wrote any phone numbers I might need on the back of the notebook. One section of the notebook became to do lists. Another section was for claim items. A third section was for prices for replacement items and rebuilding. A fourth section was to list items dumped during packout (explained below).

As you sign papers and get receipts, you can quickly throw them into the bucket to organize later. Choose a bucket with the brightest, gaudiest lid you can find so you will spot it more quickly.

Fireproof cash box. At the end of each evening working on the claim, I moved receipts/valuable papers from the file box to the cash box.

Photocopier. If you don’t have a small one, find the fastest place you can make copies because you’ll be busy making lots of them.

Febreze in bulk. If you have a fire, we found generic giant-size bottles of Febreze worked well. We used a lot of it and also dryer sheets in removing odors.

The claim! The claim!If you don’t know how to use a computer, now is the time to learn. I used Access and Excel and recreated our insurance company’s forms. The following features were the ones I used the most: filters, find, queries, sorts, and reports.

Over two years, my database/spreadsheet probably saved me over 100 hours of time on our content claim. If I hadn’t used those programs, we wouldn’t have completed our claim so thoroughly and wouldn’t have recovered as much of our belongings. Our first claim was 60 pages long. Our insurance company re-entered the claim into their system and resorted all items. If this happens to you, doublecheck items. Our company made minor mistakes on the original claim which, when tallied together, amounted to several hundreds of dollars in our favor.

Itemize, itemize, itemize. Mentally go through every room of your house. I took the notebook with the content subject area and wrote a room at the top of a page. Then I mentally went through that room and listed what was in it. Go through every cabinet, drawer, and closet. Count every extension cord, socket, etc.

What was hiding on the top drawer of the guest closet? If you keep the file box with you, you can note things as you think of them. If you purchase items from a specialty shop, contact them and ask if they still have records of purchases. Stores gave us records of Thomas the Train toy purchases we made for our son along with duplicate receipts of custom framing jobs I had ordered.

In order to receive the difference between actual and replacement value, we had to purchase replacement items and submit receipts. I numbered receipts and kept photocopies in a folder.

Rebuilding. Our home wasn’t completely destroyed. The rebuilding happened in 3 steps.

-Pack out. House contents are sorted between those which are salvageable and those which must be dumped. A clean up crew pulled belongings from the house and told me whether items went in their truck or to the dumpster.

For items to go into the dumpster, I noted them in my notebook section and also took photographs of them in sets, in case I needed more reference later.

For the photos, try to take pictures of brand labels, etc. Be as specific as possible. If a shelf held 10 cups, 8 plates, and 4 bowls, list them exactly like that. Brand names and age will help too.

During this pack out stage, you will probably already have to begin to make purchasing decisions for the rebuilding phase. Four days after our fire, we chose replacement kitchen cabinets because we were told they would take the longest to arrive. As we shopped for items, we deliberately made choices which were not special order.

At the same time, don’t rush too quickly. We lost all of the blinds in our home and happened to still know the people from whom we purchased the house. They confirmed the old blinds were custom made, and as a consequence, we replaced the blinds with new custom treatments.

Get ready to make several choices quickly – in our case, our biggest choices included doors, blinds, paint colors & types, floors, light fixtures, ceiling tiles, faucets, sinks, cabinets, wallpaper, borders, furniture, window treatments, and appliances.-Demolition.

After pack out, areas that must be rebuilt are demolished.

-Rebuilding. The demolished areas are rebuilt. Try to be present as much as possible during this step.

-Return items. Items which were taken out to be cleaned/salvaged were returned. Pay close attention during this step. Some things which may have been taken to be cleaned may not return in the same condition in which they left. My son had 6-month-old bedroom furniture which returned with smoke stains.

We were told if we let the movers carry items into our home, we were accepting their condition. Richard and I both went through all furniture and large items to check them and refused some items. We were luckier than most because we were able to return to our home three months after it burned. Our crew was on the job, almost every single day after the fire. We made it our business to be there, with them, as much as possible. The following are some things that helped us the most.

-Help From Friends. We couldn’t have survived without the help from friends. One friend, an engineer, went through our home after the fire to evaluate the condition of ceilings and walls which our contractor originally said didn’t need to be replaced. The engineer said a bedroom ceiling had been warped with water damage. A brother-in-law who is a gas lineman helped us push for safer replacement gas lines in our home. We argued both items, which were decided in our favor. When they demolished the ceiling of the bedroom in question, they discovered mold growing. We’re more than grateful we pushed for its destruction instead of going with their first opinion.

-Hospitality. We chose to view the fire as an opportunity to welcome workers. Every day we had workers at our home, we provided a cooler of iced water bottles and soft drinks for them to drink. The workers appreciated the gesture. We wanted them to feel welcome and respected in our home. Our hospitality inspired them to work harder and help us find ways to rebuild our home better.

-Witness. I collect crosses and crucifixes that are mounted throughout our home. During the fire, the walls behind those crosses didn’t have smoke stains. For weeks after the fire, every room had at least one light-colored cross on a wall. Almost every worker who came into our home commented at least once that we went to church, and we had some great conversations with them.

-Negotiation. We didn’t rebuild to match exactly what we had had before. Rooms switched purposes, so when we returned we would think of the house as a new beginning. An old storage room was converted into a larger office for Richard. We added extra insulation wherever possible, upgraded light fixtures, and put new ceilings into part of our basement.At the same time, we tried to remodel as simply as possible so we could return home faster. Our insurance company gave us some wiggle room. For example, our upstairs carpet was ruined and removed, and we discovered oak floors beneath them. We negotiated with insurance that instead of their replacing our upstairs flooring, Richard refinished our oak floors himself at our expense, and we purchased flooring for our basement on the insurance claim instead.

-Replace Slowly. If your state insurance laws and insurance company will let you, replace non-essential items slowly. This time, you can buy exactly what you want. We used a card table and then a loaned kitchen table for over a year before we finally found the table we wanted. If the kids had had a preschool card game set, we replaced it with an older grade level set instead.-

What To Do With Kids. Our kids were 5 and 7 when our home burned. We homeschool and had gotten two weeks into our school year when the fire began. Their schoolbooks, my husband’s business, and our clothes are all that we salvaged. The first weeks, when everything was most dangerous, friends kept the kids. After that, we tried to involve them as much as possible. We let both kids make the choices (within reason) for their new bedrooms. They learned several new vocabulary words: receipt, claim, toxic, demolition, and more. For two months, their formal school day began at 6:30 a.m. and ended around 9:00 a.m. so I could go to our home and monitor reconstruction.

The best thing both kids learned from the fire was to work quickly and efficiently. That skill is one they still have, four years later.Don’t Look Back. You will make mistakes, lose things, and forget others. One mistake we made was miscommunicating paint colors. I asked about one color for our upstairs, and Richard thought I only wanted it for our bedroom instead of our entire first floor. He happened to hate that shade of white but thought he could stand it in one room.

Some losses will be harder than others. Richard’s hardest loss was his portfolio. He’s an artist who lost 30 years of artwork. During our pack out, I grew numb and tired one morning and paid little attention to a metal box that was thrown into a dumpster. That night, I realized it was a keepsake box with every memento of a lost baby. Richard offered to dumpster dive until he found it, but I refused. His safety was more important than memories. We had to let the dead bury the dead and move forward. The next morning, as I arrived at the house with our kids, a driver was hauling the loaded dumpster to our landfill.

Have Fun. Some how, some way, find ways to add humor or fun to a difficult process. After that dumpster was removed, another one replaced it. While it was still empty, before our work crew arrived, the kids and I made a target practice game inside the fifteen-foot dumpster. We found some plastic items ready to be tossed. The three of us went into the empty dumpster and threw them – 10 points for the back wall and 5 points for the sides. It helped vent all our frustration and diffuse a rough morning for me.We have a large fenced backyard, and the kids enjoyed playing outside a lot during reconstruction.

Life Continues. It’s four years later now. The closets are full again, and you could never tell there was a fire. The kids rarely speak of the minor disaster that consumed our lives for almost two years. It’s still a watershed, and we measure time in terms of “before the fire” and “after the fire.” We thank God for the many friends who prayed, helped, and carried us through the storm of trouble so we could rebuild our home and begin again.

Mary Bieverwww.marybiever.comworkshops@biever.com

A woman, listed as the world’s oldest person, has died. She was 115.

The director of the home for the elderly where she lived says Hendrikje Van Andel-Schipper died peacefully in her sleep and “was very clear mentally, right up to the end.”

The director says that with physical ailments increasing, the woman known as Henny, said “it’s been nice, but the man upstairs says it’s time to go.”

Henny was born in 1890 and celebrated her 115th birthday on June 29th. Her status as “oldest person” was recognized by Guinness Book of Records last year.

She advised others who wanted a long life to “keep breathing” and eat pickled herring, a favorite dutch snack. Her husband died of cancer in 1959.

Guinness spokesman Sam Knights says the oldest authenticated person now is 115-year-old Elizabeth Bolden of Memphis, Tennessee.

Back in May, attendees of AFT Early Childhood Education Teacher Summit delivered a petition and bag of peanuts to all 535 members of Congress on behalf of thousands of activists across the nation, to send a clear message to elected leaders that early childhood educators are woefully underpaid – in short, that they work for peanuts.

“Members of Congress need to know that early childhood educators shouldn’t have to work for peanuts,” said Monica Tabares, a Head Start teacher from New Jersey attending the summit.

She and her colleagues recently affiliated with the AFT. “Low wages don’t just hurt early childhood educators like me. They hurt parents, children and anyone looking for high-quality early childhood care because very few people can afford to live on our wages.”

Partly as a result of efforts by the AFT and other early childhood education advocates, Sens. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) last week introduced the “Focus on Committed and Underpaid Staff for Children’s Sake (FOCUS) Act” to help raise wages.

If enacted, the bill would create a grant program to help early childhood educators to obtain scholarships, pay increases, and health benefits.

“Low wages, which contribute to high staff turnover rates and deter new people from entering the field, are a roadblock preventing a high-quality early childhood education system from being created in our nation,” said Antonia Cortese, executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

“One of the best ways to build and maintain a high-quality program is by attracting and retaining high-quality early childhood educators. This bill does just that.”

To further support these educators, the AFT convened a summit of working activists from around the country to discuss their most pressing concerns and find new ways of addressing them. Attendees discussed potential action plans for activism and advocacy.

“For too long, there has been a mismatch between the low wages and the high level of responsibility and importance of the work that early childhood educators undertake,” said Marci Young, deputy director in the executive vice president’s office.

“By working together, early childhood educators can better help the children they care for by creating new solutions to old problems, such as low wages, poor or nonexistent benefits, and bad working conditions.”

This is a wonderful beginning, a great initiative, but unfortunately
nothing will come of it because the importance of early childhood education is
the last number on the last page. We still don’t understand what it is or what
we as a nation are supposed to do about it, and we sure aren’t going to pay for
it.

Early childhood education is the holding tank between that cute crawling
infant to a child who can sit still more than five minutes.

RELATIVELY SPEAKING

Plan now to avoid child-care panic

Maybe you know the feeling: It’s Thursday evening and you just realized there’s no school on Friday. What to do with the kids?

A little planning now could prevent that last-minute panic, says Charlotte Shoup Olsen, family systems specialist with Kansas State University Research and Extension.

Check the school calendar now and make note of holidays, teacher in-service days and other times students will be out of school or dismissed early. Arrange child care now, rather than trying to piece something together the night before.

Some children don’t have any idea of what discipline is at all and it’s sad. They have no self control, no self esteem, and no means to get any. Everything is met with an angry, frustrated adult who piles on the negativity. There is no starting place in chaos; it’s just a wind of mess and noise, and the child responds with horrible behavior and tears.

Kids are kids. Sometimes they are going to mind, and sometimes they won’t. The goal is to make minding fun and rewarding so that a child begins to understand that good behavior results in positive goods and services and ultimately ends in that primary goal – a good and fabulous me.

But what’s the point of a “good me” when it’s never noticed, not respected, and growth and development met with the parents’ anger and frustration? “That’s good, Johnny, now shut up, my favorite song is on.” Up goes the CD and the child kicks the back of daddy’s seat, and daddy reaches around and gives the child a good crack. The child kicks over daddy’s coke and spills it on the fancy carpeting, and a curse is let out against the child. The child cries and receives another slap, and so goes the evening.

The saddest part of careless or no interest and no real discipline comes from home. When the focus is on the adult and not the child, when the cost of living is a tidal wave of self indulgence enhancing the adult’s life and not the child’s, when the child takes a back seat to nearly everything, of course the child is going to be lacking in social skills. He is so hungry for positive attention, for love, he will scream out in just about any unformed cry he can think of to cry.

Every year there are always a few children who just break your heart. You know no matter how hard you work and everyone around you works, the ultimate outcome will be a child who is still desperately in need of constant reconstruction simply because the parent continues to entertain himself at the child’s expense. The parent is the primary educator of the child. School is a compliment to a home, not a substitute.

Neglect is the number one child abuse issue.

When parents are the first family to arrive and the last family to pick up a child, and the child is obviously not ready for the day, it shows. Same clothes, no bath, no breakfast, it all shows.

When children come in with smoke-run on their faces – a chronic runny nose brought about by cigarette smoke, it can only mean that an adult’s habit comes before a child’s health.

When the teeth of a child are black with decay, neglect is the cause. A toothbrush costs less than a pack of cigarettes, and helping a child to brush his teeth takes less time than smoking one.

When a child hasn’t learned to eat with a fork, doesn’t know that one sits to eat, can’t manage a cup – even a half cup without spilling it, can’t toilet himself – thinks he can sit on the urinal, wash his hands, can’t understand the simplest request, it’s neglect. It’s a steady diet of French fries from the drive in, men’s rooms on the dash, and a regular audio intake of senseless booming from some quasi-music that hisses out of the radio like a bad dream.

When a child is four and has never worked a puzzle, has never even seen a puzzle, has never even heard of a puzzle, and does his first one, and his little face lights up, and he can’t wait to do another, it’s neglect.

When a child is nearly five and can’t hold a pencil, and doesn’t know what holding a pencil is for, doesn’t know what a letter is or cares, doesn’t know that we count – anything, and doesn’t know that we are not always the first or only, it’s neglect.

When a child can’t play, can’t stack blocks, doesn’t know that one builds a garage, a road, or that a train is supposed to run on tracks, because he had never been introduced to toys, it’s neglect.

Rearing a child is expensive, but it can still sensibly be done on a shoe string. Careful diligent parents can rear children on very little and do it right all the time. Those children who have little, if they have their parents’ love, have more than the affluent child with a house full of things.

But there’s also the child who has nothing and no one to share the nothing with, and for him the hope is that he will find a place who can teach him.

Oregon Advocates Try to Build Up Early Education

Solid preschool efforts can head off social problems later

TARA M. MANTHEY Statesman Journal

August 28, 2005

One-fifth of Oregon kindergartners entering school next month won’t be ready to learn.
They may lack motor or social skills. They may be unhealthy, unable to speak well or won’t know how to interact with their teacher.

Whatever their vulnerability, it’s likely they’ll start behind because they didn’t attend a private preschool or qualify for the low-income Head Start program.

Advocates say Oregon, once a leader in pre-kindergarten education, now is falling behind.
Forty other states provide high-quality preschool to more children than Oregon does. Other states are expanding classes to children of all incomes, but Oregon struggles to finance programs designed for the poor.

An estimated 1,200 children living in poverty in Marion County can’t get into public preschool because there isn’t room. Of all the children eligible, these 57 percent are called “unserved” because there’s no money for more classrooms.

It’s the highest rate in the state. Polk County, with 53 percent unserved, comes in fourth.
Members of a broad group of political, philanthropic and business leaders hopes to change that. They are developing a campaign that paints pre-K as the best way to fight crime and strengthen Oregon’s economy.

The group, Ready for School (members of the group are listed on Page 5A), hopes to persuade a tax-leery state to catch up to the rest of the nation. They’ll start presenting nearly two years of research this fall, said Swati Adarkar, the executive director of The Children’s Institute, a Portland-based education research nonprofit.

“Given all the resource conversations that are taking place in the state, we are really concerned that early education is being overlooked, and it can make the biggest difference,” Adarkar said.

Because 90 percent of brain development occurs by age 6, experts say children who go without early childhood education miss a critical moment in their development, and they may never catch up.

At least three long-range studies have found that children who attended high-quality preschool become more successful adults.

Forty-two years ago, researchers began following a group of 123 low-income black children. They were enrolled the Perry Preschool, an intensive, two-year program.

Today, half of them earn more money and are less likely to use drugs or be arrested than their peers. Researchers have found that governments have saved an estimated $195,621 — per participant — in public costs in their lifetime.

The studies have drawn the interest of economists and employment specialists.

· Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis determined that early childhood education programs are a smarter public investment than subsidizing office towers, athletic arenas and entertainment centers.

· A commonly quoted Head Start study says states could save $7 in future social-service and corrections costs for every dollar doled out now for pre-K education.

· The Children’s Institute in Portland calculated that four students could attend a public Oregon university — including tuition, books, room and board — for the cost of incarcerating one juvenile.

Some states have responded by expanding public preschool to many or all children.

Oklahoma and Georgia already offer universal early childhood education.

Governors in Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, New Mexico and Tennessee all proposed dramatic increases this year.

Illinois increased programs for next year by $30 million. That’s on top of $60 million set aside earlier as officials prepare to open the program to every child, according to the national Pre-K Now organization.

Californians are rolling out expanded programs community by community. In Florida, voters mandated universal programs in the last election.

Roy Miller, president of Children’s Campaign Inc., coordinated that effort. He said it was successful because high-quality preschool was promoted as the most efficient way to prevent crime.

Even though Florida lawmakers are struggling to finance the mandate, Miller said he would push the unfunded constitutional amendment again because he knew it was the only way to get the program started.

“We can afford to take care of our kids,” he said.

Likewise, in New Mexico, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish and early education supporters started slowly, building up support before successfully passing a bill to create a pre-K program. They also settled for less money than hoped in order to start the program, Denish said.

Oregon jumped into early childhood education in the late 1980s. It modeled state classes after the federal Head Start program. At that time, 5 percent of eligible low-income children were served in the Oregon Pre-kindergarten Program.

That level rose to 62 percent in 2001, before the recession forced cuts across state budgets.
Oregon ranks in the bottom 10 states for degree-holding pre-kindergarten teachers. About 37 percent of teachers have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 73 percent nationally, according to the Yale University Child Study Center.

A dearth of high-quality preschool is limiting the state’s economic output, just as insufficient transportation systems or housing markets would, according to a study released this week.

A third of Oregon children are placed in paid child care between birth and age 5, the University of Oregon Extension Office found. Yet, just 3 percent of child-care providers in Oregon meet rigorous national standards for accreditation.

The situation is inhibiting parents’ ability to work and limiting the development of young children, the study said.

tmmanthe@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6705

Pre-K Center Build for Very Young Children

By VERONICA VILLEGAS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

When more than 400 of the littlest pupils in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district arrived at the new Pre-K Center for their first day of school this week, they discovered a facility designed and built just for them.

Large classrooms with big windows, a library with tiny tables and chairs, a special gross motor development room and even tot-size toilets are just a few of the amenities at the new early childhood center built on the campus of the district’s Community Learning Complex.

The Pre-K Center at the Community Learning Complex, 1812 Pearl St. in Carrollton, serves children in northern Farmers Branch and southern Carrollton. Half-day sessions run from 7:50 to 10:50 a.m. and 12:05 to 3:05 p.m.

For information on enrollment at the Pre-K Center, call 972-968-6600.

For information about other classes and programs offered at the Community Learning Complex, call 972-968-6527.

“It’s a space for 4-year-olds to do what 4-year-olds should do,” said Charles Cole, assistant superintendent for Student, Family and Community Service. “Everything from 8 o’clock in the morning until 3 o’clock in the afternoon is geared around them.”

The $5 million facility is the beginning of a plan to expand the school district’s pre-kindergarten program, which is funded primarily with federal money, school officials said.

Those plans include extending the program to a full day instead of a half-day and building more specialized facilities to accommodate the expansion. The district already has pre-K classes at nine elementary campuses, and a second pre-K center is under construction north of the Bush Turnpike, school officials said.

The district expects to serve about 925 pre-kindergarten children this school year, and the demand grows every year, Dr. Cole said.

The program is available to children who primarily speak a language other than English in their home, meet the income guidelines for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program or are homeless.

“The philosophy is that these students need special, early attention in order to be ready for kindergarten and first grade,” Dr. Cole said. “We want them, when they leave this program, to be at the same level as other students who have benefits and resources at home that they don’t. Our goal is to equalize the playing field.”

Eva Medina-Walker, the Pre-K Center’s principal, said the new school – which offers six bilingual and six English as a second language classrooms – makes that job much easier.

“Everything here is geared just for them,” she said. “We have really large classrooms that can handle all the centers – home living, dramatic play, computers, listening station, water and sand table, and circle time space – that these children need.”

In addition to fine-tuning school readiness skills such as dexterity, fine and gross motor skills, and literacy, students also will be introduced to physical education.

“We want them to exercise,” said Ms. Medina-Walker, who has a background in early childhood education and English as a second language programs. “What we want to do is provide the child with physical activity they might not get at home.”

The gross motor development room provides the place for that to happen. With its special soft-surface flooring and equipment, students can run, jump, bounce and play to their heart’s content, Ms. Medina-Walker said.

Families also are encouraged to get involved. The Pre-K Center is on the campus of the Community Learning Complex, at which parent education, English as a second language, citizenship and GED preparation classes are available.

Dr. Cole said he is proud of the new center because it gives first-time students and their families the best possible start.

school is going to be in a beautiful facility with caring teachers and an instructional program that addresses their needs,” he said. “What better way to learn to love school?”

Veronica Villegas is a Fort Worth-based freelance writer.

We always think of the US as a dismal hole when it comes to children in inner cities, but when we think of crisp clean Europe, we think of a vacationland of good living. Here’s an article that shocked me.

One of the shocking aspects of the recent harrowing death of a seven-year-old girl in Hamburg was the fact that hers was not an isolated case. So why does child neglect still happen, and what can be done to prevent it?

Jessica spent her short life in a tiny, unheated backroom of a top-floor apartment, where the windows were kept permanently shut and covered with black plastic. When she died, she weighed just 9.5 kilos (20.9 lbs). The autopsy showed she’d been eating carpet fluff and her own hair to quell her hunger pangs. Her mother, 35-year-old Marlies S., only called an ambulance when Jessica went into a coma.

“Her last few weeks alive must have been hell, ” said a police officer.

Neighbors and social services were unaware of the child’s existence. When she had failed to attend school at the age of five, Hamburg’s education authority sent an official to the apartment where Jessica was registered. After three attempts to establish contact, the authority decided the family must have moved and gave up.

She isn’t the only child in Germany to have met a painful death at the hands of indifferent parents. In the past five years, at least eight children have died under similar circumstances.

According to the Berlin Criminal Office, an average of 200 cases of suspected child neglect per year are reported to the police in the capital alone.

“A lot of cuts are being made to the social services, but, at the same time, their cases are piling up,” Ekin Deligöz (photo) of the Green party said. She heads the Bundestag’s child commission and oversees the government’s recently unveiled “National Plan of Action for a Child-Friendly Germany.” “One reason for the increase is that there’s been a change in attitudes and more and more people are getting referred to the youth welfare office,” Deligöz explained.

Recent years have even seen social workers acting with excessive haste. “Youth welfare offices are regularly criticized for over-reacting,” said Uta von Pirani, director of Berlin’s youth welfare office. “They’re often accused of taking children out of families too quickly.” But she says they can’t win. “Either that, or they’re accused of acting too late or not at all,” she added.

According to Katharina Abelmann-Vollmer from the German Child Protection Association, the number of cases of child neglect is not actually rising. “What’s changed is public sensibility. People are more shocked about violence towards children than they used to be, and the spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child approach is no longer acceptable.”

In some respects, Jessica was also a victim of Germany’s recent slide into mass joblessness.

“Germany’s widespread unemployment is taking its toll on the nation’s children,” pointed out Deligöz. “The divorce rate is climbing and we’re seeing more and more patchwork families.”

“In Hamburg, a child loses its right to a kindergarten place if its mother is unemployed,” she went on. “For as long as Jessica was in care, her situation was under control. Obviously, the staff would have been the first to notice anything suspicious — if she’d shown signs of starvation, for example. Had she been able to stay there, her case would never have gone unnoticed.”

But identifying problem cases isn’t always enough. Jessica may have been one of Germany’s “invisible children,” but there are many other cases where kids recognized to be at risk still fall through the net because of inadequate cooperation between education authorities and the youth welfare offices.

“In future, we will alert the youth welfare office every time there is grounds for suspicion that parents are failing to send their child to school,” said Hamburg education senator Alexandra Dinges-Dierg in the wake of Jessica’s death.

Such a move might have saved this particular child’s life. As it is, an acute lack of communication from department to department is widely acknowledged to be the main obstacle in Germany to creating a functioning alarm system against child neglect.

“What we need are colleagues who are ready to work together,” said Abelmann-Vollmer from the Child Protection Office (photo). “The problem is there are too many parallel systems. All too often, the health services, education authorities and youth welfare offices work as rivals. Their various responsibilities are firmly demarcated, and staff are too unwilling to let their tasks overlap.”

Jessica’s case prompted Dinges-Dierg to call for tightening the law enforcing school attendance. This would allow an official from the local education authority, accompanied by a police officer, to enter homes where children are registered who either fail to attend school or have been absent for extended periods. As it stands, parents can refuse entry.

But many believe changing the law isn’t the answer. “Ensuring children can lead good lives is not a question of introducing new legislation, it’s a question of creating a more child-friendly society,” insisted Abelmann-Vollmer. “We need recognition for working parents and more support structures for them to turn to.”

Germany’s ageing population and dwindling birth rate are symptomatic of another issue. Children are increasingly marginalized here. Unemployment, poverty and social isolation are all factors that leave many parents unable to cope with the demands of bringing up children — moreover, without the traditional help of the extended family.

“The Child Protection Association believes child-rearing is the responsibility of the whole of society,” argued Abelmann-Vollmer. “It’s not that you should call the police when you hear the family next door arguing; it’s that you should offer to look after their children so they can go buy the groceries.”

Deligöz is more reluctant to pass the buck. “The concept of the family has changed,” she said. “We no longer live in extended families, and society has had to take its place. But we can’t make society responsible for everything.”

Von Pirani expressed similar sentiments. “Family is a very private matter in Germany,” she said. “That explains why there was no one close to Jessica who could alert anyone to what was happening. That was what was lacking. We can’t expect the state to keep tabs on everyone and everything.”