When Angela Duncan participated in a Covington walking tour designed to help families work with their young children on reading and learning, she loved it so much she contacted the city about having one in her neighborhood.
“When COVID happened, we got one of the passports, and we would drive around to the different A to Z maps,” Duncan said. “I went on to have three more kids, and each time, when they got old enough, we would do it. I just thought it was such a fun experience for us.”
Duncan contacted Read Ready Covington, a program that takes a collaborative approach to teaching children. Read Ready brings together city services, the library, local agencies and other resources to help make children ready for kindergarten.
Duncan’s request didn’t fall on deaf ears. “They set it up,” she said, “and we went around and mapped it out together where we thought it would be beneficial for each letter.”
Read Ready Director Mary Kay Connolly said the idea is to infuse learning into everything they possibly can. It promotes play as learning and provides games and other fun activities for families.
“This is a set of multiple partners,” Connolly said. “It’s individual residents, it’s agencies, it’s schools and preschools and child care centers. It’s mental health, it’s the library … it’s different departments in this city that I’ve worked with, like Parks and Recreation.”
Read Ready’s efforts come amid a growing effort in Northern Kentucky to prioritize early learning.
Much of the brain’s development happens within the first three years of a child’s life, according to leading neuroscientists, and more than 90% of the brain’s architecture is in place by the time a child is 5
“There’s no question that early learning is a central element in the education process and needs to be a strategic priority,” said Cheye Calvo, president and CEO of Educate NKY. “And, quite frankly, it has been for a generation.” Educate NKY is a nonprofit dedicated to improving outcomes for children from birth to grade 12.
‘Program rich, coordination poor’
“This region really zeroed in on early learning and early childhood as a focus point over 20 years ago with the emergence of Success by Six, at first in Boone County and then across the region,” Calvo said. “A lot of work was done. This region, in partnership with NKU and United Way, was central to Kentucky having a universal kindergarten readiness screen.”
Yet, he said, the efforts did not have a strong impact on readiness scores.
“As a region we’re behind where we were a decade ago,” Calvo said. “Despite a lot of terrific and thoughtful work by a lot of people, we haven’t figured out how to move the needle…. Kindergarten readiness is central for kids, because we know that students who enter school ready are four or five times more likely to be proficient when they get to third grade than those that aren’t. So it is a meaningful and durable measure of success that lasts years into a kid’s education,” he said.
The organization is digging into the issue. Last year, it released a landscape assessment and created a working group of regional stakeholders to work on a strategy to address the issue and to provide recommendations. In May, EducateNKY held a Start Strong Summit, bringing together educators, nonprofit agencies, city officials and community organizations to discuss the state of early childhood education in our region. The organization sought ways to connect and help coordinate the many efforts going on across the region.
Calvo noted that, at the summit, one of his colleagues made an important point. “We are program rich, coordination poor,” she had said.
“We have a lot of programs, but we haven’t yet figured out how to make the sum equal or greater than the parts,” Calvo said. “And so there’s a few things that we are doing. We have hired what we’re calling an early learning champion, a vice president of early learning and family power, Jenny Watson, a former principal in Boone County and an assistant superintendent.”
The idea, he said, is not only to provide the programs, but to make sure people know about them so that they have a wider impact.
Gabrielle Mitchell, a middle school teacher and mom, participated with her daughter in Play with a Purpose, a nine-week educational play group that provides time for parents to meet and talk with each other. The program was with one of Read Ready’s partners, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters.
“As a teacher and a new person to the community, I wanted to get involved with everything that I could, and so I joined the Play with Purpose group at the day care, and absolutely loved it,” Mitchell said.
The group, sometimes abbreviated as HIPPY, not only provides physical resources, like diapers, but it equips parents and families with tools, knowledge and strategies. “They’re providing these groups where we can learn how to teach our children and how to develop them and understand their needs more,” Mitchell said.
Read Ready Covington is hosting several events this summer, including an art and reading program at the Baker Hunt Art & Cultural Center and the Early Childhood Fun Fest. For more information on Read Ready, go to covingtonky.gov, then click on Government and then Neighborhood Services, where you will find a button link for Read Ready.
Partnering for success
Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters is an international organization that provides a home-visit based program along with the Play with Purpose groups held across the region. They partner with several organizations, including Brighton Center, which has offices in several Northern Kentucky communities.
Melissa Hall Sommer, Brighton Center’s senior vice president, said HIPPY fits right in to the center’s goals of providing a continuum of care for families. The center offers several programs for small children, including Every Child Succeeds, home visits for new mothers and babies up to age 2. The organization continues the model of home visits and focuses on pre-kindergarten children.
“HIPPY’s belief is that a parent is a child’s first and best teacher, and our whole mission and model follows that,” said Nicole Carter, the Brighton Center’s HIPPY coordinator. “We go into the home once a week for 30 weeks at least, and we take a researched and developed curriculum that’s over 50 years old. It’s been updated through those years, but it started over 50 years ago.”
The program is free.
“So each week, during the home visits, we bring educational materials, the curriculum and any supplies that the family would need,” Carter said. “It’s play-based and book-based.”
The organization also has monthly in-person group meetings through its Play with Purpose program, which parent Gabrielle Mitchell touted. It allows time for parents to visit with other parents while their children play. The groups are held at Brighton’s Shelby Street office in Florence.
The key lesson for the HIPPY program is its success. Carter noted that 97% to 100% of the children who have participated are kindergarten ready. Cities across Northern Kentucky are interested in the program, and there are ongoing discussions about how to expand it to reach more communities.
Lisa Smith, a mother from Hebron, said HIPPY was a great opportunity, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown. “It gave us things to do when we were trapped inside during lockdown and all that, which was helpful in itself,” she said.
“Then my second child, he just started HIPPY this year,…” Smith said. “It’s just been great having activities we can do at home. We have the activities every week, and then this year they started a play group with HIPPY. So that’s been nice being able to connect with moms with kids of similar age.”
Jessica Janssen, who participated in the organization with her daughter, said the convenience of having home visits made a big difference.
“They brought everything to you, and you didn’t have to go anywhere to get it,” Janssen said. “And, you do it on your terms; it’s not, ‘You have to be at class at 10 o’clock.’ It was, ‘If we have time, we can do it today. If not, we’ll do it tomorrow.’ And my home visitor was great. My little girl loved her.”
Sommer noted that Brighton Center is devoted to providing wraparound services for families.
“We try to look at the whole family perspective,” she said. “We are thinking about how a child learns within that family … inclusive and wrapped around that family.”
For more information on HIPPY or other early childhood programs at Brighton Center, go to brightoncenter.com.
Mobile outreach
Learning Grove is the largest provider of high quality, community-based child care in Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati. It operates 11 full-day, full-year child care centers. They provide Early Head Start programming, and they train early childhood educators through the Learning Grove Institute.
Recently, Learning Grove took its expertise on the road with the Learning Together van. An RV van, outfitted to look like one of its classrooms, has been going out into the community.
“We got funding through the Governor’s Office of Early Childhood,” said CEO Shannon Starkey Taylor. “We take this mobile RV into under-resourced communities, and try to target those communities where the kindergarten readiness scores might be particularly low. Our hope is that we go into those communities, and, if they don’t have access to high quality child care, we’re giving them a dose of literacy.”
Through the van, Learning Grove can provide free and fun learning activities, take-home literacy and math kits, and information for parents. By coming to where families are, the organization can bring innovative programs and resources directly to communities that need them. They are tracking their efforts, but Starkey Taylor said it’s too soon to know the full impact.
Learning Grove does know that 52% of those who have come onto the van have participated in at least one engagement or educational opportunity.
“That could be anything from getting their child enrolled in a child care program to going to the library, getting a library card,” she said. “So we are reaching families and not just having it be one and done on our Learning Together van. They’re actually following up on some of the referrals we’re making, which is really good.”
For more on Learning Grove, go to learning-grove.org.
Providing additional resources
EC Learn provides training for early childhood professionals, but it also deals directly with families and employers to help educate them on the role of early learning in the community. “At EC Learn we like to think of ourselves as the connector,” said Sandra Woodall, the group’s executive director and CEO.
“We’re actually a comprehensive child care resource and referral entity,” she said. “We provide, educate and partner, and we influence quality early learning experiences that impact families, early childhood educators and the community.”
The organization offers a wide range of services, including professional development and training for those who work with children.
“We want to make sure that families have an understanding of what child development milestones are and how that influences and impacts kindergarten readiness,” Woodall said. “And then we also talk to employers on how they can be part of a solution by looking at child care as an infrastructure for their employees, because it impacts the current workforce, but it also definitely influences the future workforce.”
EC Learn is collaborating with Educate NKY. Together, they partner with local school systems and other organizations and work to get information out through community events and through their website, My Pre-K (mypre-k.com).
EC Learn developed My Pre-K, a website and resource hub with more than 108 partner organizations, to serve children from before birth to kindergarten. Families can look up information based on their child’s age and their ZIP code to find information on local resources, on topics such as child care, public preschool, mommy and me reading programs, child mental health and development.
The site’s goal is to combat fragmentation within the system and provide easy-to-find and easy-to-navigate information.
EC Learn works with its partners to provide resources wherever possible.
“Through our outreach events, we provide family guides that are linked to the early learning standards to be kindergarten ready,” Woodall said. “We have activity cards, growth charts and information that the schools give out to help them know some of the things that they can be doing with their children while they are at home – things that help families understand the development to get children to kindergarten readiness.”
EC Learn also advocates for early childhood education, In February representatives of the group went to D.C. to speak against cuts to education and to speak up for Head Start.
For information and resources for families, go to mypre-K.com.