Chalkbeat

This kindergarten teacher graduated during the pandemic. She was told to ‘be prepared for anything.’

2023-12-06T11:08:00+00:00

During the height of the COVID pandemic, when schools were closing and the future of education was uncertain, Sarah Budlow decided she wanted to become a teacher.

She is now in her third year teaching — her first in the School District of Philadelphia, and she said what she learned in her educator preparation program was simple: “Be prepared for anything.”

“We’ve been virtual, we’ve been in person, we’re not sure what it’s going to look like,” Budlow said was the attitude at the time she graduated in 2020. “We definitely had to have the mindset of, we don’t know what’s going to happen. So you’re just going to have to pivot and figure things out as it goes.”

Budlow is now putting her improvisational skills to work at Luis Muñoz-Marin Elementary School, teaching kindergarten. She regularly sends parents tutorial videos of lessons and skills she’s teaching her students so that they can continue the learning process at home. Because homework is optional in the youngest grade, giving parents the tools to do some extra practice when their kids aren’t in class can be crucial, Budlow said.

Budlow recently spoke with Chalkbeat about joining the educator workforce during the pandemic, getting kids excited about learning, teacher burnout, and her favorite book for early readers.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How and when did you decide to become a teacher?

I graduated college in 2020 with no clue what I wanted to do. I knew that I was interested in urban education and I loved working with kids. I started teaching at an outdoor summer camp with social distancing because of the pandemic.

I was really interested in learning more about urban education and being a part of what goes on in urban schools. That’s when I applied for Teach for America. I’m from Baltimore, but I wanted to go somewhere new, so I asked to be placed in Philly.

Were you daunted about going into teaching during the pandemic?

The more I learned about the impact of a kid’s school experience on their life and their future, the more I was interested in getting involved, especially during the pandemic.

It was kind of good timing because I started teaching in 2021, right when we were coming back from being all virtual. I think that it really highlights just how important it is for kids to be in school. A lot of people would tell me that everything was so different now from what it was before the pandemic, but I have nothing to compare it to. So this is just how it’s always been for me as a teacher.

For the most part, it’s been good to start teaching at a time when I think there’s a lot more appreciation for what goes on in schools.

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

I’m really bad at picking favorites. The first thing that came to mind is math class. The district just started with this Illustrative Math [curriculum], and I love teaching it.

We’ve been learning about counting groups up to 10. There is a lot of room for kids to have conversations with each other and as a whole group about how they counted and why they counted and they can try different ways of counting. It creates this environment in math class where there’s not just one right way to do things. I think it gives them a deeper understanding of what we’re actually doing in math.

I’ve seen kids grow a lot from where they were at the beginning of the year and also just get really excited about math. I hated math as a kid so it’s awesome to be able to not recreate the experience that I had.

My other favorite lesson is any kind of read-aloud. Just asking kids what they think and what they noticed about the characters and getting those conversations going.

One of my favorites that I’m reading with my class today when they get back from lunch is “We Are In a Book!” by Mo Willems. It’s just a lot of fun. Right now I’ll read it to them, but later in the year, they should be able to read it with each other.

What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on inside your classroom (or your school)?

Kids bring good things and hard things from the community with them. When there’s a holiday coming up, they’re gonna get excited. One of my students’ big sisters just had a baby and he’s an uncle and he was really excited to show me pictures. There are those exciting moments in the community when kids just come to class and are really eager and excited to share.

But then there’s things like gun violence, which is a very real problem in Philly. Every year that I’ve taught here, I have had kids that have had direct experiences with gun violence. A lot of times, they come to school looking for a place to process that. That’s really hard. But I also think it’s really important for us not to run away from that because that’s real. If kids are experiencing something like gun violence, then it’s important that they have a space to process that and don’t hold their emotions inside.

I will usually partner with parents, and if something comes up in school, I’ll let the parents know. But they also have the space to talk about it in school and just say how they’re feeling, and we can connect them with a counselor. Sometimes they just need to talk it out.

I think it’s a good opportunity to help kids process the world around them. Because we are in a classroom together all year.

When Sarah Budlow joined Teach for America, she asked to be placed in Philadelphia, where she currently is a kindergarten teacher at Luis Muñoz-Marin Elementary.

Tell us about your own experience with school and how it affects your work today.

I never really felt like I had teachers that got me. My teachers were nice. I did well in school and I was confident in my skills to some extent, but I also never thought that I was that smart. I thought I was kind of in the middle. And I was never that excited about school. I think that there are certain things from my education that I would want to replicate, like my parents’ involvement. But then there are certain things I don’t want to replicate, like just feeling disconnected from my teachers and just feeling like school was kind of boring.

I want to see my kids in the way that I felt like my teachers didn’t really see me that well. I want to know what they like and what makes them excited and find a way for them to feel excited to be in school and also feel competent in their skills.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received, and how have you put it into practice?

I read an article for class when I was at [The University of Pennsylvania] last year that was about teacher burnout, and it was called “Burned-in, Not Burned Out.” A lot of it had to do with teachers taking care of themselves as a way of taking care of their classroom and taking care of their kids.

I used to work way too many hours. But once I read that article, it really changed my perspective because I realized that I was over-exhausting myself and overexerting myself for little things that maybe could have waited until the next day or the next week.

[Now that I’ve started to] take care of myself, I’m able to be more present for my class and just generally I feel like I can do a better job. And that was a really hard lesson. The first two years, I can’t say I did very well at that, but I’ve gotten a lot better this year.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney discusses his pre-K legacy: ‘We had all the parents’

2023-12-06T11:04:00+00:00

This story is featured in Chalkbeat’s 2023 Philadelphia Early Childhood Education Guide on efforts to improve outcomes for the city’s youngest learners. To keep up with early childhood education and Philadelphia’s public schools, sign up for our free newsletter here.

When Mayor Jim Kenney is feeling frustrated, he said, he has a guaranteed pick-me-up: He goes to visit students in a local prekindergarten.

“When I get really down, and depressed, and disgusted, and lots of other adjectives, I go schedule a pre-K visit,” Kenney told Chalkbeat in a candid interview conducted during his final weeks in office. “It’s like my salvation.”

Along with overseeing the school district’s return to local control after 17 years under state authority, Kenney regards the establishment of PHLpreK, which allows thousands of 3- and 4-year-olds in the city to attend prekindergarten free of charge, as one of the major legacies of his two terms in office.

“I believe the only way out of poverty and into a successful life is education,” he said, by way of explaining his commitment to the issue. Providing structured programs for 3- and 4-year-olds, he said, “sets the tone for the rest of their educational experience.”

As policymakers consider how to overhaul the state’s school funding system to make it fairer for districts like Philadelphia’s, Kenney also pointed out that the city increased its contribution to the school district by $1.5 billion during his tenure.

This year, more than 5,000 children are enrolled in PHLpreK, according to a report from Kenney’s office. Since its inception in 2017, more than 17,000 children have passed through the program and over 500 new teachers have been hired to work in PHLpreK classrooms, the report said.

Making free, high-quality prekindergarten more accessible helped parents and caregivers of young children hold down jobs, Kenney said, which in turn reduced poverty and led to more stable families – in itself an important factor in promoting school readiness.

While there isn’t research on PHLpreK’s impact that tracks students who had access to early childhood education versus those who didn’t, Kenney said third grade reading scores went up 3 percentage points last year in district schools. Those third graders were the first class of children who had access to PHLpreK.

To be sure, that increase is modest. The district set a goal for 62% of third graders to score proficient on the state exam by 2026. But in the 2022-23 school year, only 31.2% of third graders scored proficient or above on their state exams.

Beyond the numbers, Kenney cites anecdotal evidence that PHLpreK is having an impact. He loves to tell the story of visiting a kindergarten on the first day of school. “It was a disaster,” he said, with children bawling and clinging to their mothers — except for two kids sitting placidly in their seats, hands folded in front of them.

“I said to them, ‘Did you go to pre-K?’ They did. They knew exactly what to do,” Kenney recalled. “There was no learning curve.”

To get free pre-K done, Kenney fought off the soda industry, which spent millions trying to kill the sweetened beverage tax he proposed to fund the program. (The City Council approved the 1.5 cents-per-ounce tax on those beverages in a 13-4 vote in 2016.)

“They hired every lobbyist in the universe,” he said. “But we had all the parents. And ladies with babies strapped to their chests can be a powerful force.”

Kenney said he voted against the tax twice during his time on the council in 2010 and 2011 when then-Mayor Michael Nutter brought it to the table. Nutter had emphasized the health benefits of reducing soda consumption, which didn’t resonate with the council members at the time.

What changed Kenney’s mind? If he wanted free pre-K, he would need to establish a sustainable funding source.

“Once we got sworn in. We’re sitting in my office … and I said, well, how are we going to pay for all this stuff?” Kenney said.

Having a dedicated purpose for the tax revenue was enough to convince the council members to back the tax.

But in its first few years, hampered by an ongoing lawsuit against the soda tax and diminished state revenues during the pandemic, the program was slow to roll out and expand. A city controller’s audit in 2017 found some “missteps” with the program’s implementation, including over-billing and under-enrolling.

But Kenney said he never considered giving up on the effort.

“Head down, win or lose,” Kenney said. “I don’t know what we would have done if we had lost in court. But we didn’t.”

The state Supreme Court upheld the beverage tax in a 4-2 vote in 2018. Kenney said he hopes the program will continue to expand after he leaves.

It’s unclear what the future will hold for the program when Kenney vacates his position. A spokesperson for mayor-elect Cherelle Parker declined to comment on the program..

Kenney said he hasn’t had the expansion discussion with Parker’s team yet. But he thinks it’s “politically powerful enough” that “if somebody tries to take it away, I don’t think that they would get a good reception.”

In his waning days as mayor, Kenney has been thinking about what he’ll do next. He said he intends to set off on an ocean cruise the day after Parker is inaugurated. After that, he’s not sure. But it won’t be public life.

“I’m done with it. It’s time for people to move on sometimes,” Kenney said.

He said one idea he’s mulling is starting a nonprofit that would raise money to expose city kids to more live arts and culture programs, he said.

As a high school freshman at St. Joseph’s Preparatory School, Kenney said he and his classmates were taken on a field trip to see the Alvin Ailey Dance Company and its legendary founder, Judith Jamison, perform at the Walnut Street Theater.

“I went from hating it to thinking, ‘This is beautiful. I’ve never seen anyone move like that. I’ve never seen anything like this,’” Kenney said. “I honestly believe that kids in the city, who see nothing but chaos and hurt, [deserve] an opportunity to do that, to see that there’s beautiful things in the world.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

How families can apply to Philadelphia’s free pre-K programs

2023-12-06T11:00:00+00:00

There are several ways Philadelphians can access high-quality, free prekindergarten for all 3- and 4-year-olds living in the city. Families who’ve been through the program say it’s had a profound impact on their lives and is among the best the city has to offer.

But signing up for pre-K hasn’t been easy for everyone.

Some eligible families say they have struggled with the application process, found themselves stuck on waitlists, or weren’t aware that the city offers free pre-K at neighborhood schools or child care centers near them regardless of their family income.

The city and school district want that to change. Early next year, city officials intend to launch a more streamlined, easy-to-understand application process with the hope that more families will participate.

For now, there’s two main ways to apply: through the school district and through the city’s PHLpreK program. Funding for these programs comes from the city’s soda tax (a portion of which is dedicated to PHLpreK), the state’s PreK Counts program, and the federal Head Start program.

Together, the district and city offer some 16,250 seats at schools and private pre-K providers across Philadelphia, according to Diane Castelbuono, the district’s deputy chief for early childhood. Because it’s a two-year program, she said, some five to six thousand seats open every year as kids move from pre-K to kindergarten.

But that’s less than half (45%) of the estimated 36,022 3- and 4-year-olds who reside within the bounds of the city school district.

Families can face many barriers throughout the application process. For example, in-person application hours at school-based locations are only staffed during weekdays from 9 or 10 a.m. until noon. If seats fill up at a family’s preferred location, their child may be put on a waiting list for the entire school year. And neither the district nor the city provide transportation for pre-K children.

Leah Falk, a parent with one child who went through the program, said the application process was “opaque,” and a bit of a burden.

“This is from a family with two college-educated people who fill out forms all day,” Falk said. “There seems to be a process and a shadow process and I don’t know why that is.”

Castelbuono said the district is aware of how complicated the process can be for parents. She said they’re working towards adopting one universal application “which is the best thing for families,” but she said, “we’re not there yet.”

In the meantime, Castelbuono emphasized, families should start the application process as soon as possible. For the best chance at securing a seat in a preferred location, she said families should get started right after the winter holidays.

Whether this is your first time applying, or you’ve got another child already in the program, here is everything you need to know to apply to pre-K in Philadelphia:

What are Philadelphia’s pre-K options?

The city and School District of Philadelphia provide free, high-quality, full-day pre-K classes for all city kids ages 3 to 5. A child must be at least 3 years old to enroll, but families can begin the application process before their child turns 3. Children who are turning 5 on or before Sept. 1 have to apply to kindergarten.

You can check to see if your child is eligible using the city’s tool here.

Pre-K programs at school-based locations run from September through June and follow the school district’s calendar. According to the district’s website, program hours may vary by location, but in general the hours are: Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Want to know what a typical day might look like? You can see a sample lesson plan here.

How do I apply?

Parents and guardians can apply two ways: online or in-person.

For your best chance at finding a seat, the district is encouraging families to complete both the city and school district’s applications before the end of February 2024.

The city’s PHLpreK application can be found here.

The district’s application can be found here.

How to apply online

For the 2024-2025 school year, the city and school district hope to have a simpler way to apply online. Check back here in January for updated information.

The online application process for the school district takes about 15 to 30 minutes to complete and requires a number of documents — it’s important to note that the district and city require different documents for their respective applications. The school district offers their own step-by-step guide with photos that can be helpful to have open while you’re applying.

The application will ask questions about the child’s name, birth date, housing status, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) information, and allow you to request a location of your choice — either a program in a school close to your ZIP code or one run outside of a school by a community partner..

After submitting, you’ll have to upload your documents. Per their website, the district requires:

Proof of the child’s date of birth (ideally a birth certificate, but a valid U.S. passport, medical records, or any other form of government-issued document with your child’s birthdate would also work).
Documentation of family income.
Proof of Philadelphia residency (this could be a utility bill, driver’s license, W-2 tax form, or current lease or rental agreement, among other documents).
Child’s health insurance card.
Physical (health assessment form) and immunization records.
Picture identification of parent/guardian.

If applicable, the district will also ask for:

Proof of TANF benefits, SNAP/food stamps, medical assistance.
custody order.
Med-1 form if your child needs medication that a staff member will have to administer.
a copy of your child’s Individualized Education Program.
foster letter.
homeless verification letter/shelter letter.

The city’s PHLpreK application requires:

One proof of age document (such as a birth certificate or passport).
One proof of residency document (such as a utility bill, lease, or driver’s license, etc.).
A completed PHLpreK application and PHLpreK acknowledgement form.

How to apply in-person

You can register at many of the schools and community child care locations the district and city partner with or at the district’s office at 440 North Broad St. Just make sure you bring all of your documents — the same you’d need for the online application above.

You can find a location nearest to you here or here. Be sure to check the days and times they are open.

You also have to print, fill out, and bring a paper application with you. The school district’s application can be found here in English, Spanish, and nine other languages. The city’s PHLpreK application can be found here in the same languages.

What happens next?

If your child is accepted or put on a waitlist, you will get a phone call, note in the mail, or an email within six weeks of your application submission. However, the district warns that notification may be delayed depending on the time of year your application was submitted. Castelbuono said there is “always a crush” of applications in the summer months, so by August seats are often full.

Each pre-K location has a maximum funded capacity, meaning only a certain number of children can attend at each location. If more people apply to a location than there are seats available, the district will create a waitlist. District officials say on the pre-K website that “it is possible for a child to remain on the waiting list for the entire school year.”

If a seat opens up at the location of your choice, the district says someone will call to let you know.

What else do I need to know?

Transportation services are not provided by the city or district for pre-K children, so you’ll have to arrange your own transportation or carpool with neighbors or friends.

Some locations do offer before and after care if your family needs an extended day, though there will likely be a cost associated. Check here to see if a location near you offers before or after care.

Who do I talk to if I have questions or concerns?

The district offers phone support for anyone with questions about the program or registration process: 215-400-4270. The city’s Office of Children and Families also operates a PHLpreK hotline: 844-745-7735 (844-PHL-PREK). You can also email the office at OCFCommunications@phila.gov.

You can also reach out to the Early Learning Resource Center for information or guidance throughout the application and registration process. Their phone number is 1-888-461-KIDS (5437).

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

At these Philadelphia child care centers, learning and fun are inseparable

2023-12-06T11:11:21+00:00

Children at six Bright Horizons child care centers in the Philadelphia area have some new playground equipment: Interactive stations designed to promote learning while having fun.

Temple University researchers aim to measure how the “playful learning stations,” all designed with input from staff and community members, help the preschoolers learn skills like communication and pattern recognition.

It’s part of a plan to incorporate learning into non-classroom areas like playgrounds and even public spaces like bus stops and sidewalks, Temple psychology professor Kathy Hirsh-Pasek said.

Hirsh-Pasek’s theory is that children learn better when they’re having fun, and teachers enjoy teaching more when they design and teach activities designed to encourage playful learning. Experts have long said that play is essential to children’s healthy development.

The idea is “taking the science of learning and building it into the architecture of the built space,” said Hirsh-Pasek. It’s a technique being used at libraries — the Cecil B. Moore Library worked with members of its local North Philadelphia community on a “playbrary” that includes a spelling-based climbing wall — as well as bus stops and other facilities in Philadelphia and cities across the country, she said.

These “learning landscapes” have been shown to encourage learning, Hirsh-Pasek said. The library project, she said, encouraged more people to get library cards.

The Bright Horizons study is the first to test the concept in a school environment, said Hirsh-Pasek.

Interactive learning through play can also help combat learning loss from interruptions such as summer breaks and the more extended pandemic disruption, Hirsh-Paskek said. Temple research, for example, found that Playstreets, a Philadelphia program that closes designated streets to traffic during summer days and brings in learning games, resulted in better language skills.

Three of the six Bright Horizons centers are using stations geared toward literacy and language, and the other three are focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (commonly known as STEM). Some 100 children across the centers are participating, Hirsh-Pasek said.

Bright Horizons’ Buerger Early Learning Center at Congregation Rodeph Shalom has two installations fostering literacy and communications skills.

Temple researchers worked with Bright Horizon staff and parents to design an interactive mural with Philadelphia and community landmarks and characters that can be used for storytelling or recognition games. There’s also a “story wheel” with stations kids can spin to pick a character, a setting, a conflict, and a resolution, followed by a platform for presenting the narrative.

Since Buerger has a large Jewish constituency, the mural and story wheel feature characters and places relevant to Jewish life and culture. “It was really important for our mural to include Judaism, because we’re at the synagogue,” said Leah Briggin, Buerger’s director.

Installations at other Bright Horizons centers, which were all designed with parent and teacher input, have features central to their communities.

STEM activities include a dance game designed to encourage pattern and shape recognition.

In all cases, the idea is for kids to learn how to work together and communicate while developing critical thinking skills and self-confidence, Hirsh-Pasek said.

Bright Horizons, which operates year-round, set up the “playful learning” installations in June. The Temple study runs for this academic year, after which researchers will evaluate any changes in kids’ behavior or skills. “We’ll go back and see whether the students in the more STEM-based [centers] learn more STEM,” using tests given at the beginning and end of the project, and evaluating skills in areas including narrative, critical thinking, communications, and confidence for the kids using the language-based stations, Hirsh-Pasek said.

Children playing with installations at The Buerger Early Learning Center at Congregation Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia, PA.

Temple received a grant for the program from the William Penn Foundation. Bright Horizons didn’t receive any direct funding, said Rachel Robertson, vice president of education and development at Bright Horizons. (Chalkbeat receives funding from the William Penn Foundation.)

Temple currently owns the installations, but Bright Horizons plans to consider how to bring the concept to other programs once the study ends, she said.

Preschool seems like the obvious place for playful learning. But the idea works just as well in higher grades and even in college, said Hirsh-Pasek, who uses “joyful learning” in her classes. “When it’s meaningful and it’s fun, you’re actually learning,” she said.

Teachers are also happy when they’re free to create fun activities to encourage learning, Hirsh-Pasek said.

“We all know that early childhood educators need and deserve more respect than they get,” Robertson said. Giving them a say in how to teach is one way of honoring that, she said.

Students gravitate to hands-on, interactive learning

The Bright Horizons venture isn’t the only real-world study of playful learning. Hirsh-Pasek said her team is embarking on a $20 million, four-state study to see how classrooms adapt to the approach. Teachers will work with small groups and hands-on projects, all developed with teacher input.

The idea has been shown to work, Hirsh-Pasek said. She cited examples in which a first grade teacher had a class jump on a number line on the floor to learn addition, and a basketball game designed to help fourth- to sixth-graders understand fractions and decimal conversion.

“Playful learning is the ideal,” Robertson said. “It really is how children learn best.” Kids “have to play with things, to get their hands on things, to experiment,” she said. “Playful learning allows them to try out the concepts they’re learning in real life.”

Bright Horizons teachers are already encouraged to foster kids’ curiosity, Robertson said. She recalled a teacher whose class was distracted by a group of birds at the window. Instead of drawing their focus back to the lesson she was teaching, “the teacher went with it,” letting the kids ask questions about birds and look up the answers, and ultimately building bird feeders based on what they learned, said Robertson.

Bright Horizons teachers at the centers participating in the project attended five training sessions before the program began, Robertson said. “Ensuring we can show the link between playful learning and learning outcomes is an important part of this,” she said.

Briggin said kids at her center use the mural both on their own and in teacher-guided activities. “We see a lot of children gravitating towards the mural,” she said. “They’re really interested in spotting things” they see on their way to school, or if one has made a weekend trip to a landmark they’ve seen on the mural they’ll want to point it out, she said.

Hirsh-Pasek said the “playful learning” installations at the Bright Horizon centers are popular with children. “It’s been amazing to watch,” she said. “It blows my mind at how easy, how cheap, and how effective this stuff is.”

Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s Early Childhood Education Guide

2023-12-06T11:10:00+00:00

For thousands of Philadelphia families, access to reliable, high-quality early childhood education is a priority.

Luckily, all 3- and 4-year-olds living in the city are eligible for free pre-K through the school district and through the city’s free preschool program, PHLpreK.

This year, Chalkbeat has created a guide featuring stories that take a political and personal look at early childhood education in Philadelphia and an explainer to walk new parents through the pre-k application process.

In our guide, reporter Nora Macaluso looks at a new movement towards “playful learning” that considers how important fun and enjoyment can be for early learners. We sat down with outgoing Mayor Jim Kenney to reflect on his pre-K legacy in Philadelphia, and we also spoke with kindergarten teacher Sarah Budlow, who shared how her pandemic education inspired her to become an educator herself.

This year, more than 5,000 children are enrolled in PHLpreK, according to a report from Kenney’s administration. Another 11,000 students are enrolled through the school district.

Milagros Nores, co-director for research at the National Institute for Early Education Research, observed some 285 Philadelphia pre-K classrooms last spring and told Chalkbeat the quality was comparable with similar programs she’s studied in other states. But she said there was room for growth, especially when it comes to teacher and staff training.

Nores said now that the program has incorporated more professional development and embedded coaching, it will likely improve.

But those improvements will depend on political will. Kenney made PHLpreK the centerpiece of his education agenda, but it’s unclear if mayor-elect Cherelle Parker will maintain it, expand it, or change it when she takes the helm. A spokesperson for Parker declined to comment on the issue.

Amid that uncertainty, providers are warning of an impending mass exodus from the field. Some early childhood education advocates in Philadelphia and statewide say their sector is “on the brink of a breakdown.”

Carol Austin, executive director of First Up, an advocacy group that provides training and accreditation assistance to early childhood educators and organizations, told Chalkbeat the biggest challenge facing Philadelphia early childhood programs is underfunding.

That lack of funding at the top causes a ripple effect that means early childhood workers are often underpaid. As a result, caregivers are leaving the field, which creates more work and pressure for those who remain.

In Philadelphia County, the estimated full-time hourly rate for early childhood teachers was $14.37 for annual earnings of $29,884, as of the most recent earnings data from 2021.

“People are leaving the field because it’s so stressful,” Austin said. “They can make more money at Target.”

Austin said that like their peers in K-12 classrooms, early childhood staff are also seeing more students, including toddlers, grappling with challenging behaviors in the wake of the pandemic. In some cases, Austin said, those students would be better served by having more and better-trained teachers and support staff in the classroom. But that requires more funding.

“If we could pay educators and staff what they deserve, we wouldn’t be dealing with this cycle,” Austin said.

Barbara Chavous-Pennock, CEO of Somerset Academy Early Learning Center in North Philadelphia, said finding adequate space, quality teachers, enough funding, and necessary support for students from marginalized communities is getting more difficult every year.

But Chavous-Pennock said she’s hopeful the city can expand and streamline the free pre-K programs it has.

“The greatest thing that I think we falter from as a city is that we have tremendous programs, we have dollars, we even sometimes have political will,” Chavous-Pennock said, “but we talk to each other in silos. We are not sitting together, we are not working together.”

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

Food insecurity, literacy, and more: Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s early childhood education guide

2022-12-07T11:30:00+00:00

This story is featured in Chalkbeat’s 2022 Philadelphia Early Childhood Education Guide on efforts to improve outcomes for the city’s youngest learners. To keep up with early childhood education and Philadelphia’s public schools, sign up for our free weekly newsletter here.

As any parent, teacher, or administrator will tell you, the success of Philadelphia’s early learners depends on factors inside and outside of the classroom.

For our 2022 Philadelphia Early Childhood Education Guide, we dive deeply into areas both inside and outside the school setting as we continue to explore how to improve outcomes for the city’s youngest learners.

Outside the classroom, we’ll look at the ways hunger can disrupt the education of young children — as well as some local solutions for filling this most basic human need.

Back inside the classroom, we will take stock of the district’s push to have students reading on grade level by the time they finish third grade, an effort that started in 2015 but was interrupted by the pandemic.

Straddling home and school life is the effort to embrace students’ customs and cultural identity in the classroom, a strategy that some researchers believe will create a sense of belonging that translates into better academic performance.

Chalkbeat Philadelphia is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and economic mobility in the city. Read all our reporting here.

And in our How I Teach feature, we hear from a prekindergarten lead teacher about how to help youngsters who rarely left their homes during the pandemic transition to the school setting.

Check out the stories in the guide below.

Philadelphia invested in early literacy efforts. Is it working?

During November, Mayor Jim Kenney visited several child care centers to highlight what he considers one of his biggest achievements as mayor: making affordable, high-quality early childhood education available to an additional 4,300 students through PHLPreK, an initiative that supplements state and federal programs including Pre-K Counts and Head Start.

The focus on prekindergarten is part of the city’s effort to ensure that all students can read on grade level by the end of third grade. This Read by 4th campaign began in 2015, and has brought together universities, foundations, businesses, and other institutions to emphasize literacy activities in everyday life as well as in the classroom.

As a target on the road to universal proficiency, the Philadelphia Board of Education has set a goal that 62% of third graders will be proficient readers by the 2025-26 school year. Yet while many systems have been put in place to help the city achieve its goal, the results so far have been mixed — at least as measured by standardized test scores.

Read the full story, by Dale Mezzacappa.

Early childhood education programs fight food insecurity in Philadelphia and beyond

Approximately 31% of Philadelphia’s children experienced food insecurity in 2020, up from just over 24% a year earlier, according to Philabundance, which operates food banks in the area as a member of the Feeding America program.

And almost half of principals in a 2020-2021 School District of Philadelphia survey said food insecurity was a “great” or “moderate” challenge. Black and Hispanic/Latino households had higher rates of food insecurity, as did families whose children were still learning English, the district found.

This level of food insecurity can have dire consequences for early learners, who need stability at home and in school settings to thrive.

Read the full story, by Nora Macaluso.

How Philadelphia’s early childhood education programs help kids find strength in their identities

Inside Children’s Village, a 46-year-old nonprofit education center in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, preschoolers look into a mirror and create self portraits, then say which attributes they like best.

The game, called “Mirror, Mirror,” is a favorite of Sim Yi Loh, the family partnership coordinator at the center, whose families are largely first- or second-generation immigrants from East Asia.

“Children as young as six months can point out facial differences and skin color differences,” Loh said. “These activities we brought into the classrooms to boost self-confidence, and this will carry on into their learning.”

“Mirror, Mirror” is just one of several ways Children’s Village tries to embrace the culture, traditions, and customs of its early learners. And helping young children see themselves in the school setting can create a strong sense of belonging, some researchers say, that could help the early learners do better in school.

Read the full story, by Nora Macaluso.

How this preschool teacher adapted for her COVID-era students

For many parents, this year has marked a return to “normal” — with COVID restrictions largely lifted and workplaces open once again.

The transition has been harder for young children. Today’s preschoolers were babies and toddlers during the pandemic lockdowns, and some missed out on early opportunities to be around educators and peers.

“For many of my students, this is their first time in a school or care setting, or even leaving their house” for extended periods of time, said Lyssa Horvath, a lead pre-K teacher at Belmont Academy Charter School in Philadelphia.

To meet students’ needs, Horvath has adjusted her approach. “In addition to the language, math, physical, social, and emotional development that I typically do in my classroom, I’m engaged in a lot more confidence boosting and encouragement than in years before,” she said.

Read the full story, by Gabrielle Birkner.

Philadelphia officials optimistic about early literacy efforts despite disappointing test scores

2022-12-07T11:25:00+00:00

Mayor Jim Kenney had a question for the 30 or so four- and five-year-olds arrayed before him at the Little Einsteins child care center in Germantown just before Thanksgiving.

After reading to them from the book “Our Favorite Day of the Year,” about holidays, food was on the mayor’s mind.

“What do you like to put on top of your pie? I like vanilla ice cream,” he said.

“Pizza!” one little boy shouted.

“Pizza on top of your pie?” the mayor responded in mock disbelief. The little boy giggled.

Soon, it was a free-for-all. “French fries!” “Hot dogs!” “Nuggets!” children shouted.

“Now you’re being silly,” the mayor said, appearing to enjoy every moment as the children basked in the attention.

During November, Kenney visited several child care centers to highlight what he considers one of his biggest achievements as mayor: making affordable, high-quality early childhood education available to an additional 4,300 students through PHLPreK, an initiative that supplements state and federal programs including Pre-K Counts and Head Start.

Just 28.2% of Philadelphia third graders scored proficient or advanced in reading this year on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, or PSSA, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of the state test scores. That is not only a decline from pre-pandemic proficiency of 32.5% in 2019, but more than 10 percentage points below the goal set by the Board of Education for the 2021-22 school year for the district to be on track for its goal of 62%. (In 2020, the state did not administer the PSSA; in 2021, a relatively small share of students took the PSSA due to the pandemic, and officials have warned against comparing those scores to results from other years.)

Overall for grades 3-8, 34.7% of students scored proficient in reading on the PSSA in 2022. That’s below the interim target of 42.5% the district set for 2021-22 in order to stay on track to reach its goal of 65% proficiency by 2026.

Recently released scores from this year’s federally administered National Assessment of Educational Progress for fourth and eighth graders — known as “the nation’s report card” — revealed promising but also worrying signs for Philadelphia’s younger students when it comes to literacy.

While fourth graders’ NAEP reading scores dipped nationwide and in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia’s fourth grade reading scores did not change significantly from 2019, the last time the NAEP test was administered. At the same time, Philadelphia’s fourth graders scored significantly below the national average and the average for Pennsylvania. (NAEP is administered to a representative sample of students, not all of them.)

Despite worrying signs in the data, those working in the field also see encouraging signs.

Donna Cooper, executive director of the advocacy group Children First, called it “amazing” that Philadelphia’s fourth grade NAEP scores in reading “didn’t tank” for 2022 after all the pandemic-related disruptions.

And others point to the foundation for future success in literacy that Philadelphia has put in place recently through a diverse set of initiatives inside and outside schools. “We feel we’re in a much better place than we were seven years ago,” said Jenny Bogoni, executive director of the Read by 4th campaign.

Early literacy efforts focus on coaches and curriculum

The initiative started in the wake of research showing that students reap lifelong benefits if they are reading proficiently when they start fourth grade. A 2012 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, for example, found that students who do not reach this milestone are four times less likely to graduate high school on time than those who do.

Despite the added pre-K seats in Philadelphia over the last several years, inadequate availability may still be hindering efforts like those to improve early literacy.

About 12,000 children, or nearly half of those eligible for those seats based on family income, still don’t have access to affordable early childhood education, Cooper pointed out.

That could contribute to the reality that despite “tons of effort” after seven years “we’re not seeing movement” on the traditional measures of children’s literacy, she said.

Still, while the percentage of students reaching proficiency on the PSSA has not shown the progress people would like, the share of students scoring “below basic” (the lowest level) on the test did fall across various student subgroups from 2015 and 2019. For example, the percentage of Black male students scoring below basic on the English Language Arts test declined from 46.5% in 2015 to 41.5% in 2019, according to the district.

“We haven’t quite gotten to putting more in the proficient bucket, but we’re bringing up the bottom,” Bogoni said.

Starting in 2019, the district overhauled its early reading curriculum by hewing more closely to the science of reading, said Nyshawana Francis-Thompson, the district’s deputy chief of curriculum and instruction.

This shift in instruction seeks to couple comprehension skills — including vocabulary development, background knowledge, and verbal reasoning — with more explicit phonics instruction, decoding, and phonemic awareness, or the relationship between letters and sounds.

With the curricular shift, “We’re more focused on foundational skills,” said Malika Savoy-Brooks, the district’s chief academic support officer.

The district is also working with local colleges of education to make sure that teachers planning to work in the early grades get more rigorous training in reading instruction. And since 2015, early-grade teachers have received summer training in best practices for teaching reading.

Beyond that fundamental shift in core instruction, the district has also hired literacy coaches recently to work in many schools. Officials have also sought to raise awareness among parents about the importance of exposing them to books from a very early age.

Outside of school, the Read by 4th campaign has enlisted the help of “reading captains.” These are community residents who conduct literacy activities in the neighborhood at libraries, schools, parks and other settings.

Diane Castelbuono, the district’s director of early childhood education, said there is “a small army of reading captains out there engaging friends and neighbors in how to raise a reader, and how families can access the resources they need.”

Separately, the district is working with book publishers and funders to obtain more diverse books, and enhance classroom libraries to make sure most of the books and teaching materials are more culturally responsive to the children in the classroom, who are overwhelmingly Black and brown.

Francis-Thompson said the district is drawing on materials and philosophy from Dr. Gholdy Muhammed, an associate professor at Georgia State University who emphasizes the importance of cultural affirmation and appropriate reading materials to children’s development of literacy skills.

“Significant work has been done making sure there are books in children’s homes, making sure the distribution of children’s books is culturally responsive and in different languages,” Castelbuono said.

While curriculum is important, so is making sure that the teachers of early learners also focus on children’s social and emotional needs, said LaTanya Miller, executive director of the district’s office of academic supports who works on adaptive curriculum for students with disabilities.

And with respect to English language learners, who make up 12% of the district’s students, the district has also gradually shifted its approach to stress that speaking and understanding a language other than English is an asset, not a liability.

Over the past several years, the district has invested in modernizing kindergarten through third grade classrooms to include centers devoted to reading, writing, and LEGOs.

And officials are ramping up other initiatives, including playful learning, in which opportunities for reading and conversation are present in places all around the city, including parks, laundromats, and buses.

The ultimate goal of all these efforts, Francis-Thompson said, is to prepare students to be critical of the world around them and “not just a passive consumer” of information. Beyond just teaching skills, creating literate students is about “accepting them and embracing all that they are in a learning environment,” she said.

As with many other education initiatives, the pandemic has disrupted efforts to improve early literacy. Bogoni said almost two full years of remote learning has taken its toll. But she stressed that the city is now in a better position to make badly needed progress.

“We were feeling we were on the cusp of making good progress as the pandemic hit,” she said. “Now the task is to double down. The foundations are in place that should allow us to move forward in this space of urgency.”

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Early childhood education programs fight food insecurity in Philadelphia and beyond

2022-12-07T11:20:00+00:00

When teachers at Children’s Playhouse, a pair of child care centers in South Philadelphia, noticed children sneaking school-provided snacks into their book bags to take home, it was a “huge red flag,” said founder and CEO Damaris Alvarado-Rodriguez.

This practice typically happened near the end of the day, leading staffers to believe the children weren’t getting enough for dinner, or eating early enough, to keep them satisfied.

So the center asked families if they’d prefer their kids have an afternoon “supper” rather than a snack, and the answer was yes.

Damaris Alvarado-Rodriguez, Children’s Playhouse CEO, said teachers were alarmed to find children sneaking snacks to take home from the center.

“Some families work long hours,” and between commuting and other responsibilities, children might not be fed until 8 p.m. or later, Alvarado-Rodriguez said. Other families, she added, just don’t have the resources to buy enough food.

The type of situation that unfolded at Children’s Playhouse is part of a broader pattern in the city, according to recent data about food insecurity, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines as “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.” Although the pandemic has drawn significant attention to the issue, it’s far from a new one.

This level of food insecurity can have dire consequences for early learners, who need stability at home and in school settings to thrive.

Anna Johnson, an associate professor of psychology at Georgetown University who studies the link between food insecurity and the well-being of young children, said the issue can be linked to other stressors some face in early childhood.

“Children from low-income communities are more likely to experience food insecurity, housing instability, and neighborhood violence,” Johnson said. “It’s really a systemic problem. It’s hard for them to get the resources all kids need for a happy, healthy life.”

In food-insecure households, parents generally make sure the children are fed and go hungry themselves, she added. But such choices end up disrupting and straining parent-child relationships.

“Food insecurity impacts parents’ abilities to be those buffers to the stresses their children experience, which then comes out in what we’re calling child mental health,” Johnson said.

One tangible consequence of that increased stress is that anxious kids aren’t able to concentrate in educational settings, said Seth Pollak, a clinical psychologist with the Child Emotion Research Lab at the University of Wisconsin.

“There’s really good evidence that when children are feeling anxious, it’s really hard for them to listen to the teacher’s instructions or pay attention to the cues their peers are sending,” Pollak said.

By the same token, alleviating child hunger can go a long way toward setting kids up for success, researchers say. And some providers are searching for solutions.

Children’s Playhouse provides meals to 278 students through its various programs.

Pennsylvania programs aim to ease hunger

Children’s Playhouse works across different sectors in Philadelphia by providing breakfast, lunch, and dinner to some 278 children in Head Start, pre-kindergarten, and infant and toddler programs at its two centers. The center also has a social worker on staff to direct families to additional resources.

Children’s Playhouse also partners with Philadelphia to provide Head Start and city-sponsored preschool programs, and works with food bank operator Philabundance to provide meals to the community, Alvarado-Rodriguez said. She’s also started a nonprofit to expand food availability to the community.

Food insecurity isn’t confined to major urban areas. In rural Pennsylvania, the Power Packs Project provides families in 45 schools with ingredients and recipes for low-cost fresh meals.

The 17-year-old project works with schools in the cities of Lancaster and Lebanon to find families who qualify for free and reduced-price meals through school, and enroll them in the program. These families receive packs with a mixture of fresh and shelf-stable groceries and a recipe card.

The recipe is for a meal to feed four people, but the food in the box each week generally provides staples and ingredients for about 10 meals, said Brad Peterson, the project’s executive director.

“It’s all about reducing that meal gap,” Peterson said. “Our mission is to supply kids with food over the weekend so when they go back to school Monday, they’re well fed and ready to learn.”

With the help of Johnson and her Georgetown colleagues, Power Packs — which is looking to expand — has recently started looking into data like changes in test scores to measure the program’s impact, Peterson said. “We’ve really been more focused on short-term outcomes,” he said.

Children’s Playhouse hasn’t measured the success of its food program, Alvarado-Rodriguez said. “We’re working so fast we didn’t stop to collect data,” she said.

Demand for food programs is growing, and recent inflation is a “huge concern” for families, many of whom were struggling to begin with, Alvarado-Rodriguez said. And more broadly, COVID’s disruption of food and other benefits programs hurt families at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder the most, Johsnon noted.

Children’s Village is working with state and local representatives to expand its food services, Alvarado-Rodriguez said.

“We have received testimonials throughout the pandemic,” and teachers have reported that the program has helped kids in their classrooms, she said.

Children’s Playhouse is looking to expand its food services, as the demand for programs that fight food insecurity grows.

Peterson attributed increased demand for Power Packs to the effects of inflation, but also to the elimination of federal benefits stemming from the pandemic. “We knew there was going to be a wave” of demand this year, he said. “A lot of the feeding programs that popped up during the pandemic have slowly gone away.”

One major change to longstanding nutrition policy during the pandemic was that schools provided free lunches to all students regardless of their household income levels during the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years. But those federally subsidized universal free meals ended this academic year.

On the other hand, Pennsylvania recently raised the income eligibility threshold for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to 200% of the federal poverty level, making more than 174,000 households eligible for the program. The expansion, which went into effect Oct. 1, “allows us to extend a reprieve to people who may be struggling” to pay for food, Executive Deputy Secretary for Human Services Andrew Barnes said in a September statement.

Philadelphia is also working to fill the gaps. In addition to providing regular meals in school and in after-school programs, the Philadelphia district works with Philabundance and the Giant Food-funded Share Food program to link schools with other resources, a district spokeswoman said.

Aside from such partnerships and official programs, teachers can also play a role on a smaller scale to alleviate children’s stress that’s related to food insecurity, said Pollak of the University of Wisconsin.

“Sometimes if a teacher can find some kind of quiet or stable thing to do” with a child who might be experiencing food insecurity or another form of instability at home, he said, it can make a significant difference. That could mean regularly pulling the child aside during lunch or recess and reading a story or having a snack, or even a group activity for a few children, Pollak said.

He hopes that the events of the last few years drive more research into (and attention to) food insecurity and the consequences it can have for young children. But for now, Alvarado-Rodriguez is driven not just by the need she sees, but by a moral imperative.

“It is disturbing that in parts of Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia, we still have families with children that are going hungry at night and they can’t afford to feed them,” Alvarado-Rodriguez said. “That is something that is unacceptable.”

How Philadelphia’s early childhood education programs help kids find strength in their identities

2022-12-07T11:15:00+00:00

This story is featured in our 2022 Philadelphia Early Childhood Education Guide on efforts to improve outcomes for the city’s youngest learners. To keep up with early childhood education and Philadelphia’s public schools, sign up for our free weekly newsletter here.

The game, called “Mirror, Mirror,” is a favorite of Sim Yi Loh, the family partnership coordinator at the center, whose families are largely first- or second-generation immigrants from East Asia.

In classrooms throughout Philadelphia, educators and others seek to create such cultural ties. The city school district uses Relationships First, a community-building program for pre-K-12 students, to help them explore their identities and articulate what they value about their cultures.

Lessons that include prompts like asking kids to share pictures illustrating something about their culture they value, and reading books about what makes kids special or unique, are designed to spark questions and discussions about valuing identity and accepting others, a district spokeswoman said. The district recently partnered with the Children’s Literacy Initiative to help teachers identify and use anti-racist materials through an $84,000 grant that embeds coaches in classrooms.

“We understand that if students see themselves valued, reflected, and honored in books and learning experiences that we provide them, they’re more likely to learn,” Nyshawana Francis-Thompson, the deputy chief of the district’s Office of Curriculum and Instruction, said in a statement to Chalkbeat.

In 2019, the district adopted a “culturally and linguistically inclusive” curriculum designed to support teaching practices that reflect students’ experiences.

“We are constantly reviewing our curriculum and making adjustments to ensure that we are placing instructional resources and content in front of our students that will build their knowledge of themselves and other people through a culturally respective lens,” Francis-Thompson said.

Kids as young as 3 years old begin to sense that there may be a stigma attached to a particular social group or certain skin tones, hair textures, and body builds, and that’s the time for adults to to step in, said Gabriela Livas Stein, a professor and head of the psychology department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

“It’s important to be really purposeful in making them have a sense of pride in these different attributes,” she said.

Adults can help by giving specific, positive praise about features, saying things like, “I love your dark skin,” or, “Your hair is so gorgeous,” and exposing kids to books that reflect those statements, Livas Stein said.

Giving kids the “skillset” to handle unkind playground comments while retaining their “sense of optimism” can be tricky, Livas Stein said. “What we know, particularly from younger kids, is this happens a lot with their peers,” she said. “They’re all developing, so they may be saying things that hurt each other.”

There are online tools to help. Livas Stein recommends Sesame Street videos and the website embracerace.org. She added that positive messages about these issues to students — especially students of color — can lead to tangible benefits, such as increased motivation to do well academically.

Forging bonds, finding cultural role models

Grassroots programs that encourage cultural affinity are popping up around the country.

In Boston, a program called Love Your Magic aims to give girls of color a sense of belonging and the confidence they need.

Ivanna Solano, the program’s executive director, said she saw too many girls being told they were “sassy” or “disrespectful,” when “the reality was they were just advocating for themselves.” As a result, a disproportionate number of Black and brown girls are “pushed out” of schools for being disruptive, said Solano, a former teacher.

They’re also getting messages from the media and society in general that make them think they’re not important enough to share their thoughts in the classroom, she said.

It’s important to encourage a sense of belonging early on, Solano said. Adults often think young kids can’t talk about race or social justice at an early age, when in fact “students as young as kindergarten are noticing that,” she said.

Not all efforts to enhance students’ sense of belonging and cultural identity have to be in a strictly academic or school setting.

Love Your Magic offers retreats for girls as young as first grade to learn yoga, meditation, journaling, and other strategies to ease anxiety and improve well-being, Solano said. About 25 girls participated in a summer camp in New York State, she said.

At Children’s Village, which serves Chinese, Indonesian, Spanish-speaking, and other families from across the city, the food program is also multicultural. Kids may have tacos one day, chicken teriyaki the next, and curry the following day. Children often find comfort in the similarities of different cuisines, said Loh. They’ll often have bonding moments like, “Oh, you have rice too?” she said.

Of the 450 children who attend the Children’s Village preschool or one of its school-age programs, 60% come from non-English-speaking families, she said. And many Children’s Village families are first or second-generation immigrants from East Asia, Loh said.

In the name of assimilation, some parents want their children to speak only English, meaning they might lose the language their family speaks at home in the process.

“We say: It’s OK to embrace and keep the home language so you can continue to communicate with your child,” she said.

The center helps parents plan for their children’s education, helping them through an application process that can be stressful and complicated even for native Philadelphians, Loh said. The kids are also prepared socially and emotionally, as they’re taught skills such as how to make friends and how to pay attention, she said.

The nearby Chinatown Learning Center embraces a similar philosophy, encouraging preschoolers to learn English while retaining their Chinese language skills and cultural identity.

The preschool offers bilingual education and aims to prepare children and their parents for success in elementary school and beyond.

“They have teachers that look like them” and speak their language as well as English, said Carol Wong, the center’s director. “It is really important that they connect with, identify with, and have role models that look like them.”

Her students were babies during lockdown. Here’s how that’s changed her approach.

2022-12-07T11:00:00+00:00

For many parents, this year has marked a return to “normal” — with COVID restrictions largely lifted and workplaces open once again.

This is Horvath’s first year at Belmont Academy, but she has taught preschool for more than a decade. She’s also a policy fellow with Teach Plus Pennsylvania, a mentor teacher, and a preschool curriculum developer. Horvath spoke recently with Chalkbeat Philadelphia about teaching preschoolers to share, common misconceptions about early learners, and how young children use behavior to communicate their needs.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to become a preschool teacher?

I didn’t choose preschool, preschool chose me. I thought I wanted to be a middle school English Language Arts teacher, and that is what my original certification is in. However, my first job was a summer position at Merritt Academy in Virginia, teaching across age levels. When September approached, I was asked if I wanted to stay on as a lead teacher in a pre-K 3 classroom, which I happily accepted. After one year, I knew early childhood education was the place for me. Guiding so much important brain, social, and emotional development is a huge responsibility, and I get to do it with curiosity, joy, and laughter every day.

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

I love lessons that focus on social and emotional skills, helping children manage emotions, establish relationships, set goals, and make responsible decisions. One of my favorite lessons to do around the December holidays centers on the story about sharing, “Rainbow Fish” by Marcus Pfister. After reading the book, I give each child a sheet of shiny fish stickers and ask what we should do with them. A choir of voices usually responds with “share them!” We take a few minutes to stand up and put our stickers on our friends, laughing and giggling the whole time. As you can imagine, by the end of the lesson everyone is covered in their peer’s stickers.

I conclude the lesson by discussing how it feels to share and give something to someone else and how it felt to get the stickers. Children agree it feels just as good to give as it does to receive. Then the kids brainstorm and list other small acts of kindness they can give in the classroom or at home. The goal of the lesson is to teach children that generosity, like sharing a smile, a hug, a story, or a compliment, helps to develop positive relationships with peers and family members.

What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on inside your classroom?

In many ways, the communities we serve are rebooting, and there is a lot of disruption. Students are headed back to school, parents are back at work (many of my students’ parents have more than one job), schedules are changing, and cold viruses are spreading. Adults are returning to a familiar way of life, but this is unfamiliar for kids under five who have spent the majority of their lives in a pandemic environment.

In the classroom, this translates to insecurity and introversion. They struggle with how to move in a room full of other children, sharing, taking turns, or simply playing with others. On the flip side, these children have formed strong, secure attachments with their caregivers, which is translating to strong, secure attachments with their teachers and peers.

What advice would you give someone considering a career in early childhood education?

First, see if this is the right fit for you. Visit and observe all types of schools and all ages, birth to five. Learn about Maria Montessori, Emilia Reggio, and play-based schools. Visit a Head Start, charter, or traditional public school, or one of the academically focused centers. Early childhood education is incredibly rewarding, and also incredibly hard, so find what sparks your passion the most and know that the work you are choosing is incredibly important and worthwhile. Connect with the teacher advocacy groups in your area, Teach Plus, First Up, and Children First have all been incredible sources of professional development and building my teacher network. Being involved with these organizations has allowed me to meet teachers outside of my school and strengthen my own teaching practice.

What’s a common misconception about preschool and/or early learners?

A common misconception about preschool and early learners is that their learning looks like typical elementary school learning and that small children sit and receive instruction directly from the teacher. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Early learners’ brains are still developing, mapping, and making connections. They learn by active participation, trial and error, exploration, and investigation. They learn by doing and for young children doing is playing. This is why I’m working with Teach Plus, raising my voice as an early childhood educator to advocate for what is best for young learners.

I understand that you help develop other early learning centers develop their curriculums. Tell me about that work and what makes a strong preschool curriculum.

I had the opportunity to work for a nationwide early learning center as a curriculum developer. My main project was rewriting the phonics program for 4- and 5-year-olds to reflect current research and best practices.

To me, a good preschool curriculum meets students where they are, engages them in developmentally appropriate practices, makes space for students to practice and reinforce skills, and allows multiple ways to demonstrate mastery of skills. Good preschool curriculum is child-focused, allows children to make independent choices, and allows lots of time for play. Good preschool curriculum engages teachers as room facilitators, or composers — bringing out the best in each student — as opposed to technicians rushing through scripts.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received, and how have you put it into practice?

The best advice I’ve ever received is that behavior is communication. This changed the way I manage my classroom and see my students. What I used to see as misbehavior I now know is an unmet need of a child that I need to address, whether it is feeling secure, managing emotions, or responding to internal body cues. With this orientation, I understand my students better and help them understand their needs and how to best meet them.

For many of her students, this year is their first school experience

2021-12-07T11:55:00+00:00

Some of the best advice that Olga Rosario received about teaching early learners is to never give up on a student. That means continuing to provide students with tools they need to master skills and meet goals.

Rosario, is a dual-language kindergarten teacher at Lewis Elkin Elementary School in Kensington. This school year, she is closely observing the development of early learners who returned for in-person learning on Aug. 31.

The school serves more than 800 students in grades K-4, but its youngest learners are a particular concern this year, as kindergarten enrollment districtwide fell nearly 30% last school year compared to the year before. First grade numbers dipped, too.

Those numbers rebounded a bit for the 2021/2022 school year. As of late August, kindergarten registrations were up 27%. Data from the district show that kindergarten enrollment went up by about 1,100 students this year, but is still below pre-pandemic numbers and district projections.

This year, Rosario is focused on re-establishing classroom norms, routines and expectations. It’s a challenge. (So, too, is getting kindergartners to keep their masks on.)

“Due to the pandemic, many of my students did not attend preschool last year; therefore, kindergarten has been their first school experience, so children are learning how to behave and engage as students,” she said.

One of the most gratifying aspects of teaching is seeing a student’s face light up because they have accomplished a goal, Rosario told Chalkbeat, noting: “I have witnessed students’ progress throughout the years and it gives me great pleasure to see students blossom.”

Rosario spoke recently with Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What was the biggest misconception that you initially brought to teaching?

My teaching career started as a paraprofessional for students learning English at a charter school in Philadelphia. My focus was to teach English as a second language and to help students assimilate to a new culture. As a Spanish native speaker, my goal was to support English learners and provide tools for my students to succeed academically and to thrive in a new learning environment. I don’t recall having brought any misconceptions as I totally related with the student population.

How have you helped your students adjust to in-person learning this year?

I have created a plan of teaching that reinforces consistency and integrates clear norms and expectations in the classroom. I have accomplished this by inserting exercises that remind students of correct posture and positive behavior throughout the lessons. I am also supporting their academic learning by implementing interventions, such as one-on-one support and small group instruction.

Describe what makes your teaching experience unique.

I identify myself with my students, their families, and culture – and representation matters. As a Puerto Rican, I recognize my students’ needs, challenges, and wants. Establishing a relationship and an effective line of communication with my students and their parents promotes students’ trust and parents’ support.

Have you noticed any special challenges Latino students are facing now?

I strive to provide as much support and resources to my students’ families because I feel there is a correlation between language barrier and the lack of support from parents, as [parents] feel less confident to know how to help their student. At the same time, many parents are less involved as they feel overwhelmed by what they feel is their main contribution to their families — to work and ensure that the main necessities are provided for their families.

Why is it important for parents to monitor their children’s development? What should they look for?

It is extremely important for Latino parents to be involved in their children’s learning starting in their early years at school. The benefits are great for students, as it motivates them to do well and it strengthens the emotional skills as [parents and children] work together for a common goal. Parents can support their students with homework, reading, and with building of skills that they may see their students having difficulty learning. They can also be involved by [encouraging] opportunities for play, communication, and physical activities. As a teacher, I am able to recommend ways for our parents to be more involved in their children’s development.

Tell us about a memorable time — good or bad — when contact with a student’s family changed your perspective or approach.

A memorable moment that stands out is witnessing a student that developed during online learning. In the beginning of last academic year, the student was struggling in virtual school so I reached out to the parents to help me encourage their child. He slowly began to achieve goals. When we returned to in-person learning, he continued making progress. I could sense the desire to learn and that made a huge difference. I was pleased with how much the student blossomed by the end of the school year.

Parental involvement crucial for Philly’s early learners, advocates say

2021-12-07T11:54:00+00:00

With remote learning, many parents took on the role of part-time teacher to their children. Now, with most students attending full-time in-person school — some for the first time — some child advocates in Philadelphia say that parental support is more important than ever.

“Though it was significant before, I really think it’s significant now because it stems to us not knowing where our students really are,” said Tomea A. Sippio-Smith, K-12 education policy director at Children First, formerly PCCY.

“Before, we understood. We want our students to be able to do X, Y and Z. The guidelines haven’t changed but everybody is aware we are experiencing life in a pandemic. Where we would love students to be is not necessarily where students are because they have not had that foundation we were so used to offering in the past. It’s even more important now because we don’t know the long-term impact that’s going to have on our students.”

Before the pandemic started, Tina Barlow, a parent and volunteer at Anderson Elementary School in Cobbs Creek, regularly visited her children’s classrooms and volunteered, including as a parent mentor with a West Chester University mentoring program. Now her involvement is mainly virtual because COVID precautions prevent her from being in the building.

She uses ClassDojo, a communication tool, to check her children’s progress and participates in school advisory meetings. She also has gotten tutors to help her children, who are in first and third grade.

Barlow said getting access to extra help for her children is key to her involvement in their learning. She doesn’t mind the safety precautions that prevent her from volunteering in person.

“You can email the teacher if you have something you need to discuss, or they can call you on the phone,” she said. “For me, it’s working out fine — anything to prevent COVID from coming into the building, I’m all for it.”

Akeem Smith, whose twin kindergartners are students at West Oak Lane Charter School, relies on his mother for help with the children’s school work. The twins still have hybrid learning, attending school in person twice a week.

“It’s grandma 90% to 95% of the time,” he said. “Just because of the job I have, I lean on my support system, which is my mom. She does the bulk of the work with the kids as far as schooling. I would do the homework and the extra projects and things like that. I didn’t know how I was going to make things work out, but she seems to make a way. She relays all the information that’s needed. No information goes unnoticed.”

Nadine Smith, the twins’ 63-year-old grandmother, described her role as a juggling act that requires tending to two kindergartners, on two different laptops, with two different teachers.

“Sometimes I cut myself thin because I [have] to be there for both of them at the same time,” she said. “I did do their report card conferences with the teachers. We did that over the telephone. [Now], when I take them on Thursday and Friday, I might see the [teachers], but others are accepting them. I know how to get what I need from everybody.”

The Smiths and Barlow are examples of what several educators and advocates describe as the many faces of parental engagement – the facets of which they say changed in a lot of ways because of COVID.

“I think engagement definitely increased, just because families were home. [But] that type of engagement became overwhelming and sort of disrupted the family environment,” said Tawanna Jones-Morrison, a school psychologist, parent and advocate. “It’s one thing to be engaged about things happening at school, starting a new curriculum or having family night [versus] people expecting you to be a teacher. While [families] were more engaged, that was a very unique type of engagement.”

But Morrison said the level of parental involvement seen during the last school year also might be key to helping early learners who are returning to in-person school this year.

“It’s interesting, because what happened during the pandemic - there was this relationship created between parents and the academic work and to think that the valve is going to be shut off is a bad idea,” said Morrison. “Thinking about how much effort parents were putting in to support students academically, that benefited some students. It’s especially [important] for [early] grades because we want them to have a rich environment for learning to read, learning their beginning math skills, and practicing their social skills. Parent engagement helps create that safety net for children and that safety net includes making sure there is a space and opportunity to learn those skills at home.”

Other educators agreed, noting that schools should ensure they are doing what they can to help parents remain involved during in-person school.

“I think it’s absolutely changed for the better. It’s changed in terms of the urgency to get to know families and not waiting for the first report card conference to reach out. During COVID, people are at a different level of stress. We don’t have time to wait until the report card conference to have conversations. It becomes a higher level of urgency for relationship building,” said Principal Laurena Zeller of Add B. Anderson School.

Sippio agreed, advising schools to “meet parents where they are,” to sustain involvement. Just as important, she added, is increased advocacy from parents around policies that can help any learning loss students have suffered as a result of COVID.

“Schools have gotten an influx of federal dollars and they have to use them on student learning. Parents can advocate for those funds to make up for learning losses,” Sippio said. “That’s why parents should be involved. There’s never been a time the government has given school districts so much funding to support education related to learning losses.”

Despite potential learning loss from the pandemic’s disruption, Mai Miksic, director of Early Childhood Policy at Children First, said she doesn’t think the situation is dire, and there’s a lot that parents can do to help, including educational activities at home with their early learners.

“The conventional wisdom is that reading to your 3-, 4-, or 5-year-old is the best thing. [Anything] a parent can do to engage them in imagination or exploration is so important these days, anything in lieu of putting them in front of a television.”

Child care staffing shortages across Pennsylvania persist, but solutions taking shape

2021-12-07T11:53:00+00:00

In her 45 years running Children’s Village Child Care center in the Chinatown section of Philadelphia, Mary Graham has seen hundreds of staff members come and go.

When Jha’Nyse Lundy-Reid showed up one day, Graham knew she was a keeper.

Lundy-Reid is an artist, working in charcoal, ceramics, glass blowing, and creating coloring books for children. But talented as she is, her art didn’t provide a living. “It wasn’t working,” Lundy-Reid said. “I needed something to supplement my income.”

Her sister, who worked as a substitute teacher at Children’s Village, told her that the center was always looking for new staff. Lundy-Reid started working there part time in October 2018. “I loved it,” she said. “I found that I loved working with children.” She became a full-time staffer in August 2020.

Identifying individuals like Lundy-Reid who may have been overlooked for child care jobs in the past is one of several ways that Philadelphia providers are trying to solve unprecedented staffing shortages.

While staffing has always been an issue in the industry due to its persistently low pay and often stressful working conditions, shortages have never been as bad as they are now. During the pandemic, 255 of just over 1,000 total centers in the state permanently closed.

The state helped providers continue to pay staff for several months in 2020, but that didn’t last long. Many workers found that they could make more money working at Target or Walmart or Starbucks, among the companies that have raised wages in an effort to maintain their own staffing levels.

Child care centers like Children’s Village raised wages and benefits for their staff in an effort to recruit and retain their workers.

Providers are doing what they can to search for solutions. Graham and others, with anticipated money from one of the federal relief packages, raised wages and benefits and offered signing bonuses in an effort to recruit and keep workers so they could simply stay afloat. They are identifying new types of employees, including artists like Lundy-Reid and others in creative pursuits who need to supplement their incomes. They are also looking seriously at hiring family members of the children they serve and focusing on career growth.

To bring these new staff members in, providers are relaxing some educational requirements for aides and other support workers in the centers.

But those who run child care centers and preschools say these efforts aren’t enough — that state, federal, and city leaders need to treat the issue with more focused urgency. Pennsylvania received $1.2 billion in American Rescue Plan funds with $720 million earmarked to go directly to centers. The law was passed last spring, but that money was only recently distributed.

“That money started to flow in September, and that’s a good thing,” said Carol Austin, executive director of First Up, an early childhood education advocacy group. “But everybody knows it’s short term. It’s not really sensible to use it to increase salaries, because we can’t sustain that after the money’s gone.”

For her, the long-term answer is to pass President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, now being negotiated in Congress, which would devote $400 billion to extend pre-kindergarten to an estimated 20 million 3- and 4-year-olds. So far, as lawmakers and the administration try to craft a bill that can get all 50 Democratic votes, that proposal has remained intact and hasn’t been recommended for the chopping block.

“That would be a game changer,” Austin said, permanently providing funds to underwrite higher salaries and supporting educational requirements for teachers. Most importantly, the plan would recognize the importance of child care and preschool availability to the nation’s economy.

President Biden’s Build Back Better plan would include $400 billion to bolster child care and pre-kindergarten, extending early education to an estimated 20 million 3- and 4-year-olds.

In the meantime, however, child care providers in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the state continue to struggle with day-to-day issues.

Due to a shortage of workers exacerbated by the pandemic, programs “have closed classrooms, they have turned away families, they have long waiting lists,” said Mai Miksic, the early childhood policy director for Children First, formerly Public Citizens for Children and Youth. “Not just teachers, but directors are leaving.”

First Up, a child care advocacy organization in the five southeast Pennsylvania counties, organized a “Day of Hire” last month that yielded about 100 new applicants.

Before the event, Children First sponsored job fairs. At one in Germantown, four or five providers came to recruit, “and we got maybe three people interested,” Miksic said.

“It’s a hard job,” Miksic said. “Children are a lot of work, you have to have a big heart, a lot of empathy, a lot of patience. It’s a lot easier to hand out a cup of coffee.”

Damaris Rodriguez-Alvarez is the executive director of Children’s Playhouse, which has two sites in South Philadelphia neighborhoods that have large immigrant and refugee populations.

“Staffing since the pandemic has been horrendous,” she said.

On the Day of Hire, three people applied for jobs, and two were hired, she said, including a family member of one of the children. “This made me think, I need to do things differently,” Rodriguez-Alvarez said. “I’m trying to build on that. I hired a couple of family members to support teachers in the classroom.” She is also talking to the city and the school district to help with a wider initiative in this area, relaxing requirements so that centers can hire family members with high school diplomas.

But this still requires additional funding to underwrite higher wages, she said, and to help those workers obtain the child development associate, or CDA, credential needed for workers if a center is to get a high-quality rating from the state.

Now, the situation is impossible, she said. Pre-pandemic, Children’s Playhouse had 288 children in three major programs: PHLPre-K, Head Start, and PreK Counts. Now, she has 158 because she doesn’t have enough staff.

“These assistant teachers are hard to find right now,” she said. She posed the question: Why would anyone work in child care for $14.50 an hour — exposing themselves to unvaccinated children and dealing with all the stresses of the job — when they could make $21 an hour at Amazon?

While staffing shortages persist, Philadelphia is working to expand its early childhood programs.

Even with a labor shortage, Philadelphia is still working to expand its early childhood programs.

The city’s Office of Children and Families this year added 700 new PHLPre-K slots, for a total of 4,000, and added 27 providers to the program. And it has just established the SPARK Quality Support Center to work with providers to address a range of needs, including staff recruitment, professional development, and shoring up business plans. The city is partnering with Shine Early Learning, an organization that works nationally with child care programs to improve their quality.

The SPARK center “represents a new vision of supporting providers,” said Sean Perkins, the city’s chief of early childhood education. The city has hired Traci Childress, who ran St. Mary’s Child Care Center in West Philadelphia for years, to operate the center. Kate Eisenpress is the city’s new Director of Early Childhood Strategic Initiatives.

In terms of helping with the staffing shortage, Eisenpress said, “This is a good start, not the end.”

At Children’s Village, Graham has maintained the size of her 20-person staff by focusing on career growth. She makes good use of the state’s Teacher Education and Compensation Helps Early Childhood, or TEACH, program.

Lundy-Reid was a step ahead because she already had some college education, earning an associate degree in art. She is now studying for her child development credential through TEACH, a public-private partnership including businesses, foundations and government that offers scholarships to help child care workers improve their education and their compensation. Through TEACH, the college courses are free, and she gets paid release time during the work day to attend them. It is a powerful incentive.

“The minute I get 18 ECE credits, I get another raise,” Lundy-Reid said.

Graham also said that the city, state and federal governments need to do more to keep the child care industry viable. The industry is built largely on the backs of women, she said, “and the problem is people are living paycheck to paycheck. Child care directors and employees don’t have pensions.” More long-term thinking is necessary, she said, and she is hopeful that the pandemic proves to be the reckoning point.

As for her own center, “We’ve been here for 45 years,” Graham said. “We’ll survive.”

Preschool suspensions and expulsions have dropped in Pennsylvania. Here’s why that progress is in jeopardy.

2021-12-07T11:52:00+00:00

Jane Stadnik regularly gets calls from Pennsylvania families whose young children are about to be suspended or expelled from preschool, often for things like throwing toys, pushing over furniture, or repeatedly running out of the classroom.

As a family resource specialist at the PEAL Center, a statewide advocacy group for children and youth with disabilities, her job is to help such families access therapy or other support so children can stay in their classrooms.

Her success rate is about 50%.

Some children get kicked out and some parents pull their children out voluntarily because they can’t afford to miss more work for suspensions or midday calls to pick up kids early.

“They’re worried that the next phone call is going to be the one to say, “Pick him up and don’t come back,’” she said.

In Pennsylvania, as in many other states, preschool suspensions and expulsions in public schools have decreased in the last several years. Despite this trend, such removals still happen and disparities based on race, gender and disability status persist. Some advocates fear the pandemic could stall or reverse recent gains.

Many preschool educators have already seen more behavior problems in their classrooms this fall. Not only did many children lose out on exposure to peers for more than a year, some missed being identified for special services, or absorbed the extra stress coursing through their families during the pandemic. In addition, many preschools are facing major staff shortages, leaving overwhelmed teachers to handle kids’ challenging behavior without much support.

“We’re seeing behaviors we haven’t seen in a long time and at a much higher rate,” said Becky Bohley, director of Kinder Academy-Trinity in northeast Philadelphia.

While her center is part of a small pilot program that aims, in part, to reduce suspensions and expulsions, Bohley said it wouldn’t surprise her if the pandemic fuels an increase in such discipline across early childhood programs.

“If ever there was a time I could see that happening again, it would be now,” she said.

Beyond the pandemic’s potential to ramp up preschool suspensions and expulsions, there are also big holes in the data on such discipline. The federal government tracks incidents of suspension and expulsion in school district classrooms, but no one’s tracking what happens in private preschools. There’s also little information on “soft” suspensions or expulsions, unofficial actions that can include sequestering a student in the preschool director’s office, asking the parent to pick a child up early, or counseling a family to find a preschool that’s a “better fit.”

Experts say the problem with any kind of removal from the classroom is that it doesn’t teach children the behavior adults want and robs them of valuable time in the classroom.

“We’re so concerned about absenteeism, but we as adult educators are forcing students to be absent by using suspension and expulsion,” said Richard Fabes, an Arizona State University professor.

“We should be concerned about anything that causes students to miss school, which undermines their learning, undermines their engagement in school.”

Good news, bad news

Nationwide, just over 2 in 1,000 preschool students enrolled in public school classrooms were suspended or expelled in the 2017-18 school year. That’s a big drop from the 2015-16 school year when the rate was more than 4 preschoolers per 1,000, according to an Arizona State University report examining federal early childhood discipline data.

While most states posted declines during that period, Pennsylvania’s drop in preschool suspensions and expulsions was even steeper than the national decline, going from about 3 per 1,000 students to .6 per 1,000 students.

Despite the decreases — at least for preschools in public schools — Black students are still suspended and expelled significantly more than white students.

Fabes, the lead author of the report, said the disparities are evident from preschool to high school, in blue states and red states, populous states and sparsely populated states, states with larger proportions of people of color and states without.

“Every way we have sliced and diced these data we see this disparity for Black students,” he said. “I just don’t think tweaking policies at the edges is going to do anything to address these gaps because they’re so pervasive.”

Fabes believes preschool suspension and expulsion should be banned completely, though he acknowledged that’s not likely. Many teachers and administrators believe it’s a tool they need despite evidence that it’s not effective, he said.

Suspending and expelling little kids does not improve their behavior or head off future discipline issues, he said. On the contrary, early suspensions and expulsions increase the risk students will receive similar punishments in later grades, and drop out of school altogether.

“These have implications for their lifelong success,” Fabes said.

Stadnik, of the PEAL Center, knows the desperation some of her clients feel because she felt the same way years ago when her son, who has an intellectual disability and autism, was in preschool. He would sometimes throw blocks over the shelves and hit unsuspecting children, or act out in other ways. She was a lead teacher at the center, but voluntarily moved to a lower assistant teacher position so she’d have more freedom to leave her own classroom to help her son when things spiraled out of control. Even then, she worried he could be kicked out and that she could lose her job.

“I know how stressful it is,” she said. “If you’re a single parent, you can’t give up your job. Everybody’s livelihood depends on you.”

New policies raise questions about quality

In 2014, the federal government published national preschool suspension and expulsion data for the first time. That was followed by an Obama administration push for states to adopt policies aimed at reducing such punishment in both preschool and child care.

In 2017, Pennsylvania officials mandated that early childhood programs receiving state or federal funding establish written procedures outlining efforts to reduce suspensions and expulsions. The state also started a hotline child care providers could call for help if they were considering suspending or expelling a child for challenging behavior. Over three years, there were about 70 calls to the hotline. The state has since switched to an online survey to offer such support, with 74 providers or parents responding to the survey over the last 16 months.

The Philadelphia school district prohibits preschool expulsion and severely limits suspensions among its 11,000 preschool students. Diane Castelbuono, the district’s deputy chief for early learning, said the policy, which in rare cases allows children to be moved to a different placement, applies to the 3,000 preschoolers enrolled in district-run classrooms and the remaining 8,000 who attend class in community-based preschools that contract with the district.

Shantel Meek, director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University, said the wave of state and local policies on early childhood suspension and expulsion, brought with it wide variation.

“We had a huge quantity of policy in the last eight years,” she said “I would like to see a move toward quality of policy … a clean-up of sorts, or a sharpening of sorts.”

One of the problems with many recent preschool suspension and expulsion policies is the laundry list of loopholes, she said. For example, the rules might prohibit the suspension or expulsion of young children, but allow a variety of exceptions that can be interpreted broadly.

“You can’t expel unless a child does one of these 30 things,” Meek said, offering an exaggerated example.

Meek also wishes there’d been more progress in capturing clear data about how many young children in preschool and child care are suspended or expelled each year, whether they attend public or private programs.

“That is still a huge gap,” she said.

Marsha Gerdes, a senior psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said many early childhood teachers and directors wouldn’t think to label an unofficial removal — say, a child sent to “take a break” in the director’s office or another classroom — as a suspension, even though it ends up functioning the same way.

In her recent work studying a program aimed at boosting kids’ social and emotional skills at about a dozen local child care centers, she’s found it challenging to ensure staff members record discipline consistently.

“The not-recorded-at-all is really where we’re at with most child care centers,” she said. “As you look at this issue over time, we don’t have a really good ability to know if we’re making progress or not.”

Finding solutions to a tricky problem

There are a variety of programs, curriculums, and early intervention services that can help reduce or manage meltdowns, aggression, or other behavior that get small children into trouble.

Sometimes mental health consultants or other specialists work with preschool teachers, parents, or children themselves to help smooth out challenging behavior.

Pennsylvania has 29 early childhood mental health consultants, up from 13 in 2018, but advocates say that’s not enough to meet the state’s needs.

State officials report that 63% of about 2,700 consultations from 2013 to 2021 produced positive outcomes. In other words, children stayed in their early learning program. One hundred and seventeen children, or about 4%, were expelled, and 42 children, or about 2%, were expelled but the consultants helped them transition to a new program.

There are a host of training programs that help teachers build children’s problem-solving, relationship, and coping skills, such as The Incredible Years and Teacher-Child Interaction Training, and curriculums such as Second Step.

Gerdes, the Children’s Hospital psychologist, is studying the effectiveness of a program with similar aims. It’s called Early Childhood Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS, and mirrors an approach often used in K-12 schools. The idea is to build children’s social and emotional skills with outside coaches helping a centerwide leadership team set priorities and address problems.

Preliminary data from the project shows improved classroom environments and a major reduction in suspensions across nine participating Philadelphia centers — from 28 to four. Gerdes knows the data may not be rock solid because of inconsistencies in discipline reporting methods, but believes the project is promising.

“Is it the answer to all suspensions and expulsion problems? I’m not positive yet,” she said.

Amy Lynch, an associate professor of occupational therapy in Temple University’s College of Public Health, in 2019 spearheaded her own pilot program in the city to help kids with emotional regulation after years of working with children who had experienced trauma.

“I thought, I can’t imagine that the number of kids being expelled [isn’t] also somehow directly related to kids who are experiencing the impacts of trauma,” she said.

With support from the local United Way and the advocacy group First Up, Lynch and her team developed a 12-week program, called PREPPS, in which therapists go into classrooms and lead lessons with titles like, “How does your engine run?,” “Asking with respect,” and “Accepting the no.” The lessons, which include songs and games, include teachers as participants so they can see how the skills should be taught and reinforced.

Bohley, the director of Kinder Academy-Trinity, said two of her four preschool classrooms are doing PREPPS this fall and the other two will start in January. She’s already seen progress, with children who previously sat out opting to join the PREPPS lessons and kids acting on what they’ve learned — for example, by taking calming “brownie breaths,” deep inhales as if they’re smelling a fresh-baked brownie and big exhales to cool it down.

“I love the program,” she said. “I think it’s incredibly valuable.”

Bohley said in her 11 years heading the center, she’s never expelled a child. But on occasion, she’s asked parents to pick up their children early or had children sit in her office to calm down.

“This is a program that can help us get to a place where we never have to do that,” she said.

Pennsylvania could get universal preschool. Here’s how.

2021-12-07T11:51:00+00:00

Parent Danielle Ruffin thinks every Pennsylvania child deserves a preschool program like the one her 4-year-old daughter Novah attends inside a small brick building in North Philadelphia.

Young World Early Learning Center, which recently earned the state’s top rating, is a place where the director knows every child’s name, all preschool teachers have bachelor’s or master’s degrees, and students dive deeply into topics — from trees to clothing — for weeks at a time.

“It’s amazing,” said Ruffin, who has visited many preschools around the city in her work as a speech pathologist serving young children. “One of the best centers I have been in.”

But more than half of Pennsylvania 3- and 4-year-olds don’t have access to public preschool programs like Ruffin’s daughter does. There simply aren’t enough slots, even with slow-but-steady state funding increases over the past several years.

Advocates say federal money will be key to creating a universal preschool program in Pennsylvania — one capable of reaching the state’s nearly 300,000 preschool-age children. Now, for the first time, that federal influx is a distinct possibility as lawmakers debate President Biden’s massive social spending bill, which includes billions for preschool nationwide.

“If something like Build Back Better goes through, that’s a lot more money that’s going to be available to serve a lot more kids,” said Jen DeBell, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association for the Education of Young Children, referring to Biden’s $1.75 trillion social spending package.

DeBell’s organization is one of several members of a statewide coalition called Pre-K for PA that’s pushed for increased access to high-quality preschool.

While early childhood education often garners bipartisan support, Biden’s social spending package, which would also fund health provisions, tax credits, and workforce programs, has no Republican support in the evenly divided Senate. At least one Democrat hasn’t signed on either.

“We’re holding our breath,” DeBell said. “We’re hopeful we hear a breakthrough soon.”

She said if a major federal infusion for preschool materializes, Pennsylvania will be well-situated to build on Pre-K Counts, the largest of several government-funded preschool programs in the state. Currently, Pre-K Counts serves around 29,000 children statewide and is available to families with incomes up to 300% of the federal poverty level — about $79,000 a year for a family of four.

While Pre-K Counts’ eligibility criteria would likely need to change if the state shifts to universal preschool, the essential infrastructure is already in place, said DeBell. In addition, the program, like Biden’s plan, emphasizes high-quality classrooms and offerings both inside schools and at community sites.

Researchers have found that high-quality preschool can make a long-term difference in children’s lives, leading to higher educational attainment, increased earnings, and better health.

Ruffin said she sees too many preschool kids in low-quality programs around Philadelphia.

She provides speech therapy to a little boy who’s always on his iPad when she arrives at his center, where he’s the oldest child and often appears bored. He enjoys the weekly one-on-one sessions with Ruffin, but pouts when they’re over.

“He’s missing out on beautiful days of just sparking up that brain,” she said. “If there were a Head Start or Pre-K Counts [program] in the area, that would be a game-changer.”

In addition to Pre-K Counts, Pennsylvania uses state money to fund about 8,000 preschool slots through Head Start, a federally funded program for children from low-income families. Since 2017, Philadelphia has had its own free preschool program, funded with a tax on soda and sugary drinks. Last year, the program included more than 3,000 slots.

While many early childhood advocates and preschool providers in Pennsylvania say they’d welcome a major preschool expansion, they caution that the details of the plan matter.

Mai Miksic, early childhood policy director at the advocacy group Children First, worked in New York City when universal preschool rolled out there — vexing community-based preschool providers who were paid far less than school-based providers.

“People were really angry about the way it was expanded and the way community-based programs were treated,” she said. “We don’t have to make the same mistake in Pennsylvania.”

Miksic, whose organization is also part of Pre-K for PA, said it’s important to continue state-level momentum for preschool expansion because even if new federal preschool funding is approved, state lawmakers will have to opt in and possibly provide additional state funding as the effort phases in.

Keshia Bell-Jones, director of the Young World center, which offers infant and toddler slots in addition to preschool, said she’d like to see more money put toward compensating staff fairly. Currently, her lead preschool teachers, some of whom have been there for more than a decade, make $45,000 to $60,000 a year.

“We have teachers that are barely making ends meet,” she said.

In addition, she said classrooms need extra staff to deal with the disruption and trauma of COVID. Ratios of one staff member for every 10 preschoolers, as the state requires, aren’t enough to deal with the challenging behavior some children are showing these days.

“Does it take into consideration what we’ve all been through over two years with COVID? No, it doesn’t.” said Bell-Jones. “The teachers really need to have support.”

This is a critical moment for early childhood education

2021-12-07T11:50:00+00:00

The importance of early childhood education has never been lost on Philadelphia, from its push for pre-kindergarten five years ago to its ongoing efforts to expand access in vulnerable communities.

But the pandemic has shone an even brighter spotlight on the need to prioritize high-quality instruction for the city’s youngest learners. After schools shuttered due to the coronavirus, the School District of Philadelphia saw its kindergarten enrollment drop sharply — about 30% compared to the previous year. That’s three times the national average. First grade enrollment also declined 8%.

Additionally, goals to expand pre-K to more students were hampered by the pandemic. The aim for PHLpreK was to fund slots for 6,500 students a year, but the effort is funded by the city’s beverage tax — the revenues from which declined about 15% during the pandemic.

This comes amid a backdrop of disappointing achievement and vast racial disparities in test scores. A report earlier this year found just 32% of third graders in Philadelphia read on grade level, with gaps among racial groups and low scores for students learning English and those with disabilities.

Educators find themselves grappling with teaching 5-year-olds who have had no formal educational experience and 6-year-olds who maybe have remained in preschool an extra year.

Chalkbeat is meeting this critical moment with a guide featuring stories explaining the state of play in early childhood in Philadelphia. Reporter Ann Schimke examines how behavioral issues that grew out of the pandemic are impacting efforts to limit suspension among early learners. Ann will also look at the likelihood of universal preschool coming to Philadelphia. Dale Mezzacappa writes about how one child care facility is facing the staffing shortages that are hampering centers nationwide. Samaria Bailey looks at the importance of parental involvement in early learning. And Johann Calhoun talked to an early childhood educator about introducing students to school for the first time this year.

Check out the stories in the guide below.

Preschool suspensions and expulsions have dropped in Pennsylvania. Here’s why that progress is in jeopardy.

In Pennsylvania, as in many other states, preschool suspensions and expulsions in public schools have decreased in the last several years. Despite this trend, such removals still happen, and disparities based on race, gender and disability status persist. Some advocates fear the pandemic could stall or reverse recent gains.

Read the full story.

Pennsylvania could get universal preschool. Here’s how.

More than half of Pennsylvania 3- and 4-year-olds don’t have access to public preschool programs. There simply aren’t enough slots, even with slow-but-steady state funding increases over the past several years.

“If something like Build Back Better goes through, that’s a lot more money that’s going to be available to serve a lot more kids.”

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Child care staffing shortages across Pennsylvania persist, but solutions taking shape.

“It’s a hard job. Children are a lot of work, you have to have a big heart, a lot of empathy, a lot of patience. It’s a lot easier to hand out a cup of coffee.”

Read the full story.

Parental involvement crucial for Philly’s early learners, advocates say.

“Parent engagement helps create that safety net for children and that safety net includes making sure there is a space and opportunity to learn those skills at home.”

Read the full story.

For many of her students, this year is their first school experience.

Olga Rosario, is a dual-language kindergarten teacher at Lewis Elkin Elementary School in Kensington. This school year, she is closely observing the development of early learners.

Rosario is focused on re-establishing classroom norms, routines and expectations. It’s a challenge. (So, too, is getting kindergartners to keep their masks on.)

“Due to the pandemic, many of my students did not attend preschool last year; therefore, kindergarten has been their first school experience, so children are learning how to behave and engage as students.”

Read the full story.