Chalkbeat

Nonprofits are collaborating with the state to meet Michigan’s universal pre-K goal

2024-03-18T21:11:17+00:00

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s goal to make preschool free and available to all families is a big task.

The biggest hurdles for the state to overcome are shortages of qualified staff and too few affordable, quality child care spots for 4-year-olds.

To create a universal prekindergarten program, the governor plans to improve pay for early childhood educators, create affordable pathways for future teachers to get credentials, and expand or open new child care centers.

Now, the state also plans to collaborate with nonprofit organizations, school districts, and colleges to address the issue.

“Any problem that’s this big requires all hands on deck,” said Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist Friday after a visit to a pre-K class in northwest Detroit. “We need a diversity of options to be made available to families. In order to provide that, we’re going to need a diversity of partners.”

Gilchrist visited Angels of Essence Day Care to have a roundtable discussion about expanding pre-K and child care with parents and early childhood educators. While there, he also read to a preschool class and helped the kids recite the colors of the rainbow.

Courtney Adams, whose son, Elijah, was in the class, said during the roundtable that she and her husband have to pay out-of-pocket for child care. She chose Angels of Essence because she felt it was a safe and affordable option.

“He comes home every day with something new,” she said of her son’s education. “He’s going into kindergarten in the fall, and I know he’s going to do great.”

About 40% of Michigan’s 4-year-olds currently do not attend preschool, according to the governor’s office.

Last year, Whitmer announced plans to make the state’s Great Start Readiness Program, or GSRP, available to all Michigan 4-year-olds. The program currently offers free pre-K to students from mostly low-income families.

Originally, Whitmer said she planned to expand GSRP to be offered universally by 2026. But in her State of the State address, the governor announced that she would accelerate those plans by two years.

During the 2021-22 school year, the program enrolled more than 35,000 4-year-olds, an increase of more than 9,000 students compared to the previous year, according to the most recently available data.

Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, right, reads to a preschool classroom on Friday at Angels of Essence Day Care in Detroit.

Gilchrist noted that Michigan’s early childhood educators are often underpaid. A 2022 report by the Michigan League For Public Policy, found that early childhood educators often live in poverty. The low wages force many workers to leave the profession, making it difficult for centers to retain full staffing.

“We have this challenge broadly with educators that for so long the profession has been utterly disrespected,” said Gilchrist. “One of the manifestations of that disrespect is that it’s woefully underpaid.”

Salaries for GSRP teachers have improved slightly in recent years, but were still 31% lower than salaries for K-12 teachers, according to the program’s 2021-22 report. GSRP teachers made a median annual salary of $43,094 that year, while associate teachers earned a median annual salary of $22,077.

Michigan gave $30 million in 2021 to support bonus pay for early childhood care and education staff to help stabilize centers during the upset of the pandemic. But those funds ran out in 2023.

“Certainly, we want to try to continue to make those gains more permanent,” said Gilchrist of the additional funds for salaries.

Nonprofits have already had success widening the K-12 teacher pipeline in the state. Talent Together, an initiative made up of nonprofits, regional superintendents, and other education leaders, has helped bring new educators to the field. The program has created grow-your-own programs for school support staff to become teachers, as well as apprenticeships, and other avenues of removing financial barriers for future teachers to become certified.

The Michigan Educator Workforce Initiative, a nonprofit that is already part of the Talent Together program, recently announced it is applying for a grant from the state’s Office of Labor and Economic Opportunity to expand registered apprenticeships for early childhood center leaders and teachers.

“The registered apprenticeship model helps create an environment where there are processes, a clear training regime, and all the right partners at the table to inform what early childhood learning looks like,” said Jack Elsey, founder of the MEWI.

Wayne Regional Educational Service Agency, Montcalm Area Intermediate School District, Marquette-Alger Regional Educational Service Agency, the Early Childhood Investment Corporation, and the Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation are collaborating with the nonprofit on the effort.

“We recognize as a whole in the state, there is a gap,” said Sophia Lafayette-Lause, executive director of early childhood at Wayne RESA, about collaboration to recruit and retain more pre-K teachers. “Supporting those efforts is critical.”

Hannah Dellinger covers K-12 education and state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Here’s what it would cost in Michigan for free preschool, community college, and school meals

2024-02-07T21:14:32+00:00

At a time when academic recovery from the pandemic has been slow, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced a plan Wednesday to increase spending on Michigan’s most vulnerable students.

In her budget proposal, Whitmer also said she wants to invest more in preschool, provide child care workers with payments to enroll their own children in the kinds of programs in which they work, and expands the state’s scholarship program to ensure all high school graduates can enroll in community college, for free, if they choose.

The new investments in the $80.7 billion state budget amount to hundreds of millions of dollars of additional funding for education initiatives at a time when research shows Michigan students overall are still far behind where they were academically before the pandemic. It also comes as school districts across the state face the loss later this year of the federal COVID relief money that has helped boost tutoring and mental health services students have sorely needed.

And it’s possible, Whitmer said, because the state paid off billions in debt in the Michigan Public School Employees’ Retirement System. Those debt payments, she said, freed up $670 million.

“We have the resources to invest in our people,” said Whitmer, who first outlined her proposals during her State of the State address last month.

Negotiations will now begin. Democrats hold the majority in the Senate, but until elections can be held in April for two open seats, the House is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Those two seats are in heavily Democratic districts.

Republican leaders were critical of the governor’s budget proposal.

“Last year, Democrats blew through a $9.2 billion surplus and fought for a $700 million income tax hike,” Sen. Jon Bumstead, a Republican from North Muskegon, said in a statement. Bumstead is the minority vice chair of the Senate Appropriations committee. “Now they are presenting an unsustainable budget that spends more money, bloats the size of government, and offers crumbs for average Michigan families still coping with higher costs on virtually everything.”

Here’s what Whitmer is proposing for schools, students, and families:

Increase in per-pupil aid for schools, including for the neediest students

The minimum amount school districts would receive per pupil would be $9,849, an 2.5% increase of $241 per student over this year’s level.

Meanwhile, Whitmer proposed continuing a practice she started several years ago of weighting funding for districts based on the needs of some students. That means schools receive additional money for students who are “academically at risk,” English language learners, career and technical education students, and rural students.

The budget calls for increasing funding by $125 million for those groups of students, which amounts to a 5% increase over the $118 million spent this year.

Community college guarantee for high school graduates

Whitmer’s budget calls for a $30 million increase in funding for the Michigan Achievement Scholarship, which would allow the program to expand to ensure every high school graduate in the state could receive an associate degree or skilled certificate at a community college for free.

With the community college proposal, more than 18,000 students would each save up to $4,820 on tuition each year, according to the budget proposal.

In her remarks to lawmakers Wednesday, Whitmer said the community college proposal would also help the state move closer to a goal to have 60% of the state’s working-age residents have a postsecondary certificate or college degree by 2030. When Whitmer took office in 2018, just 45% had achieved a certificate or college degree. That percentage is now at 51%.

“This would be a transformational opportunity for our students,” she said.

“Investments in community college are key to Michigan’s overall prosperity, as these degrees and certifications bolster the workforce across the state and help meet emerging talent needs of employers,” Brandy Johnson, president of the Michigan Community College Association, said in a statement.

Expanding free preschool for all

Whitmer’s budget includes making the state’s free preschool available to all 4-year-olds regardless of family income – two years ahead of schedule. She had previously proposed phasing in the expansion.

The expansion would cost an additional $159 million, including $63.5 million to allow the Great Start Readiness Program to enroll an additional 6,800 children. The rest of the increased cost would cover increasing the per-student allocation, opening new classrooms in underserved areas, and to help pay for the cost of transportation.

Child care workers would get free care for their children

Whitmer also plans to invest more in the child care sector.

The state would spend $60 million to create a pilot program to provide these workers with benefits to pay for child care for their own children. Budget documents say the median child care worker pay is $13.71 an hour.

“The average cost for child care for one child is $10,600 annually, which means the average child care worker would need to dedicate over 37% of their gross salary to child care costs if they want their child to receive the same care they provide for other children on a daily basis,” the document says.

Expansion of free school meals

Public school students across the state would continue to receive free school meals with $200 million Whitmer proposes including in the budget. Lawmakers included money in the current budget to ensure that each of the state’s 1.4 million children would have access to a free breakfast and lunch.

She said the free meals save families $850 a year on grocery bills and eliminates the struggle of ensuring children get out the door in the mornings with their lunch.

“Knowing that your child will eat no matter what is a huge relief,” Whitmer said.

The free meals have been criticized by Republicans because it is only for public school students, not for children enrolled in private schools or children being home-schooled.

“Why are they left hungry?” Sarah Lightner, a Republican from Springport, asked during the budget presentation.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan is ‘improving outcomes’ for early childhood health and education, report says

2023-09-27T04:01:00+00:00

Michigan is improving its outcomes for early childhood education, well-being, and health, according to a national report released Wednesday.

The annual report, by the nonpartisan research organization Zero to Three, details areas where Michigan performed better than national averages, such as the percentage of parents who read to their babies daily and the number of 1-year-olds participating in special supplemental nutrition programs.

The study looked at various indicators of health and well-being, such as maternal health; infant and early childhood mental health; availability of childcare; housing and economic security; as well as newly adopted policies to support health and education.

Based on the data, the authors grouped states into one of our categories. Michigan was in the second-highest category overall — “improving outcomes.” Other states in the same category include California, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Indiana.

In recent years, Michigan has invested millions of dollars to expand early childhood education initiatives.

Michigan still falls behind national averages in key areas, the report says, including the percentage of children ages 3 and younger in lower-income families who receive child care subsidies, the number of babies and toddlers who are food-insecure, the percentage of babies receiving preventive dental care, and the number of mothers reporting poor mental health.

Nearly 41% of Michigan children 3 and under come from families considered to be economically disadvantaged. The state has a higher percentage of uninsured young children in low-income families, compared with the national average, the report says, and a higher percentage of babies who have had two or more “adverse experiences,” such as economic hardship, death of a parent, or living with someone with a drug problem.

“Economic insecurity and particularly poverty literally gets under the skin of babies, impacting their neurological development as well as physiological systems,” Patricia Cole, an author of the report, said in a presentation.

Nationally, authors of the report say, there are urgent needs for the nearly 11 million children ages 3 and under in the U.S. — 2 million of whom live in poverty.

“The data from this report tell us that poverty and disparities in access to resources along racial and ethnic lines are defining features of a baby’s experience in this country,” said Miriam Calderon, chief policy officer Zero to Three. “Most of our babies will struggle with access to resources and that will affect their development.

The report identified five key priorities:

Maternal and infant health is in “crisis,” with the U.S. experiencing the one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. According to the report, racial disparities in maternal and infant health outcomes worsened during the pandemic, with data showing significant gaps in indicators such as preterm births and low birthweight.
Data included in the report suggests there is an urgent need to address young children’s mental health. Isolation and hardships during the pandemic created more emotional distress for parents, which was tied to the same in their children. Additional stress stemming from issues such as more poverty, housing instability, and mistreatment also affect parents and their children’s mental states.
The report says there is a crisis in early child care and education, with scarce access to affordable, high-quality care in many communities. Many child care centers were negatively affected by the pandemic, and the impending end of federal relief funding will exacerbate the issue, the report says.
The report found a large number of young children live in unstable or crowded housing. Crowded housing, the report says, puts children at risk of adverse effects to their development and health and, in some cases when combined with poverty, early death.
Nearly two-thirds of Black and Native American and half of Hispanic babies and toddlers live in families that are considered economically disadvantaged, which can affect their families’ ability to access needed resources to support their development and education.

Read the full report here.

Hannah Dellinger is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 education. Contact Hannah at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan child care providers demand more money to provide a livable wage

2023-05-08T18:37:13+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for Chalkbeat Detroit’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and Michigan education policy.

The child care providers marched up and down Grand Boulevard in Detroit, chanting “No child care, no work” and other messages they hope will reach state officials with the power to address their demands.

“What do we want?” the woman with the megaphone asked the crowd.

“More money!” the crowd shouted.

“When do we want it? the leader asked.

“Now.”

The “Day Without Childcare Rally,” which took place outside the Cadillac Building, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has a Detroit office, was held with the hope that state officials would include even more money for child care than has already been proposed in budget negotiations.

More than 100 people showed up for the Detroit protest. Similar demonstrations were happening across the U.S.

The demonstrators — a mix of child care and preschool providers, educators, and parents — say they appreciate Whitmer’s efforts to invest more heavily in child care, but they say it’s not enough. Whitmer’s budget proposal includes a tax credit of $1,000 to $3,000 for early childhood educators who work in child care, preschool, and after-school settings.

Whitmer has also proposed expanding the Great Start Readiness Program, the state’s free preschool program that currently serves mostly children from low-income families. The expansion would give thousands more 4-year-olds access to the program.

Among the demonstrators’ demands is additional funding so they can pay workers a living wage and an end to the state’s rating system for child care programs that assigns a star rating based on quality.

The national effort is pushing for an equitable child care system, thriving wages for providers, and affordable child care for all families.

Protesters advocating for more funding for child care programs in Michigan picket outside the Cadillac Building in Detroit.

Protesters in Detroit say providers struggle to pay their staff and themselves a living wage.

“In this line of work, I have to get paid in hugs and kisses because my families can’t afford to pay me adequate money to sustain myself,” said Makese Taylor, a licensed child care provider who operates Twins Hands with her sister.

“It leaves me part of the working poor,” Taylor said.

Another common message: Michigan’s economy can’t recover from the pandemic if the state’s system for providing care for children while their parents are at work isn’t healthy.

“Without child care, the economy can’t go,” Hodge said. “We should never be an afterthought.”

Bobby Leddy, spokesman for Whitmer, said in a statement that the governor “is using every tool in her toolbox to lower the cost of child care for Michigan families and address decades of disinvestment in child care.”

Leddy said Whitmer has already worked with Republican lawmakers, who controlled the Legislature until this year, to make child care more affordable for working families, stabilize child care businesses, and expand access to child care. In addition, the state is three-quarters of the way toward meeting a Whitmer goal to open 1,000 new child care programs.

“As a mom, the governor knows how important it is for parents to know their kids are safe while they’re at work,” Leddy said.

Michigan’s child care system has struggled to provide quality care for parents who need it, and to recruit and retain staff. A 2022 Muckrock report found that Michigan has far more child care deserts — regions of the state with too few facilities to meet demand — than policymakers estimated.

Earlier this year, a Chalkbeat story noted that Whitmer’s proposal to expand the free preschool program would need to address staffing shortages. Low wages are at the heart of the staffing challenges.

Symone Wilkes, a parent of two boys, came to a demonstration of child care providers because she said she wanted her voice to be heard.

Symone Wilkes, a single mother of two small boys, has experienced the child care desert problem firsthand. She said there are 16 providers in her neighborhood, but none had a slot available for her 1-year-old son. That meant having to travel well outside her neighborhood to find care, which has created its own set of challenges.

Wilkes came to the protest Monday because “our voices need to be heard” and so state officials understand the need for all families to have access to child care.

Many of the providers who participated in the protest shut down their facilities for the day, hoping that action would also send a message.

“We need them to hear us,” Taylor said.

Tichina Sanders, a child care teacher at Hodge’s facility, wants lawmakers to understand how essential her work is.

“We’re not just babysitters to kids,” said Sanders, who makes $13 an hour. “I’m helping them learn.”

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan preschool expansion hits a snag as some providers face funding cuts

2023-03-02T00:21:16+00:00

Last year, as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer touted the expansion of Michigan’s free preschool program, Beverly Hogan was among the child care providers preparing to open new classrooms.

Now Whitmer has announced an even more ambitious expansion of the Great Start Readiness Program, but Hogan had to close her new classroom in February, laying off two teachers and forcing families to search for another option for their 4-year-olds deep into the school year.

The problem? Hogan couldn’t find enough kids.

Only eight students were enrolled in a classroom designed for 16. At the same time, the state ended a pandemic-era policy of paying providers based on their classroom capacity, even if fewer were enrolled. So Hogan would be paid only for children who were actually enrolled, meaning she would lose half of her funding for the classroom this year, or $74,000.

The expansion is “taking away from our business,” said Hogan, director of Busy Minds Child Care Center in Detroit. “I feel they could have waited” to shift back to enrollment-based funding.

Low enrollment might seem like a counterintuitive challenge for a state that researchers say is in the grips of a full-blown child care crisis. Whitmer built her case for GSRP expansion on the premise that tens of thousands of newly eligible middle-income families would jump at the opportunity to enroll their 4-year-olds in free preschool, and that improvements to the program would entice already-eligible low-income families to join.

Indeed, GSRP enrollment grew statewide this year. And in Wayne County, enrollment rose 17% between 2019 and 2023, from 7,468 to 8,777, according to preliminary data shared by county officials.

But Hogan is not alone in struggling to hit enrollment targets, according to providers and early education experts in the Detroit area, who point to a number of reasons. They speculate that some new classrooms opened in areas where demand for GSRP was already met. At the same time, not enough newly eligible families know about the program. And a significant segment of families simply aren’t ready to join GSRP, because the program runs four days a week and only during the school year, leaving gaps in care.

These may ultimately prove to be manageable hurdles on the path to Whitmer’s ambitious preschool expansion goals. Indeed, Whitmer’s budget proposal includes substantial new funding for GSRP, including dollars specifically for publicity and for programming five days a week.

But for providers, these hurdles come at a substantial cost. The funding reductions are hurting child care centers right now, adding instability to a fragile sector that was already struggling with staff shortages and tight profit margins.

It’s an example of how the GSRP expansion can disrupt the rest of the early childhood ecosystem, a phenomenon advocates have warned about for years. The providers facing financial problems related to GSRP also serve children younger than 4 and offer before- and after-school care.

“This is what we’ve been trying not to do,” said Denise Smith, implementation director for Hope Starts Here, a Detroit-based early childhood initiative.

A Whitmer spokesperson did not return a request for comment.

Change in GSRP funding rules was a turning point

Enrollment fluctuations on their own wouldn’t normally be enough to destabilize child care providers. It’s the change in the funding policy that’s creating short-term problems.

For most of GSRP’s history, centers were paid based on the number of students they enrolled. The switch away from that policy dates to the early part of the COVID pandemic, when early childhood providers became the first educators to resume face-to-face work. Even as their return met the urgent child care needs of essential workers, many more parents opted to keep their children home, so enrollment didn’t come close to recovering to pre-pandemic levels.

To help providers stay open, the Legislature agreed to change its funding method for one year. The state would pay them as if they had 16 students in each classroom, or full capacity under GSRP guidelines.

A year later, recognizing that many centers were still struggling with enrollment, the Michigan Department of Education continued a similar policy for another year.

This year, as the pandemic emergency ebbed, the state opted for a full return to enrollment-based funding. At the same time, county officials were working to expand GSRP programming, asking providers across the state if they could add new classrooms.

The timing meant that providers would face the financial effects of any enrollment fluctuations that resulted from the expansion effort. By adding new classrooms, they were helping meet Whitmer’s goals, but they were also taking on substantial risk.

Hogan and other providers whose enrollment remained below capacity faced a cut in funding and had to consider closing classrooms.

“Everything was fine,” until the state changed the funding method, said Shirley Hailey, executive director of Little Scholars of Detroit. “That’s going to mess us up.”

Hailey closed one of her five GSRP classrooms in February due to low enrollment.

In a statement, MDE spokesperson William Disessa said the funding shift was due to the pandemic, not the GSRP expansion. While the Whitmer administration supported the continuation of the pandemic-era policy last year, the idea of extending it for another year “received no further consideration.”

MDE and Wayne RESA, the county education agency that administers GSRP in Detroit and surrounding communities, say they informed providers of the change at the beginning of the school year and gave regular reminders.

But some providers said they had no idea.

Denise Lomax, owner of Child Star Development Center in Detroit, added a classroom this year, bringing her total to three, but says she wouldn’t have done so if she’d known about the funding change. She has been able to fill only two-thirds of her 48 slots and plans to close one classroom.

“In the beginning, I told them, ‘Maybe I should do two classes because y’all have given this to everyone who wants it,’” she said. “They said … ‘Take the three, we’re going to work with you to make sure we get the children.’”

Where to open new classrooms is a complex question

The governor’s proposed expansion of GSRP beyond current income limits should increase both the supply and demand for preschool statewide. In an ideal world, those two variables would be aligned at the local level, with new GSRP classrooms concentrated in neighborhoods with lots of eligible, unenrolled 4-year-olds.

“What we don’t want to do is open a new program that’s going to compete with existing programs for the same 4-year-olds,” said Dawn Koger, director of early childhood for Oakland Schools, a county education agency north of Detroit. County agencies determine which programs receive GSRP funding.

Achieving that balance is easier said than done, Koger said, because existing GSRP programs are located with low-income communities in mind.

The expansion plans are based largely on increasing the income threshold for the program. A family of four making almost $70,000 can now qualify for the program, and Whitmer wants to push the threshold even higher. Given Michigan’s socioeconomic segregation, newly eligible middle-income families might want programs in different places.

Where to add the new classrooms is a difficult question, especially given a lack of current data on where 4-year-olds live and how much money their parents make.

“It would be wonderful if we had new census data every year,” Koger said.

Officials in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, say they studied the distribution of GSRP-eligible 4-year-olds by ZIP code, but ultimately didn’t factor that data into decisions about the new classroom locations, because it was both imprecise and out of date.

Candies Rogers, director of Circle Time with Friends, a center in Redford, says classrooms in Wayne County opened this year in neighborhoods where demand for GSRP was already met.

“When you put so many child care centers in the same area, it is hard to fill those slots up,” she said. “I believe they opened up too many GSRP classrooms.”

One of her classrooms has only eight students, meaning she too will lose about $74,000 in funding this year. She is keeping it open for the rest of the school year, covering the lost funds out of her center’s bottom line.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

This preschool teacher has bottomless apron pockets (and other superpowers)

2023-02-16T00:18:50+00:00

Spend an hour with Cheriese Gipson, and you can’t help but get a sense of what she’s like as a preschool teacher.

She starts to explain a favorite lesson about mittens and animals, then pauses, disappears off the Zoom screen, then pops back up with a puppet on her hand to continue the discussion.

After lunch, one of the 4-year-olds returning to Gipson’s classroom pokes her head onto the screen, wanting a hug and a look at whom Gipson is talking to. Speaking in Spanish, Gipson explains that she needs a few more minutes to wrap up the interview.

Asked how her name is spelled, Gipson declares that the public needs to know about letter links, which help preschoolers recognize how individual letters make the same sound in different words. It’s one of her favorite teaching tools. The “g” in Gipson is also used in “gladiolus,” her favorite flower.

“If I’m going to (represent) early education ... you’ve got to at least put letter links ... in there somewhere,” Gipson said.

Teachers like Gipson — experienced, committed to working with preschoolers, and bilingual to boot — are in short supply in Michigan. A yawning pay gap between preschool teachers and their K-3 counterparts has undermined hiring efforts for the Great Start Readiness Program, Michigan’s free, state-funded preschool, threatening Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s ambitious plans to make the program available to every 4-year-old in the state.

In a new budget proposal, Whitmer called for more GSRP funding and a $50 million investment in early educator recruitment and training. If she needed someone to pitch prospective teachers on preschool, she could do a lot worse than Cheriese Gipson.

After teaching other grades, Gipson returned to preschool.

“I like that beginner element,” she said. “I like the groundwork of creating the first school experience.”

Gipson has taught at the Cecil Early Childhood Education Center on the west side of Detroit for seven years. Her classroom is funded by GSRP and the federal Head Start Program. She studied education at Marygrove College in Detroit and received a master’s degree in early childhood education from Oakland University.

Chalkbeat recently spoke with Gipson about her favorite lessons to teach — and the most important ones she’s learned.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Cheriese Gipson

How and when did you decide to become a teacher?

I think probably at some point in grade school. I thought about being a [medical] practitioner, but I did not like the blood. When I was in high school, I was an exchange student. I got the chance to volunteer in a teaching setting, and I loved it.

Can you talk about how that exchange program impacted your work today?

It was in Central America [Honduras] through an organization called AFS. You spend a year in another country not only being a student but also being a part of the community. You live with someone, and you experience a variety of different things within those countries.

Originally, I didn’t speak the language. But once I was able to communicate more, I could navigate more, and I met people that owned a bilingual school, and I volunteered there.

(Gipson is bilingual in Spanish, a skill she uses every day to communicate with students from Spanish-speaking families.)

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

Be afraid, and do it anyway. When you start teaching, everything is brand new, every school year is brand new.

Whether it’s the beginning of the week or the beginning of the year, everything has newness to it.

We’ve had a variety of children with disabilities, and the majority have never been in any other school setting before coming to us. We’re some of the first observers and assessment people besides doctors and families who are telling parents what we can help with and what they can do.

Sometimes we go through a lengthy paperwork process to get children [support] and ultimately find the best fit location for them, whether it’s Starfish or somewhere else.

You love the children to the point that you don’t want them to go, but sometimes your classroom is not the best place for them.

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

So recently, we did a story — hold on, let me get a glove, and I’ll show you exactly. (Gipson steps off the screen and reappears holding a mitten.)

Our children love listening to stories, but they love more than anything that they get to participate in.

This week, we did an interactive story called “The Mitten” [by Jan Brett]. It’s about a little boy and his grandmother. She made mittens for him, and she said, “Don’t lose your mittens.” (He does lose a mitten, and forest animals use it for shelter.)

We actually created all of the animals in the story and recreated the story for the children. We want them to be able to do the beginning, the middle, and the end of a story. But we also wanted them to have basic skills like cutting paper and being able to do a sequence. And everybody had their own mittens.

We never thought they would enjoy it so much and talk about it throughout the week. Everyone was talking about gloves and mittens because everyone had them in the classroom.

What’s an object in your classroom you can’t live without?

My apron. I have children that give me things every single day, whether it’s toys, something they found, or something they want me to fix.

The children know that I always wear an apron. Some that people have created for me or that I’ve made for myself, or even the aprons that Starfish provides for us.

But it always has at least two or three pockets, and the pockets are always full of something. And children are always adding to that.

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

I’ve always been a student. I enjoyed school. I felt like it was not only giving me different experiences but also giving me opportunities.

When I’m not working in the summer, I’m always learning something new.

I bring in some of the skill sets I learn to the classroom, whether it’s a musical instrument or things about how to stretch a story like the mitten, or ways to improve the space we’re in.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Pre-K for all Michigan 4-year-olds sounds good. But will there be enough teachers?

2023-02-06T11:38:37+00:00

Recent efforts to expand Michigan’s free preschool program have run up against a persistent obstacle: a shortage of teachers.

So while Gov. Gretchen Whitmer got plenty of applause last week when she announced plans for another expansion of the Great Start Readiness Program — this time opening it to every 4-year-old in the state, regardless of family income — her proposal also raised some eyebrows.

And when Whitmer provides details of her universal preschool proposal in a budget presentation this week, early educators will be watching closely to see how she plans to draw more teachers into the workforce.

“They don’t even know if they’re going to have the talent,” said Nina Hodge, owner of Above and Beyond Learning Center, which offers GSRP classrooms in Detroit. “We need a plan for these teachers. Because there’s a shortage.”

Underlying that shortage is a yawning pay disparity. A certified early childhood educator can make $20,000 more per year working with K-3 students rather than 4-year-olds. The median salary for a GSRP lead teacher was $37,000 in 2020-21, while the average K-12 teacher made $57,000. (Certified preschool teachers are among the highest paid early educators in Michigan; most child care workers make far less.)

Michigan’s preschool pay gap is among the widest of any state-funded program in the nation, and it fuels a high rate of teacher vacancies. In 2020-21, centers had 89 unfilled positions for lead teachers, or 4% of the workforce, a vacancy rate that doesn’t include classrooms that never opened because of hiring challenges.

Because GSRP is funded by the state, closing the pay gap for preschool teachers would require an increase in per pupil funding for the program. Funding for GSRP increased rapidly in recent years to $9,150 per pupil, but that’s still well below the true cost of the program, which state officials peg at $12,700.

Offering seats to many more families, as Whitmer hopes to do over the next four years, would require even more funding.

Whitmer spokesperson Bobby Leddy said additional details about the proposal would be released with the governor’s budget recommendations, which are expected on Feb. 8, but he said the state’s budget surplus, which is projected to hit $9.2 billion this fall, would be a key source of funding for the expansion.

A shift toward free preschool for all 4-year-olds — which the Legislature will debate this session — could increase access and improve teacher pay at the same time. Indeed, that’s what happened in other states with universal preschool programs, said Christina Weiland, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies early childhood education.

With enough funding, Michigan could pump more money into each classroom, supporting higher wages, while also paying to open new classrooms.

“It’s a problem that’s highly solvable if you put the resources to it,” she said. “It would really be a shame, especially before we have the details from the administration, to get to this point of false tradeoffs … about what could be possible.”

Whitmer’s proposed four-year timeline gives lawmakers time to strike a balance, attracting enough educators to support new classrooms.

But for providers struggling to keep existing GSRP classrooms open, it’s clear which needs to come first.

“We’ve had a hard time hiring and maintaining the enrollment levels that they want us to, just because there are so many GSRP programs in the same area that I’m in,” said Summur Powers, director of Creative Kidz Learning Center in Detroit.

“I know we want to reach for the stars, but I think it would be great to sit tight for a second.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Amid early educator shortage, Wayne County offers $2,400 signing bonus for preschool teachers

2022-12-21T18:25:41+00:00

Preschool programs in Wayne County are offering signing bonuses up to $2,400 to new teachers in an attempt to address staffing shortages in early education.

Wayne RESA, the county education agency that will pay the bonuses, hopes to enroll roughly 300 students waitlisted for the Great Start Readiness Program, the state-funded preschool for 4-year-olds from low-income families. Officials say they have enough classroom space for those students, but not enough educators to teach them.

In 2021, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer set an ambitious goal of offering free preschool to an additional 22,000 children. Wayne County opened dozens of new classrooms, but eliminating waitlists countywide proved difficult, in part because early education programs struggle to compete for workers with companies like Amazon.

Last year, when Wayne RESA launched a campaign to expand preschool offerings, Kidz World Learning Center agreed to open a classroom.

That room shut down after a year because the center couldn’t find teachers, said director Nahla Musa. She worries that the pandemic labor market, with its rising wages and fierce competition for workers, may have led some early educators to leave the profession for other sectors.

“Where are they?” she asked. “I went to school with some of them. Teachers should be teaching.”

Low pay and high turnover have destabilized Michigan’s early childhood sector, hampering efforts to expand and improve the system. Early educators in general are among the lowest paid workers in the state. Child care workers made a median wage of $11.61 an hour last year.

With its relatively generous state funding, GSRP was designed in part to bring the stability of K-12 education to preschool students from low-income families. Yet teachers in the program often make less than workers with similar credentials.

In Wayne County, lead GSRP teachers made a median of $42,320, or 15% less than the median kindergarten teacher at $49,959, according to 2019-2020 data. And that 15% gap was among the narrowest in the state — teachers in many counties could expect at least a 30% pay bump if they shifted from working with 4-year-olds to 5-year olds.

Statewide, associate teachers who held a certificate in early childhood made a median salary of about $20,000, roughly equivalent to the state’s 2019 minimum wage of $9.45 an hour.

By comparison, a night shift job at an Amazon warehouse in Pontiac pays up to $19.15 an hour, according to Amazon’s website, and includes a $1,000 bonus. Amazon has raised wages for warehouse workers, who only need to be 18 years old to apply.

The signing bonuses offered to new GSRP teachers in Wayne County would be paid only in the first year, and wouldn’t close the wage gap with kindergarten teachers. But officials still hope they will help draw enough new teachers to help meet the county’s enrollment goals. About 100 classrooms countywide are missing at least one teacher.

The bonuses are $2,400 for lead teachers, $1,200 for associate teachers, and $600 for classroom aides. Teachers will receive half of the money when they are hired and the other half in June of 2023. They must sign on before Jan. 31, 2023, to receive the payment, and they can’t have worked in any GSRP program in Wayne County in the last 90 days.

State lawmakers effectively set rough pay levels for GSRP staff each year when they decide on a budget for the program.

This year, lawmakers made a massive new investment in the program, drawing on a historic budget surplus and federal COVID relief funding. By boosting GSRP funding per pupil from $8,700 to $9,150, the Legislature put the program on par with K-12 schools for the first time, a major milestone for a program that started in 1985 with a shoestring budget and a handful of classrooms.

But younger children require more supervision — GSRP classrooms often have three adults to a room — and that comes with additional costs. State officials estimate that the true cost of high-quality preschool for 4-year-olds is $12,700 per pupil.

Daveda Colbert, Wayne RESA superintendent, said even the increased funding levels aren’t enough to support a stable workforce. She said signing bonuses may help draw in new teachers, but they won’t solve the problem alone.

“We should not be competing with Amazon for talent in a classroom,” she said. “If we don’t do something different (as a state) we have to really question if we value … these professions.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit isn’t dedicating any of its COVID dollars to early education. Advocates are upset.

2022-11-14T11:00:00+00:00

The city of Detroit isn’t dedicating any of its $826 million in federal COVID relief funds to local child care providers — a missed opportunity, advocates say, to support a critical service for children, families, and the local economy.

While other large cities put aside COVID funds specifically for child care facilities and early educators, Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration shelved a planned $6 million investment in child care infrastructure to make more room for investments in home repairs, internet access, and job training.

Officials plan to send a sliver of the federal aid to the child care sector — roughly $775,000, or 0.09% of the total — through economic development programs that will support child care programs along with other businesses.

The $6 million plan is still in place, but the city will look to philanthropies and corporations to cover the cost, said Adrian Monge, director of the city’s Office of Early Learning, whose position is also funded by philanthropic contributions.

Critics say the decision is a sign that the city isn’t putting skin in the game to support a child care sector bruised by the pandemic. They’re calling on city officials to back up their talk of supporting early education and use the city’s federal funds to pay for the plan.

“It is inconceivable that city governance would not dedicate available funding to offset the challenges like living wages for early educators and more,” said Denise Smith, director of Hope Starts Here, a Detroit-based early childhood initiative backed by some of the same nonprofits that fund Monge’s position. She noted that the city has a “deficit of 22,000 licensed quality options for families needing child care.”

“The Office of Early Learning has proposed a solid plan that has been endorsed by early childhood stakeholders,” she added. “It feels untenable that the funding to support this plan has not been granted.”

Duggan has said for years that he wants to expand the city’s early childhood offerings. But his latest efforts to expand the city’s role in preschool ran aground during this year’s state budget negotiations, and the city’s other early education initiatives, like the Office of Early Learning, are supported by outside funding.

Child care providers say the city could make a big difference with the COVID relief dollars.

“Help us with that funding so that the children have a cleaner and safer environment for children to play in, and we can beautify the city,” said Denise Lomax, owner of Child Star Development Center, a highly rated child care center with two locations in Detroit. “Help us with funding to employ more people, so we can give them a decent wage.”

Lomax added that she put in a request nearly a year ago to purchase and clean up vacant lots owned by the Detroit Land Bank near one of her centers, but she said officials haven’t responded to the request.

Monge said the city is focusing on using its existing resources to support child care programs.

“The city’s departments develop plans and strategies and drafts all the time to figure out how to get the most funding to Detroiters and to best serve our city,” she said. “Those things are always in process and subject to change.”

Other major cities have set aside COVID funds to directly invest in child care educators and facilities, according to data from April collected by the National League of Cities. Milwaukee plans to improve its educator pipeline by paying for Black male high school students to obtain child care credentials. Baltimore will provide direct aid to providers negatively affected by the pandemic. Phoenix plans to build a child care center for airport workers. Boston will pay providers to hire new staff.

Detroit received $826 million from the American Rescue Plan Act, the largest of several relief packages approved by Congress during the pandemic. The city has so far spent only about 5% of that, mostly on community health workers, foreclosure prevention programs, and administrative costs.

While Detroit’s allocation was among the largest of any U.S. city, it has a wide range of urgent investment needs resulting from the deterioration of its industrial and tax bases over several decades.

“There are so many competing priorities, and there’s a lot of need,” said Tonja Rucker, director of early childhood success at the National League of Cities, which tracks ARPA spending.

“But on the early childhood side, we have clear evidence that the return on investment is real,” Rucker said.

To be sure, the city’s shelved $6 million investment in child care facilities and the early educator workforce amounts to a tiny fraction of the $1.4 billion in COVID relief aid that the state is devoting to child care. That money is being distributed to child care programs across the state — including in Detroit — through grants and other programs.

But advocates and providers said the state’s spending doesn’t relieve the city of the responsibility to make its own investments. Even with recent COVID aid, the current funding model for child care — a mix of public dollars and private parent payments — doesn’t allow providers to pay early educators a living wage, resulting in extremely high turnover that makes it very difficult to maintain quality programs.

“It’s unacceptable,” said Jametta Lilly, CEO of the Detroit Parent Network, a nonprofit advocacy group. “Our children need and deserve our best. I would hope that our mayor, just as our governor has, will listen and say, ‘OK, let’s make sure that this budget is significantly weighted towards building up child care infrastructure.’”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan aims to boost child care supply by helping entrepreneurs navigate red tape

2022-09-26T11:30:00+00:00

Michigan lost 637 child care programs since the start of the pandemic, a 7% loss that exacerbated families’ difficulties finding child care in many parts of the state.

Michigan officials are betting they can begin to reverse that trend by helping would-be providers navigate an opening process that can be dizzyingly complex.

A new initiative, Our Strong Start, pairs child care entrepreneurs with a staffer from the state licensing agency who helps with paperwork and obtaining inspections.

Our Strong Start seeks to address problems raised in a recent MuckRock report, “Disappearing Day Care,” which found that Michigan’s child care supply is even more limited than experts thought. There are about 264,000 slots available for zero to five-year-olds olds, while Michigan is home to more than 559,000 children under the age of five.

Child care providers were the first educators to return to work in person during the pandemic. While federal relief funds helped many programs stay open, some providers opted to shut down rather than deal with the challenges of COVID-19 on top of the already-precarious economics of Michigan’s child care system.

The state has tapped federal COVID-19 relief dollars to help replenish the child care supply, noting that families — and especially women — can be pushed out of the workforce if they don’t have a safe place to send their children during the day.

“Since the pandemic, 150,000 women still haven’t come back into the workforce,” said Emily Laidlaw, director of child care licensing for the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. “A lot of that barrier is due to child care.”

Using $100 million of $1.4 billion in federal child care aid, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said she wants to help open 1,000 child care programs by 2024. The money will pay for renovations and other startup costs, and will also pay for four navigators at LARA who will help prospective providers through the process of starting a new program. These staffers will be based in four regions of the state, a recognition that the challenges of opening new programs vary between communities.

Laidlaw said that 300 potential providers attended a webinar about Our Strong Start, and 400 people filled out a form to get in touch with a navigator.

Child care entrepreneurs who want help applying for a license can fill out the form here.

Keith Butler, youth pastor at Community Christian Fellowship, is working to open a new child care program to address a shortage of care in the church’s neighborhood on Detroit’s east side.

“I’m looking to fill a need, especially now as parents go back to work,” he said.

The church wants to house a child care program for 30 to 50 children ages two to 12. With help from licensing officials, Butler has already met zoning requirements and had fire officials walk through the proposed space to check for safety hazards. They hope to be licensed within three months.

“I can’t say I was expecting bad service necessarily, but I wasn’t expecting this,” he said. “They’ve been a godsend.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Luca Powell and Derek Kravitz produced the investigative report “Disappearing Daycare” for MuckRock. You can reach them at derek@muckrock.com.

Wayne County child care providers battle waitlists, low pay

2022-08-31T20:40:25+00:00

Betty Henderson has spent two decades working in child care in Detroit, starting out of her home, growing to a larger site, and now buying a former church for space to “double-plus” the 30-child enrollment she has.

She knows the need for child care is great.

“Every day is a good four to five calls that want daytime hours for the babies that are either less than 12 months or 1 to 2 years old, and I have totally run out of room for them,” said Henderson, owner of Angels of Essence Day Care on the city’s west side.

But “telling them no and having a waitlist is just not feasible, because parents need care right now.”

In her 20 years in business, she said, “I’ve never had a waiting list.” Now, though, “it’s an outpour. And I’m trying to do what I can to get them in here.”

She had 19 children on her waitlist in May, whom she referred out to a few other child care providers. The first week of July, she had 13 to 14 on the waitlist and nine calls on the answering machine.

Providers say child care faced great struggles before the coronavirus pandemic. But the last two years have brought additional pressures.

Michigan’s child care industry is in crisis, according to “Disappearing Day Care,” a 10-month investigation by MuckRock and a consortium of Michigan newsrooms. And the data and documents show the problem is worse than policymakers thought.

The investigation found the number of child care deserts in Michigan — regions where three children compete for every slot at an in-home or group center — is nearly double previous estimates.

Data show 20 counties have so few child care options, they qualify as deserts. Wayne and Macomb counties are among 23 counties nearly qualifying as deserts, too.

Child care provider closings have outpaced openings during the pandemic; and a cumulative statewide list includes more than 54,000 children waiting for a spot. Oakland and Washtenaw counties are among those with waitlists longer than 5,000.

Treat child care ‘like an industry’

State leaders say they are trying to improve child care in Michigan and have directed $1.4 billion of federal relief money to help stabilize the system. But the cash is a one-time fix to aid providers during the pandemic.

Some of the money has brought additional financial help to bump up already-low hourly wages for child care workers and provide hiring bonuses. But providers fear that these funds will be gone next year, and that the money is still much less than what the staff deserve for the work they do and for the families who entrust their children into their care.

“Right now, today, because of COVID, it’s almost like now they want to listen to us,” Henderson said of legislators and others. “They hear: ‘Oh now there is a need for child care. We want to get these parents back to work. We want to get them off unemployment.’”

But additional child care subsidies to help pay staff “shouldn’t be taken back from us just because they want to say that the pandemic is over or that it’s not as bad as it was,” Henderson said.

Nina Hodge, longtime owner of Above And Beyond Learning Child Care Center on Detroit’s east side, agrees.

“Treat (child care) like an industry. We are essential people just as well,” she said. “We don’t watch TV in there. We get them ready for school, kindergarten, social development … all kinds of stuff.”

Grants help, but what happens when they’re gone?

Hodge said she’s licensed for 60 children and has six full-time and about a half-dozen part-time staff. Her center is open about 12 hours a day Monday through Friday.

The child care stabilization grants have provided some additional money to centers like hers to help with pay, among other expenses.

Hodge said she received a $104,000 stabilization grant in January of this year that she used for payroll, bonuses and mental health awareness for staff, recruiting new staff, supplies for children, and new doors. She received a $106,000 grant in June of this year that she used for payroll, bills, daily operating expenses, and minor repairs and updating.

Staff, including a cook, make about $12 an hour, Hodge said. She would like to pay them more, but she can’t.

She said hourly reimbursement rates from the state for child care providers are set to go down in the future. Hodge is concerned about providers and wonders “how will they be able to survive once these grants are over with?”

Henderson received about $48,000 as a first stabilization grant, which she said helped cover staff raises, and $57,000 in the second round of grants, which provided staff bonuses, other payroll help, and hiring as she went to overnight care.

She also used the money for the lease payment on the building, utilities, and insurance, including workers’ compensation and liability.

Henderson said child care providers deserved the bump before the pandemic — and they’ll deserve it after the pandemic. She said her staff salaries, including lead teachers, range from $12 to $17 per hour. Prior to the changes from the pandemic funds, wages were several dollars less per hour.

Centers’ challenge: Getting what they need

Qualifications for child care employment often aren’t the same as working at a fast-food restaurant or a retail job, despite the pay being the same — if not more — in those other industries.

Child care workers need training, including first aid and CPR; a police background check; a tuberculosis test; education through hours of schooling or day care experience; and an associate’s or college degree or additional credentials if someone wants to be a lead teacher, providers said.

Damon Jones, owner of LoveLee Care centers in Mount Clemens and Clinton Township, said in late May that the demand he saw was for lead teachers and directors.

Because of the child-to-teacher ratios, he said new hires often must be a lead teacher, which requires meeting more criteria, to accommodate additional children wanting to enter a program.

“That’s the challenge — in getting what you need,” he said.

During the pandemic, Jones said, he had “plenty of kids on my waiting list. We just keep a waiting list until we get a teacher … We’ve got pandemic babies that are trying to find service. Because of the high demand, the rates are going up. There’s nowhere for them to go.”

During a Free Press interview in May, he said he received four calls that morning asking if anything had changed regarding the waitlist. He said the Mount Clemens location was licensed in 2018, prior to the pandemic, and staff was already in place. The Clinton Township center was licensed at the end of 2020 for 67 children, but only about 17 were there because of low staff numbers.

The waitlist, he said, was “strenuous.”

India Armstrong, owner of Baby University in St. Clair Shores, said in June that staffing hadn’t been an issue for her center, which opened in 2019. Finding real estate was the problem.

Armstrong couldn’t find a larger location to lease to expand from her 1,800-square-foot space.

She said she tried to work with one location owner, but he backed out three different times, and few buildings zoned for day cares are available for lease in the city. Sites available for sale were costing $750,000 to $1 million, she said.

Armstrong said her center was at its licensed capacity with 30 children enrolled, full-time and part-time, and 10 to 12 staff.

The weekday center catered to children ages 6 weeks up to school-age and offered some Saturday evening care for parents to have a date night or to do whatever they need, especially if the parents don’t have family in the area to babysit or they moved here from another state.

At that time, the waitlist was 75 families. She said the center sent out notes asking if families still need care, and “they’re like ‘yes, yes, keep us on the waitlist.’”

About 70% of the families were private pay, with the average cost of full-time care at $300 a week. Staff was paid between $14 and $16 per hour with the director paid $48,000 a year, she said.

“And what we do is eat our profit to pay our people, essentially. So, if we get money for grants or anything like that, you know, that kind of helps us with supplies and things like that,” she said.

Food also is always an expense for child care centers, and these types of costs now are going up because of inflation.

“That’s all our babies do,” Armstrong said. “They want to eat all day. With their brain development, they have to eat.”

Waitlists abound

Rebekah Michelson said she started getting on waitlists for child care 10 to 12 months before her second son was born just before the pandemic began in 2020.

The Brownstown Township mother of two boys knew she would need child care when returning to work full time from maternity leave that September.

It was about two weeks away from her return to work when she learned her youngest would be “next on the list” at a nearby center that the 2-year-old still was attending this spring.

“It was like a stroke of luck,” Michelson said.

“I do feel like we’re kind of one of the luckier ones, because I know we have a couple of options in my ZIP code and a couple of ZIP codes next to us. But it’s still very limited,” she said.

Compared with looking for child care years before the pandemic for her older son, who was 6 in May, Michelson said there were “definitely more waitlists this time around.” Her older son previously attended a Downriver day care about 15 minutes from their home, starting when he was about 2½ years old.

In her desire to find a center for her youngest, Michelson said she even tried a couple of unlicensed sites.

The center she was using this spring didn’t have enough staff and had recently closed a classroom one day each week. While her youngest could attend four days a week, she had to find child care for him on the fifth day with family or by taking a sick day.

Michelson, who also was taking classes for a master’s degree in social work, said her youngest son’s child care center was offering signing bonuses for workers — money a lot of centers can’t offer.

She said child care worker salaries, in general, are “miserable. It’s horrible, and they deserve so much more, honestly.”

Michelson said she believes communities need to step up to help child care centers thrive by taking steps such as offering space or start-up incentives.

“People need these places,” she said.

Making a difference for every child

To avoid additional staff burnout, Henderson did not take summer kids at her center in Detroit this year, making it the first year where she didn’t have a student over 5 years old.

“It’s heartbreaking, but I think my staff deserve it,” she said, adding that she referred parents to summer camps and other child care centers.

Henderson said her business has continued all these years on referrals and word of mouth, not business cards, websites or social media.

While hers is not a big center, Henderson said she tries to impart to employees and new candidates that they are part of a professional, reliable team and that this is a career. She said she offers incentives to staff — raffles, early days off with pay, gift cards and events outside of work — to let them know they are appreciated.

Unlike some of her colleagues in child care, Henderson said she hasn’t had people get hired for the signing bonus and then quit.

“I try to make it fun to where you want to get up and come to work and educate the little people. And that’s why I’ve had this staff for so long,” she said. “It is hard work. But at the end of the day, the goal is to make a difference in every child that walks through the door.”

Christina Hall is a reporter for the Detroit Free Press. Contact her at chall@freepress.com.

What we learned about Michigan’s child care crisis

2022-08-31T20:10:35+00:00

In May, the nonprofit journalism site MuckRock and several Michigan newsrooms published their initial findings on Michigan’s child care crisis, including the high number of facility closures during the pandemic.

We invited Michiganders to tell us about their experiences on both sides of the child care industry — as a parent trying to find care for their child or as a provider trying to stay in business.

We received more than 170 responses, many of which included detailed policy proposals. Here are eight of those ideas, along with accompanying analysis from experts, lawmakers and state agencies about their potential feasibility:

Allow more families to receive state child care subsidies

Christie Mahl’s day care, Acorn Child Development Center in Lapeer, has a waiting list of more than 100 children. Those long lists are not uncommon in Michigan, particularly with centers like hers, which has a 5-star rating from Great Start to Quality, Michigan’s rating and improvement system for day cares. Hers is the only 5-star center in 90,000-person Lapeer County.

At $46 a day, Mahl’s day care is markedly cheaper than comparable centers in urban areas, which can charge up to $70. Some parents don’t pay anything if their income level is low enough to qualify for a state child care subsidy. But many of her parents make too much to qualify. These “borderline” families pay for child care out of necessity, even if it takes a bite out of their annual budget.

“Imagine making $50,000 and having to pay $1,000 a month,” Mahl said. “It’s a hardship.”

Temporarily increasing the subsidy income brackets was one of the first pandemic relief measures deployed by the state, which pushed the subsidy qualification from 150% to 185% of Michigan’s poverty line.

But the success of that effort has been mixed, according to researchers from the University of Michigan. They have found fewer applications for the subsidy despite more families becoming eligible — likely because of a lack of available spots at day cares statewide.

“There were over 100,000 more families that became eligible for the subsidy as a result of increased funding for the program, but we really didn’t see pickup rates improve to a great extent,” said Karen Kling, strategic projects manager with University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions program. “They were pushing families toward spots that didn’t exist.”

Mahl also suggested implementing a new tier of center for 18-child facilities. Currently the state licenses six- and 12-child facilities and much larger centers for dozens of children, but nothing in between.

Provide options for flexible at-work child care

Fifteen months into parenthood, Hillary Rose is already on her 10th nanny. When her child was born, the two day cares in her area were full. Nannies and babysitters have cost her about $1,200 a month, she estimates, but she pays it because it gives her precious hours of breathing room to focus at her job.

“I do feel like it’s kind of a requirement if I want to continue to work,” said Rose, who lives in Carleton.

Rose teaches U.S. history at a virtual school, which she can do remotely, but not with a toddler on her lap. The nannying solution isn’t perfect either: She’s often searching through Care.com, a child care networking site, for affordable babysitters. She said the more qualified sitters can charge $25 an hour, which is more than she makes teaching. More realistic options for her have been high school graduates without qualifications, but who occasionally fail to show when she needs them most.

Recently, Rose has toyed with the idea of opening a drop-in care center for remote working parents. She describes it as a kind of child care WeWork, where parents who just need a few hours of time at a desk each day could easily switch between work and care. She thinks parents need more flexible options, given the popularity of working from home. It’s an idea born from the immense challenge of balancing a full-time job and raising a kid.

“I really wasn’t expecting it to be this difficult,” Rose said.

The principal roadblock to Rose’s idea is Michigan’s long history of strict zoning regulations for child care facilities. Legislation passed in June loosened some of those zoning requirements, opening the door for child care facilities in commercial-use zones.

Factor outstanding debts into child care subsidy qualification

Monica Rosen feels like she made all the right choices: She went to college, got a good job at the University of Michigan, bought a house and had a family. But lately, she feels like she’s being crushed, she said, as she stares down the prospect of paying nearly $19,000 a year for a slot at the university’s Towsley Children’s House day care.

“I don’t qualify for the grants they offer, because you have to be in poverty, but they don’t count my student loans and other financial considerations when calculating who gets grant money,” said Rosen, who lives in Mount Pleasant. “I feel like once I pay for preschool, I am now in poverty.”

Red tape around the subsidies often hindered their use, said William Lopez, assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. Qualifying requires parents to prove that they are working or studying. Parents also must regularly reapply, as well as have their taxes in order — all of which contributes “to a very low proportion of children who are eligible receiving vouchers,” Lopez’s team found, according to forthcoming research they shared.

Provide affordable health care for child care workers

In 2020, Karen Lumsden’s child care center, Children’s Place Montessori in Troy, ate a $110,000 loss. Some of it was recouped by $70,000 in one-time grants from the state, but she’s only just recovering from the pandemic shutdowns. Her Montessori center, which is licensed for 70 kids, is still below its capacity mark by 20 children.

Staffing challenges means she can’t open a third room and be fully operational.

“Had the grant money not come, I would be totally screwed,” Lumsden said. “It was a godsend.”

What would further help Lumsden, she said, is an affordable health care option for her staff. Of eight employees, seven are on their spouses’ health care plans and the eighth pays heavily out of pocket for health care via the Affordable Care Act.

Lumsden said day cares that offer health care have an easier time hiring. But she can’t offer it now because her business would dip into debt.

“That’s just the reality,” Lumsden said. “They’re going into a business that can’t sustain them. If they had an insurance option for child care workers, whoa. Insurance would be such a boon.”

Companies could subsidize tuition to attract workers

On average, Tea Shong’s teachers stay on staff for just 18 months. Some find child care isn’t for them, while others love the work but decide to pursue higher pay in K-12 school systems, which offer benefits as well.

“Some of our best employees move on to the K-12 system,” said Shong, of Lenawee.

Shong thinks the state does enough to support parents and providers. Her teachers should make more, but she thinks that, in today’s economy, employers looking to attract workers should be footing more of the bill — offering child care pay as a benefit.

If that were more common, Shong would be able to charge more knowing that employers are splitting the bill with parents, and then be able to bump wages for her teachers. As it stands, her teachers make $12 to $14 an hour.

“I believe more workplaces should offer child care support, like they offer insurance,” Shong said. “These teachers do some of the most important work, and their pay does not reflect it.”

The Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, which regulates and investigates complaints about child care facilities, has found more than 9,000 child care staff vacancies across the state and is now letting some facilities apply for rule exemptions to hire younger staff who are finishing required coursework and are awaiting final certifications. A survey the agency sent out this spring found that staffing turnover affected a majority of facilities and ranked as the No. 1 factor affecting the number of available child care openings.

And the No. 1 reason why Michigan child care facilities said they couldn’t attract new staff? Low wages and nonexistent benefits.

Help from the private sector is one of the flagship ideas implemented by the Whitmer administration. The program, known as Tri-Share, splits child-care costs among an employer, employee and the state. But it only serves families that make between 200% and 325% of the federal poverty line — $34,840 to $60,970 for a single mother, for example — a population that isn’t served by the subsidy.

In a statement, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office said it is proud of the work of Michigan Tri-Share but, as of now, the program has enrolled just 57 children since its inception more than a year ago in June 2021.

Tri-Share reports cite a number of reasons for the program’s low uptake, including the number of child care deserts in Michigan.

Build a web portal for parents and providers

To keep centers profitable, they need full enrollment. That’s why for years, Louise Stoney has argued that tech could provide answers for child care facilities across the country.

With an app, centers could give real-time enrollment numbers and post to a marketplace for anxious parents shopping for care. Instead of calling every center in their ZIP code, they could quickly see when and where openings come online, saving parents time and keeping providers’ classrooms full.

“We need to create some scale and stability so that they’re not just out there trying to do everything by themselves,” said Stoney, an independent consultant specializing in early care and education. “Technology is a big part of that.”

In Michigan, no such digital platform exists. The closest alternative is Care.com, a website that helps parents shop for caregivers.

Better software would also relieve child care providers of another headache: the amount of paperwork required by state regulators, such as attendance logs. And it would provide better child care data to the state, which currently relies on out-of-date and inaccurate licensing numbers.

Stoney said that real-time systems like these have already been deployed. Pilot programs exist in Colorado, where counties have invested in a platform called BridgeCare. Another platform, LegUp, offers similar real-time data sharing and operates in Wisconsin and several other states.

Create universal pre-K in Michigan

For state Rep. Yousef Rabhi of Ann Arbor, the problem is clear: Child care isn’t funded in the same way as the state’s K-12 public school system.

Rabhi’s solution would be to fold Michigan’s nearly 8,000 child care facilities into a statewide universal pre-kindergarten system. Rabhi thinks universal pre-K would stabilize the child care workforce by adding benefits, such as health care.

It would also remove the cost barrier for hundreds of thousands of Michigan parents with a free public system. Universal pre-K has already been implemented in Florida, Vermont, Oklahoma, and the District of Columbia, as well as in more than 30 cities across the country.

“This isn’t a far-fetched idea. It’s not like we’re doing something completely brand new,” Rabhi said. “It’s just that we arbitrarily cut the system off at kindergarten.”

In 2019, Whitmer said she wanted to achieve such a system by the end of her first term. And a bipartisan mood around child-care reform has put universal pre-K on the table, Rabhi said, even if the price tag would be significant.

Using federal estimates, the annual market cost of a universal pre-K system for Michigan’s 3- and 4-year-olds comes out to $972 million per year — an estimate built using a $6,600 per capita figure used to vet President Biden’s American Families Plan. That’s just for tuition, however.

Modeling experts at the Children’s Funding Project, a policy group that provides cost estimates to government bodies, said that a “true cost” — one that includes infrastructure investments and a living wage for workers — would likely double that estimate. “It would range somewhere from $14,000 or $15,000 to $18,000 to $20,000 for a preschooler,” said Kate Ritter, an adviser with the organization who specializes in finance and cost modeling. Ritter’s estimate puts the cost of universal pre-K closer to $2 billion.

The Children’s Funding Project has actually begun work modeling revenue options for universal pre-K in Michigan. In the past, the group has provided states with memos identifying how states can find cash to pay for broader child care programs, such as by raising corporate income taxes.

Reinvest in in-home centers

For state Rep. Jack O’Malley of Traverse City, state involvement in child care has historically been the problem, rather than the solution. Before a recent changing of the guard at Michigan’s state licensing agency, small in-home providers reported being harangued by licensing consultants.

These consultants would often write up small, mom-and-pop day cares for minor violations, and fed-up providers would call it quits, as O’Malley describes it.

Simply put, safety concerns and a preoccupation with academics have pushed the state to overregulate and ask childcare providers for too much documentation, O’Malley said.

“When you are requiring that employees have certain levels of degrees — do we need that?” O’Malley said. “Are our center-based day cares becoming pre-kindergarten kindergarten? Are we now having them reading the classics?”

Financially, the argument for more in-home centers goes both ways.

In-home centers are more geographically and financially accessible, sometimes charging half as much as larger centers. But they can quickly become losing business propositions for their owners, who need a critical mass of children to be profitable.

A survey sent out to child care providers this spring by the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs found that in-home facilities reported loss of income as the No. 2 impact of staffing shortages, just behind the inability to enroll more children. And in-home providers overwhelmingly supported the idea of reducing staff-to-child ratios, compared with larger child care centers, the survey found.

In June, O’Malley proposed, and helped pass, legislation increasing the ratio of children in-home centers could serve. One employee can now care for up to seven kids, up from six, and a two-employee center can now care for up to 14 kids, up from 12. (Some states, like Washington, allow one employee to care for up to 10 preschoolers, aged 30 months to 5 years old.)

O’Malley said the bill has been met with “hoorays and cheers.”

But child care experts worry that such hands-off policies won’t fix much — and could endanger children. Linda Smith, executive director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Early Childhood Initiative, a think tank in Washington, described the legislation as “looking for a quick fix.”

“The answer is not just put a couple more kids in and that’ll fix anything,” Smith said. “It’ll only make it worse, because it’ll drive more staff out. We should not go down the road where we just relax the regs.”

Reporter Luca Powell did the reporting for this project for Muckrock, a nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom.

Michigan’s child care crisis is worse than policymakers have estimated

2022-08-31T19:02:43+00:00

It was March 27, 2021, and an at-home day care in Grand Rapids was ready for a pool day. The day care’s owner took seven children — five of whom were just 2 and 3 years old — to a nearby Holiday Inn Express. She bought a room to use the hotel’s splash pad and two indoor pools, and charged parents $25 per child.

None of the children had life jackets or arm floaties. The caregiver, Melanie Williams, was the only adult overseeing the seven children. At the time, Michigan law required one adult for every six children at licensed at-home day cares. That rule has since been relaxed by state lawmakers.

At 6:38 p.m., one of the smaller children — identified only as “Child P” in state investigators’ reports — ran away from the kiddie pools and climbed into the larger adult pool.

Four minutes later, the girl’s head was underwater, her lips blue, her eyes open, and she was lying flat on her back, witnesses said.

She wasn’t breathing and had no pulse.

Luckily, an off-duty paramedic and an off-duty nurse on vacation with their own children were nearby, and pulled the child out of the water, surveillance footage shows. Another adult ushered the other children away, later telling investigators that he didn’t want them to watch a child die.

Child P survived, but her brush with drowning underscores the stakes as Michigan’s child care industry deteriorates. Overwhelmed by demand, Michigan’s child care industry is in full-blown crisis, according to Disappearing Day Care, a 10-month-long investigation by MuckRock and a consortium of Michigan newsrooms. Reporters collected years of investigative reports by Michigan’s child care licensing bureau and testimonials from hundreds of parents and providers, and analyzed new state child care data provided as part of federal pandemic relief programs.

The data and documents show the problem is even worse than policymakers thought.

Nearly double the child care deserts

At the beginning of the pandemic, the Michigan League for Public Policy, a Lansing-based nonprofit, created a list of 11 so-called child care deserts. These are regions where three children compete for every available slot at an in-home or group center.

But those deserts were calculated using the capacity of licensed child care facilities located in a particular county. The practice overstates the number of spots available and thus hides the true picture of child care availability in Michigan. Many of these licensed child care slots remain empty for a variety of reasons.

Through state Freedom of Information Act requests and a first-of-its-kind data analysis of child care records, we found the number of child care deserts in Michigan is nearly double previous estimates.

A total of 21 counties have so few child care options that they qualify as deserts, the data shows. Another 23 Michigan counties, including Metro Detroit’s Wayne and Macomb counties, are rounding errors away from qualifying as deserts as well.

In Macomb County, there’s a waiting list of more than 2,300 children, state data shows, and nearly half of providers are under-enrolled.

Key findings about Michigan’s child care crisis

Statewide capacity estimates of 373,000 day care “slots” for Michigan’s children are an illusion. The real figure for 0- to 5-year-olds is closer to 264,000, a gap of more than 100,000 slots that reflects staffing shortages, high costs and temporary closures caused by COVID-19, as well as the exclusion of more than 70,000 children over the age of 5 who are eligible for kindergarten programs. Michigan has more than 559,000 children under the age of 5.
About 23% of centers that received state grants don’t serve newborns up to 3-year-olds, a critical age range for care. Out of a total of 140,000 slots at grant recipient facilities, roughly 11,500 served infants, and another 30,000 served toddlers.
During the pandemic, closures heavily outpaced openings. Compared with February 2020, Michigan has 637 fewer child care providers, a 7% drop, according to state data. Family providers closed at several times the rate of high capacity centers in urban areas, a shift that exacerbates the day care drought for rural parents. In 2018, a pre-COVID year, 1,000 group and family homes closed, while just 486 centers opened to replace them.
A cumulative statewide waiting list includes at least 54,057 children. On a population-adjusted basis, the longest waiting list by far was more than 3,200, in Grand Traverse County, a rural northwest Michigan county that saw more than a third of its child care facilities close over the past three years. In June, Oakland, Kent and Washtenaw counties all had waitlists longer than 5,000.
State aid missed 2,363 providers, a reflection of lack of interest in government help, even as the child care business model becomes increasingly untenable. Providers cited concerns around government intrusion into their curriculum and mistrust that the grants would really be tax-free.

The data for this analysis is publicly available on GitHub.

And in Detroit, 12 ZIP codes are weathering dire capacity shortages. One neighborhood, which includes Hamtramck and borders Highland Park, had as many as nine children for every available child care slot.

The neighborhood, which is one of the poorest in the state, had a ratio more than three times the criterion to qualify as a desert. Outside of Detroit proper, wealthier Wayne County suburbs had less need: While the ratio of children to slots for the city was 2.8, the ratio for Wayne County overall was 2.5.

After seeing the new data, Michigan’s Early Childhood Investment Corp., a public organization that contracts with the state to help run the child care system, said that it didn’t know the original child care desert figure was flawed, and that the original numbers were calculated using the best available data at that time.

Based on the new, larger numbers, “it’s clear that families do not have access to child care to meet their needs,” the ECIC said in a statement.

Advocates, policymakers and experts said that bad data has long dogged efforts to improve the state’s child care industry, and that the findings from “Disappearing Day Care” only underscores the lingering problems.

State Rep. Brenda Carter, an Oakland County Democrat who sits on the Michigan House Families, Children and Seniors Committee, said the findings show “just how urgent” the need for child care reforms has become.

“Seeing your report makes me very concerned for those young, working parents today,” she said. “If they do not have family help and are not able to find professional child care, where are their children to go? Those parents still have to put food on the table.”

Lisa Brewer-Walraven, director of the Michigan Department of Education’s Childcare Division, said she didn’t dispute that more counties than previously known qualify as deserts. “What we’re focused on is the solutions,” Brewer-Walraven said.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a first-term Democrat running for re-election this year, has made expanding child care one of her administration’s key initiatives, noting her “first-hand experience” in trying to find affordable child care and pledging $100 million in state money to open 1,000 more child care facilities by 2024. In a point-by-point response to our findings, her office asserted that “under Gov. Whitmer’s leadership, the state has worked with providers to keep them open and serving kids” and provided testimonials from nearly 900 providers who received grant funding.

But her office also noted the daunting issues facing Michigan’s child care industry — and the net loss of more than 600 providers during the pandemic.

“All families deserve to have child care that meets their needs — regardless of where they live, how much money they make, their race, ethnicity or immigration status,” the governor’s office said in a statement. “In too many Michigan communities, families cannot find the child care they need.”

The real number

Fewer than half of Michigan’s 8,000 active child care facilities give real-time numbers to the state. For these providers, who work with Michigan’s Great Start to Quality program, officials can see each facility’s enrollment numbers.

For the more than 4,000 other facilities, however, the Michigan Department of Education knows only their licensed maximum. That number, known as license capacity, can be significantly different from the actual number of children enrolled at a given time.

Child care finance expert Louise Stoney described license capacity as a useless number for planning purposes. Stoney’s group, Opportunities Exchange, consults with a number of state education departments on the economics of early education reform.

“The real issue is staffed capacity,” Stoney said. “How many classrooms are you staffed to run? That’s the real number.”

But many Michigan providers said they haven’t been able to fully staff in months. Some run as many as 80 children under capacity, even as parents line up at the door for coveted spots.

The most in-demand openings are those for the youngest children, ranging from newborns to 3 years old. They also require the most attention, which means more staff.

At River’s Edge Learning Center in Bay City, the shortage of employees has meant that owner Danaea Trombley has limited how many children she can enroll. “If we don’t get three or four more staff, we can’t open up that toddler room,” Trombley said. In December 2021, Trombley was running under capacity by 30 children.

From an economic perspective, providers say they are crushed between the effort to keep staff and run a profitable business. Emily Myers, owner of Ferndale Montessori in Oakland County, said that after paying utilities, wages and benefits, she puts aside only a 2% to 3% profit. That sum often gets reinvested, however.

“This is for when the furnace goes out, repairs, incidentals,” Myers said. “At this point, I have not added to a nest egg or rainy day fund for this business, until the grant money.”

One of her biggest expenses, a health insurance option for her employees, often threatens to put her business in the red.

But offering health insurance allows her to keep employees, who are often tempted away from private child care into the relative comfort of Michigan’s public school system or other higher-paying industries.

Child care workers in Michigan start at anywhere between $11 and $15 an hour, and rarely receive benefits through their employer.

“Our people can go literally anywhere and make more than they can in child care,” said Linda Smith, executive director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Early Childcare Initiative, a Washington-based think tank. “When it costs more than the consumer can afford to pay, then the business model is failing — hence the issues with staffing. It’s the same problem that we’ve had for decades, only magnified.”

To pay more, providers have to charge more. But parents already pay as much as 35% of their household income for child care, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In response to a public callout from MuckRock, one parent in Mount Pleasant, Monica Rosen, said that paying for her daughter’s preschool pushed her family to the brink of poverty.

“We’d like to have another child, but can’t realistically imagine a scenario where we can afford one,” Rosen said.

The pandemic pulled thousands of Michigan mothers out of the workforce entirely. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics analyzed by RegionTrack — an Oklahoma-based consulting group — found that the participation rate for women with childcare-aged children in Michigan’s workforce declined by 6 points in 2020, from 71% to 65%. Their share recovered somewhat to 68% in 2021. For single mothers with young children, the decline in workforce participation was worse: a 13-percentage-point drop in 2020, with only a 4-point recovery in 2021.

Safety concerns

The Grand Rapids day care owner who took seven children to the Holiday Inn told investigators that Child P had run away to follow some friends into the bigger swirl pool unnoticed. She stood a little over 3 feet tall and wore a polka dot Minnie Mouse bathing suit.

Surveillance footage from the pool showed the entire incident lasted seven minutes, and there were at least 21 children in the pool area.

It all happened, Williams told deputies, “in a blink of an eye.”

An off-duty nurse gave the child mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for more than a minute, and the off-duty paramedic then performed chest compressions for an additional 80 seconds, the footage shows. After three rounds of chest compressions, the little girl “came to,” they said, and vomited water before being taken to a nearby hospital.

[See the documents about the Holiday inn incident here]

A month later, Williams’ day care license was revoked by the state and, in settlement documents, she did not deny the allegations. In hours of bodycam footage obtained for this project, Williams was clearly shaken and crying shortly after the incident, and told deputies that she is normally “so good with my kids.”

A charge of third-degree child abuse was forwarded from the Kent County Sheriff’s Department to the county prosecutor’s office, records show, but the office declined to charge Williams, concluding that it appeared to be an accident, Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker said. After the little girl was taken to the hospital, bodycam footage shows one deputy privately confiding to another:

“It’s tough, man. They can get away from you quick.”

Child P’s guardian also didn’t want to press charges against Williams and, in fact, returned the girl to the same day care before it ultimately closed. Williams hung up the phone when reached for comment for this story.

Meanwhile, investigative reports by state regulators raise concerning flags about children’s safety as workers leave the industry.

In March 2021, a Novi child care worker accidentally let a child fall off a changing table, and didn’t alert others until later in the day because she was “too busy” watching other infants and “did not have time” to report it, at a facility that repeatedly has staffing turnover. The caregiver was ultimately fired.

And in September 2021, a facility in Canton was found to have just two staff members looking after 28 toddlers. Two days later, inspectors found that, at one point, the facility had allowed just one staff member to care for 35 toddlers. The facility still maintains an active license.

Cheyenne Wallace, 27 of Hamtramck, an assistant teacher at Ferndale Montessori, left, works with a group of toddlers Thursday, Aug. 18.

The Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, which regulates and investigates complaints about child care facilities, said it prioritizes the safety of children. But the agency, known as LARA, has found more than 9,000 child care staff vacancies across the state and is now letting some facilities apply for rule exemptions to hire younger staff who are finishing required coursework and are awaiting final certifications.

A survey the agency sent out this spring found that staffing turnover affected a majority of facilities and ranked as the No. 1 factor affecting the number of available child care openings.

Complaint data shared by LARA shows that annual complaints dipped in 2020 and 2021, with numbers from this year on track to return to pre-pandemic levels. In that same period, the agency has seen a more than 200% spike in investigations of Professional Development Requirements, a category that includes health and safety training for new staff members. LARA spokesperson Suzanne Thelen suggested the spike could be linked to new professional requirements added by the agency in December 2019.

“There is a balancing act between the need for care and child care being a silent driver of the economy, but our role is to protect the health, safety and welfare of those kids in care,” said Emily Laidlaw, the director of Michigan’s Childcare Licensing Bureau.

Asked about staffing and safety violations, both MDE and LARA said their focus was on creating a “one stop shop” for providers to resolve questions and come back into compliance with regulators. With a hotline to providers, the agencies hope they can pre-empt more violations.

Legislators know that parents and providers are pleading for help, but have reached little consensus about a solution.

In past legislative sessions, Republican lawmakers advanced and passed bills intended to clear a web of licensing rules that they say are suffocating small providers. Some bills were contentious, like one that expands the number of children in-home providers can look after. The bill, which ultimately passed, was proposed by state Rep. Jack O’Malley, a Republican who represents rural Grand Traverse County, which has the longest waiting list for child care of any county in the state.

“I talked to providers. They told me, ‘If I could have just one more kid, I could probably make enough money to stay in business,” O’Malley said.

Some Democratic legislators are hesitant to relax rules, and instead have pushed for solutions that funnel more state funding — potentially from a $7 billion budget surplus — toward buttressing or reforming the child care business model.

Whitmer has also championed the issue, directing a $1.4 billion pot of federal money toward one-time grants for providers. Some providers received as much as $630,000. The Whitmer administration also expanded eligibility for state-subsidized child care by 100,000 families.

The grants helped providers clear debts, give bonuses to workers and offer scholarships to lower-income parents, according to state data and hundreds of provider testimonials. But experts say the one-time money failed to substantively fix child care.

“It wasn’t long-term money. So programs really didn’t spend it to raise wages permanently, because they were facing this cliff,” said Smith, with the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Early Childcare Initiative. “What they have done is given some type of one-time bonuses. But very few really raised the wages of the workforce, which now is complicating everything because wages have gone up so much elsewhere.”

Brewer-Walraven said she backed the new bills, specifically citing the ratio change “as good for providers.”

In a statement, Whitmer’s spokesperson, Bobby Leddy, said that the governor “is using every tool in her toolbox” to address “decades of disinvestment in child care.”

The Whitmer administration has also introduced a program called TriShare, which splits child care tuition among the employer, the state and parents. Whitmer has also set a goal to open 1,000 new child care facilities, backed with a $100 million commitment. Of that total, $11.4 million is being directed toward recruiting staff.

However, with the exception of a $2.5 million investment in TriShare, all of the child care relief money has come from federal grants. And a $77 billion state budget passed in June allots just $34 million in new money toward early childhood education. The money is destined for Michigan’s Great Start to Readiness Program, a state-funded preschool program for at-risk kids.

Otherwise, the budget identifies leftover dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act for use in further child care relief.

The Children’s Funding Project, a policy group that researches revenue options for child care systems, has tracked how different states used the one-time funds, as well as whether they backed the one-time relief with legislation.

Gaines, CEO of the Children’s Funding Project, said she was surprised that the Whitmer administration — which in 2019 pitched universal pre-K — wasn’t investing state funds in child care reform. “There’s not a lot in there outside the initial (ARPA) investment,” Gaines said.

Matt Gillard, CEO of Michigan’s Children, a policy organization focused on children’s issues, said he’s still waiting to see the state put “skin in the game,” meaning more state money.

“The reality, as we all know it, hasn’t changed,” Gillard said in regard to the flight of workers from the field of child care. “They’re underpaid and leaving for other industries. The state has to get serious about the financial side of this.”

Luca Powell and Derek Kravitz produced this investigative report for MuckRock. You can reach them at derek@muckrock.com.

How we analyzed Michigan child care data

Since 2021, Michigan legislators have publicly quoted a number estimating that 44% of Michiganders live in a child care “desert.” In reality, that number, calculated by the Michigan League for Public Policy, misinterprets the Center for American Progress’ definition of what is a child care desert.

The MLPP’s desert calculation includes 5-year-olds, while the CAP’s analysis includes only children under 5. Our analysis relies on CAP’s narrower age range, as well as more precise enrollment data, to find at least nine more deserts in Michigan than the MLPP originally calculated.

In response to questions, CAP said the narrower age range is preferable because many 5-year-olds are enrolled in kindergarten or public school programs. But the MLPP; Michigan’s Early Childhood Investment Corp. a public organization that contracts with the state to help run the child care system; and the governor’s office defended their methodology. “Trusted child care advocates use the 0-5 age range to analyze various issues affecting child care in our state, and the subsequent data leads to identical calls for expanded resources and support to address this critical shortage,” said Bobby Leddy, a spokesperson for the governor.

Our reporting on Michigan’s child care industry relies on data released by Michigan in response to state Freedom of Information Act requests. In March, we requested data that had been self-reported by providers who applied for two rounds of Child Care Stabilization Grants, as part of a $1.4 billion pot of federal relief funds. The data gave us two glimpses into roughly 5,900 child care providers out of a total pool of roughly 7,900 across the state.

Those providers told the state about their current enrollments, as well as about their waiting lists, staffing needs and expenses. We calculated waitlists by county and the number of providers that didn’t apply for grant monies using these figures. We also used enrollment figures to help calculate day care deserts, which previously had been calculated only using licensed capacity — or the maximum number of children that facilities can legally enroll.

Interviews with providers indicated that enrollment numbers offered a more accurate picture of a particular county’s child care needs. This is often because facilities are short-staffed but also because many parents simply can’t afford child care. In some cases, parents said they were too anxious about COVID-19 to return their children to day care facilities, however it’s not clear if those fears are still a main driver given the availability of a vaccine for children as young as 6 months old.

To calculate deserts, we cross-referenced enrollments from the 5,900 grant recipients with the licensed capacity of the 2,000 non-applicants. In this way, we assumed an enrolled-to-capacity scenario for centers for which we had no information.

As a result, the 20 county deserts we identify are a minimum estimate. If we had actual enrollment numbers for every facility in the state, it’s likely that several additional Michigan counties would qualify as deserts; 23 counties are mere rounding errors away from the 3-to-1 threshold.

The data for this analysis, along with source information and data dictionaries, are publicly available on GitHub.

She moved to a Detroit neighborhood for the school. Now her kid is on a waitlist.

2022-08-15T13:26:41+00:00

India Hester is the kind of parent the Detroit school district has been waiting for: Someone who chose to move to the city because of the schools.

In Hester’s case, it was not just any school, but specifically the Montessori program at Palmer Park Preparatory Academy in her neighborhood, one of the specialized programs the district has developed in recent years to try to reverse decades of steep enrollment declines.

But with school starting in just a few weeks, Hester’s daughter doesn’t yet have a spot in the Montessori preschool classroom. She’s on a waitlist, along with 44 other children, including some who live just blocks from the school. Meanwhile, three children who live outside the city got preschool slots.

The district blames a spike in applications and confusion over the enrollment criteria. But some parents in Detroit are directing their frustration at the district for policies that they say cost them a chance to enroll their children in the neighborhood school they wanted. Slots for 4-year-olds were distributed randomly, without preference for city residents or those who applied early.

Some parents warn that the district’s handling of the process risks alienating a group it has courted: Detroit parents choosing between charters, suburban districts, and city schools.

“I wasn’t expecting not to be able to get into a neighborhood school,” said Hester, who plans to send her daughter to private preschool this year and isn’t sure whether she will enroll her daughter in the district next year. “I purchased my home based on these opportunities, and now I’m being denied them.”

The scramble for seats in this pocket of the city is in some senses a welcome sign for the Detroit district, which has lost more than two-thirds of its enrollment in the past two decades, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic. About half of Detroit students now attend charter schools in the city or suburbs. Another 12,000 attend traditional districts in the suburbs.

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti has worked to expand the district’s specialty programs, including Montessoris like the one at Palmer Park, as a way to convince parents to take another look at schools in the city district.

“We are excited about this challenge,” Vitti said in an email, referring to the Montessori enrollment issue. By adding Montessori classrooms at Palmer Park Preparatory Academy, he said he hoped to “attract families directly in the neighborhood.”

But the enrollment process angered parents who moved to the neighborhood near Palmer Park Preparatory Academy in hopes of walking their children to the Montessori program.

Adding to parents’ frustration, some families were wait-listed even though they applied within minutes of the application’s release in March. They say they weren’t told that the district had replaced its longstanding first-come-first-served policy with a random selection process. The district says the change is fairer to working parents whose schedules don’t allow them to fill out the application immediately after it is released.

That shift mirrors a national trend aimed at boosting equity in applications for specialty schools by randomizing the process and allowing districts to focus on neighborhoods. In Philadelphia, the district adopted a lottery system for admission to its selective schools. Districts from Pasadena, California, to New Haven, Connecticut, offer neighborhood preference in such schools.

Vitti says he plans to recommend that the school board change the policy at Palmer Park Prep to prioritize neighborhood children for admission to the Montessori program.

A draw for families

Montessori is a free-flowing teaching method that encourages learning by allowing students to pursue their interests. In recent years, researchers have found preliminary evidence that these programs are academically effective. Long the domain of private schools — and thus of affluent families — the Montessori method has gained traction in public schools nationwide, including in Michigan. The number of public schools in the state with “Montessori” in their name grew from 14 to 27 over the last two decades. That number doesn’t account for Montessori programs housed within a conventional elementary school, such as the one at Palmer Park Prep.

Palmer Park Prep has 413 students enrolled, most of whom attend traditional classrooms. In 2017, the district opened several Montessori classrooms in the building, part of an expansion of Montessori options districtwide. The school is located in the University District, a neighborhood on Detroit’s northern edge that has one of the city’s highest median incomes.

DPSCD’s Montessori programs offer something that’s very difficult to find in Michigan: free, high-quality preschool slots with no income requirements for admission. The state’s high-quality preschool program, Great Start Readiness, uses family income to determine eligibility.

Several parents on the waitlist at the Palmer Park Montessori said they don’t qualify for GSRP because their incomes are too high. (Even for middle-income families, tuition for private child care for a 4-year-old is expensive, typically costing $8,890 per year, according to one recent report.)

The school district was previously able to admit almost all applicants to the Palmer Park Montessori, Vitti said, but interest in all three of the district’s Montessori schools spiked this year. Parents submitted 204 applications for Montessori pre-K classrooms, compared with 176 applications for all grades last year.

Neighborhood benefit?

While school districts must offer seats to all children within their borders, they can establish their own enrollment procedures for specialty programs like the Montessori at Palmer Park. Seats for 4-year-olds aren’t governed by the rules of K-12 enrollment, including Michigan’s Schools of Choice policy.

DPSCD has 16 schools that require applications, some of which require an exam to get in. Among these schools, only the School at Marygrove prioritizes neighborhood children for admittance. Other specialty programs, such as Cass Tech and Renaissance high schools, don’t give city residents preference; 20% of students at those two schools are non-Detroiters.

At the Palmer Park Montessori, of the 57 students who were accepted across all grade levels, eight, or 14% live outside the city. There are 60 students on the waitlist.

Maurice Telesford, whose daughter was admitted to the Montessori preschool at Palmer Park this year, said he chose the school because it is popular among his friends in the University District neighborhood, where he has lived for 12 years. He was born in Southfield but moved to Detroit to support the city, and said he was troubled by the fact that residents weren’t given priority for the program.

“It would be great to hear someone say ‘Hey, we missed this. Here’s what we’re going to try to do to make it right,’” he said.

Some parents in the neighborhood around Palmer Park Prep say they haven’t given up hope that their children will be chosen for admission to the Montessori. Samara Etheridge moved to the area from the other side of Detroit in part because of the program.

“I’m optimistic that I will get that call,” she said.

If it doesn’t arrive, she said she’d rather keep her child out of preschool for a year than send him to another school.

“We’ll try again for kindergarten.”

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Whitmer signs Michigan child care bills that cut red tape, aid providers for infants and toddlers

2022-06-23T21:50:44+00:00

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law a package of changes to Michigan’s child care system that she says will reduce red tape and help make child care more widely available.

The laws enacted Thursday contain a wide range of measures, from minor procedural fixes to major changes in the state’s method of supporting small, home-based providers. While some individual measures might have made some advocates and policymakers uncomfortable, the full package had something for everyone, and it won the backing of a rare coalition of Republicans, Democrats, and child care advocates.

Negotiators in the legislature balanced concerns about safety against the goal of reducing the regulatory burden on providers and increasing the supply of child care in the state. Some advocates who were leery of allowing adults to care for more children at once eventually signed on to the package.

The measures will affect thousands of private child care providers across the state who provide critical support to families and parents, often for minimal compensation. Providers have long argued that their industry is stuck with an unfortunate combination of high regulation and low funding.

Funding for child care is higher these days thanks to federal COVID relief funds. The state recently used federal dollars to invest $1.4 billion in increased payments for child care centers and bonuses for early educators, and to expand the supply of child care in urban and rural communities that often don’t have enough.

The new laws focus on changes to child care regulations, including:

Allowing experienced home-based providers to serve as many as seven children, instead of six; group home providers will be eligible to serve up to 14 children instead of 12.
Requiring the state to make more information public about special investigations into child care programs.
Giving child care providers at least 90 days to comply with new health and safety rules, a formal grace period that doesn’t currently exist.
Giving child care providers a path to operate in multi-use buildings, such as a strip mall with multiple storefronts, something that was difficult under previous regulations.

“Childcare is the silent driver of Michigan’s economy, and we are focused on breaking down barriers and expanding access to safe, quality childcare for families,” said Emily Laidlaw, director of the state’s Child Care Licensing Bureau, in a statement.

The package will also create networks for home-based providers that will offer coaching and technical support to the smallest players in the early education market. The state will pay between $2 million and $5 million to support the networks, depending on how many providers participate.

And the package will change the payment structure for providers who rely on public subsidies to care for infants and toddlers from low-income families. Rather than payments based on attendance, provider networks will be given contracts to care for children ages 0-3, ensuring a steady income source even when children are absent. The goal is to incentivize providers to care for younger children, who are most expensive to care for because they require more adult attention.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan tried preschool for 3-year-olds, but will the idea survive?

2022-06-08T12:38:16+00:00

For two years, a dozen classrooms across Michigan have experimented with a new idea for the state’s early education system: Public preschool for 3-year-olds.

State officials launched the pilot program, called Strong Beginnings, with support from a federal grant, on the premise that high-quality education has profound benefits for all young learners — not just those who are a year away from kindergarten.

But the federal funds are about to expire. And even as Michigan’s state revenues reach record highs, state officials appear poised to let the program end.

That’s a missed opportunity to expand on the success of Michigan’s existing program for 4-year-olds, officials say. Studies show that children’s experience during the developmental window between toddler age and kindergarten, a period that begins at age 3, is critical to their success in school.

“We know that two years of quality preschool has better effects on kindergarten readiness and longer-term academic outcomes in the early elementary years and beyond,” said Richard Lower, director of the Office of Preschool and Out-of-School Time Learning at the Michigan Department of Education.

Michigan’s state-funded preschool, the Great Start Readiness Program, is regularly ranked among the highest-quality in the country, but it only serves 4-year-olds.

“The state has done a great job with 4-year-olds, but our 3-year-olds have been missed as part of that equation,” said Yvonne Donohoe, director of early childhood services for Northwest Education Services, a county education agency formerly known as Traverse Bay Area Intermediate School District. Programs for 3-year-olds “are filled to the brim, and with waiting lists.”

Michigan’s program for 4-year-olds was founded in 1985 with fewer than 700 children and expanded steadily for decades. State officials see Strong Beginnings as a first step on a similar pathway to a robust statewide preschool system for 3-year-olds at risk of low educational attainment.

But with its federal grant expiring, the program is at risk of stalling unless the state steps in with additional funds. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s education budget doesn’t include funds for the pilot. Neither does the current House budget plan.

The Senate’s budget plan includes a placeholder item indicating that some senators want to discuss keeping the 12 classrooms open.

“It is my hope that we can continue Strong Beginnings and offer this programming to more children across Michigan,” said Sen. Wayne Schmidt, R-Traverse City, in a statement. The Strong Beginnings pilot opened classrooms in his district.

Bobby Leddy, a spokesman for Whitmer, said she is “open to discussing options to expand early childhood education programs even further to younger Michiganders and continue making bold investments to support families, put children on a path to success and ultimately strengthen Michigan’s economy.”

Children are eligible for Strong Beginnings or GSRP based on their family’s income and a range of other factors including behavioral challenges.

A handful of cities and states with large public preschool programs, such as New Jersey, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., offer services to 3-year-olds, but that is not the norm nationwide. As of 2019, most states offered public preschool to fewer than 5% of their 3-year-olds. Michigan was among the 19 states that served only 4-year-olds.

Officials in the Michigan Department of Education began developing a preschool model for 3-year-olds in 2017. The department secured enough federal grant money to open the first 10 classrooms beginning in 2020, and added two more the next year. (The grant funds were not pandemic-related.)

The program would mirror GSRP in many ways, including in its requirements for high-quality curriculum and staff credentialing, but it needed to be tweaked for younger children, who have fewer social-emotional skills and often are still learning to use a toilet.

Child care providers in Michigan often struggle to meet the demand from families with younger children, because they are more expensive to care for and there are fewer state resources to support their care.

“I get more calls for 3-year-olds than for 4-year-olds,” said Priscilla Darby, assistant director at Growing Minds Learning Center on the east side of Detroit, one of the providers selected to participate in Strong Beginnings.

On a recent Tuesday in one of the classrooms at Growing Minds, 3-year-olds wriggled on cots as the smells of Taco Tuesday lingered in the room. The classroom looked similar to those serving 4-year-olds in the same building, but with fewer — and smaller — children. They’d just come in from playing outside. Nap time would come after lunch. Some children drew on pads of paper or offered hugs to a handful of adult visitors to the classroom.

Statewide, the 12 classrooms in Strong Beginnings serve fewer than 200 students, a small fraction of GSRP, which served 28,000 students last year. And scaling it up would be expensive.

Based on the results of the pilot, Lower said Strong Beginnings is estimated to cost $13,500 per pupil. That’s far more than the $8,700 minimum funding level for GSRP and K-12 schools, though it’s roughly in line with what such programs typically cost to run. High-quality public preschool costs around $12,700 per pupil, according to a 2021 report from the RAND Corporation.

Strong Beginnings requires more adults per child, which boosts the cost of the program. The GSRP adult-to-child ratio is 1 to 8, versus the Strong Beginnings ratio of 1 to 7.

Plus, Strong Beginnings requires programs to hire a full-time social worker to connect families with the support they need.

For now, state officials are focused on expanding GSRP to more 4-year-olds, and recently dedicated substantial additional funds to that cause.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Mayor Duggan aims to expand preschool, boost Detroit’s influence in early education

2022-05-31T15:37:30+00:00

Mayor Mike Duggan wants to expand the role of City Hall in Detroit’s early childhood education system.

If state lawmakers approve his plan as part of next year’s budget, city officials would choose Detroit child care providers to receive grants from the Great Start Readiness Program, Michigan’s high-quality preschool program for 4-year-olds from low-income families. GSRP is one of the largest sources of public funding for early childhood education in Michigan.

City officials say they plan to use Detroit’s resources, connections, and manpower to aid a statewide effort to expand GSRP and put more 4-year-olds into high-quality preschool programs.

But skeptics say they worry that the change could create confusion and conflict. GSRP programs in Detroit are currently funded through Wayne RESA, a county education agency. Some providers say they may want to shift over to Detroit if the city begins offering GSRP grants, though the city says it wants to fund only new programs.

“Everyone has to be super careful and transparent,” said Denise Smith, implementation director of Hope Starts Here, a Detroit-based early childhood initiative. “This is fertile ground for competition and confusion.”

Duggan’s latest early childhood proposal comes as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer aims to sharply increase statewide enrollment in GSRP using federal COVID relief dollars.

Wayne RESA increased preschool enrollment in Detroit by 854 children this year, bringing citywide enrollment to 4,345, said Lena Montgomery, executive director of early childhood programs for the agency. She said the agency plans to continue expanding preschool enrollment in the city next year.

A budget bill in the Michigan Senate would make a technical change to GSRP that would allow Detroit to distribute funds under the program. Under current law, only county agencies can administer GSRP funding.

It’s not clear when — or whether — the bill might pass amid a tug-of-war over tax cuts between GOP leaders and Whitmer.

“There’s no reason they couldn’t do this,” said Matt Gillard, president of Michigan’s Children, an early childhood advocacy group and former state lawmaker. “On the other hand, anything that says ‘Detroit’ is often controversial politically.”

Still, city officials appear optimistic. Earlier this month, they published a formal request for proposals from child care providers — even though the bill hasn’t passed yet. They say they are aiming to begin enrolling students this fall.

If the law goes through, city officials promised that their preschool programs would supplement, and not replace, those funded by Wayne RESA.

“The goal here is to add seats to the GSRP landscape to expand access to more children and families, not simply shift them from one GSRP grantee to another,” John Roach, a city spokesman, said in an email. He said the city’s legislative proposal includes a clause guaranteeing that Wayne RESA would not lose seats.

Citywide marketing and recruitment efforts, backed by Duggan and contributions from the Kresge Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, could help get more Detroit children enrolled in high-quality preschool, Roach added.

(The Kresge and Kellogg foundations help fund Chalkbeat.)

Duggan has said for years that he wants to bring universal preschool to Detroit. Roach said the new proposal would bring the city closer to that goal.

But even if every Detroit child who is eligible for GSRP were enrolled, the city still wouldn’t have universal pre-K, at least not as it is defined by other major U.S. cities. Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., for instance, offer preschool to 3- and 4-year-olds, with no income eligibility restrictions.

Last week, more than a dozen providers joined a phone call with city officials to learn more about the possibility of receiving GSRP dollars from the city. Some of those already operate GSRP programs via Wayne RESA.

“I like to keep my options open,” said Nina Hodge, owner of Above and Beyond Learning Center, a child care program in Detroit.

She noted that the mayor may waive fees associated with GSRP coaches, who work with teachers to improve their craft. That would make the city program cheaper for providers than Wayne RESA’s.

Some providers say they plan to join GSRP if the city gets involved.

“It changes a lot for me,” said Pageant Atterberry, owner of New Beginnings Child Care, which operates four centers across Detroit with capacity to serve 365 children. She said she already submitted a proposal for GSRP funding from the city, estimating that she could enroll 70 4-year-olds.

While she’s heard from other providers that GSRP dollars come with lots of strings attached, she said she felt she’d have more control if the funds were administered by the city.

“There is a different set of eyes operating on this,” she said. “They’re coming in and asking providers, ‘What do you like or dislike?’”

State officials set strict requirements for GSRP programs that they say are integral to its quality, including a list of approved curriculums and minimum credential requirements for teachers. Even if the city is allowed to distribute GSRP dollars, it could not unilaterally change those requirements.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan to spend $100 million to open new child care programs, tackle pain points

2022-05-16T22:26:06+00:00

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer aims to help open or expand 1,000 child care programs by 2024 using $100 million in federal COVID aid.

The state plans to invest in child care buildings, educator training, and startup grants.

When Whitmer and state lawmakers reached a deal last year to spend $1.4 billion in federal aid to support the state’s child care system, they agreed to use the majority of the funds to pay providers more and make more families eligible for state-subsidized care.

As hundreds of child care providers shut down during the pandemic, state leaders also set aside $100 million to address structural issues such as extremely high rates of teacher turnover, a shortage of appropriate buildings, and a thicket of red tape that made finding a building for a child care center or opening a new business difficult.

Whitmer’s plan lays out a plan for spending those funds, and marks the first step toward distributing the dollars via grants.

“This is exciting because we’re thinking more at a system level about how the pieces fit together,” said Denise Smith, implementation director for Hope Starts Here, a Detroit-based early childhood initiative, referring to Whitmer’s plan.

There are 7,915 child care programs in Michigan, according to data from the Early Childhood Investment Corporation, a nonprofit that contracts with the state to help run the child care system. That’s down from 8,187 roughly a year ago. These programs can range from centers that serve dozens of kids to home-based programs that serve six or fewer.

“Lack of child care options means families are forced to leave the workforce, work fewer hours, or piece together child care options that don’t work very well for their family,” Whitmer said in a statement on Monday. “That doesn’t work for kids, families, or employers.”

The initiative will be divided into four parts:

$51.1 million to renovate and build child care facilities;
$23 million for startup grants to help new providers get up and running before they open;
$11.4 million to recruit, train and retain early educators, including a $4 million apprenticeship program for early educators; and
$14.3 million to speed up a licensing process that many providers say is onerous, and to help providers assess market demands, identify facilities, create a business plan, and comply with health and safety rules.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Struggling with child care in Michigan? Share your story.

2022-05-13T10:00:00+00:00

Karin Cooney’s child care center is licensed to look after 44 kids from Monday to Friday. But for months, she’s only really been able to care for around 30 — a consequence of being strapped for the certified, high-quality staff that have made her center, Angel Care Child Care, one of the most sought-after in Grand Traverse County.

With four more teachers, she might be able to make a dent in her waiting list, where 258 families have signed up in the hopes of enrolling a child. But her teachers seem to be leaving faster than she can hire new ones, part of a long-running crisis of staff turnover in early childhood education.

“It is finally blowing up,” said Cooney, who has worked in child care for 25 years. “I just can’t imagine being the parent of a young child right now.”

In a state where child care is precious, slots in facilities like Cooney’s are like gold, and they’re more valuable than previously known.

In 2021, the number of Michigan’s licensed child care providers statewide fell by 735 — a drastic one-year drop. All told, there are just 314,000 staffable slots available for nearly 560,000 children under the age of 5.

Michigan legislators have directed $1.4 billion of federal relief money toward stabilizing the child care industry. The cash, however, is a one-time fix designed to right the ship during the pandemic.

Absent a long-term policy fix, experts say, the industry is teetering on collapse as the business model for child care continues to break down.

Karin Cooney stands outside her child care center in Traverse City, which has a waiting list of 258 families.

Michigan is also trying to figure out why roughly 2,000 providers didn’t ultimately apply for stabilization grants meant to keep more day cares from going under. Experts said that concern around taxes attached to the grants caused hesitancy, as well as the application being “really complicated.” And day care owners themselves said they were resistant to state involvement in the operation of their facilities.

A consortium of newsrooms led by the nonprofit newsroom MuckRock is requesting child care data through Michigan Freedom of Information requests and conducting a first-of-its-kind data analysis of child care records. They will have stories and data to share in the coming weeks.

MuckRock also wants to hear from families and providers about Michigan’s child care crisis. Below is a form with 10 questions — some optional, some required but none for publication. You can also email the newsroom directly at childcare@muckrock.com or call and leave a voicemail at (401) 830-2344.

Having trouble viewing this form? Go here.

Luca Powell is a reporter with the Traverse City Record-Eagle. You can reach him at lucapowell1@gmail.com

Mohar Chaterjee is a reporter with MuckRock and Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation. You can reach her at mc4958@columbia.edu

Home-based preschool hits roadblock in Michigan budget talks

2022-05-06T16:29:41+00:00

Michigan’s free, high-quality preschool program has long operated exclusively in classrooms of 16 students. Now Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wants to find out if the program would work in smaller, home-based settings, which are more accessible to many families.

A proposed pilot program is part of Whitmer’s plan to use federal relief funds and stronger-than-expected state revenues to invest more in education and public health.

But Republican lawmakers hammering out budget proposals have instead proposed tax cuts and smaller spending increases on education.

The GOP-led Senate passed a budget proposal on Wednesday that calls for spending $62.1 million less on preschool and child care than Whitmer proposed, and it leaves out her pilot project to expand home-based care.

The outcome of their budget negotiations will have a large impact on early childhood education in Michigan.

Whitmer’s proposed preschool pilot would provide $5 million to try out the state’s preschool system — known as the Great Start Readiness Program — in home-based day cares that have long been excluded from the program.

Advocates and providers say the pilot would help the Great Start Readiness Program reach more students as the program aims to expand using federal COVID funds. At the same time, they hope to counter the view that home-based providers can’t match the quality of larger child care centers.

“It would give us a chance to show that we’re out here kicking butt just like the center-based providers,” said Kai Young, who operates Squiggles & Giggles Child Care out of her home in Detroit. Young has been in business for 29 years and her program has a perfect 5-star quality rating from the state.

Her reaction to the prospect of participating in the pilot: “Where do I sign up?”

But the GOP-led House and Senate didn’t include funds for the pilot in their budget recommendations.

Whitmer and GOP lawmakers agree that the state should spend an additional $121 million to keep the Great Start Readiness Program funding at its current levels, replacing one-time federal funds that were used to expand the program during the pandemic.

Beyond that, however, GOP leaders nixed several of Whitmer’s early childhood proposals in their draft budgets, including:

Increased funding for the Great Start Readiness Program (separate from the at-home pilot) by $33 million.
An extra $9.5 million to support child care providers.
An extra $7.1 million for Early On, which supports children ages up to age 3 with disabilities.
$7.5 million to expand enrollment drives for early childhood programs.

Wayne Schmidt, Republican chair of the Senate committee on education appropriations, didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

Early childhood education has often enjoyed bipartisan support in Michigan. Matt Gillard, president of Michigan’s Children, a nonprofit advocacy group, said he believes some Republicans support aspects of Whitmer’s preschool and child care proposals.

“It’s disappointing to see the legislature come out with what we view as negotiating positions masquerading as serious budget proposals,” he said. “They’re more interested in setting them up for tax negotiations than having a thoughtful discussion of these proposals.”

Whitmer and legislative leaders will negotiate the budget over the next several months, with the aim of finishing the process over the summer.

Koby Levin is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 schools and early childhood education. Contact Koby at klevin@chalkbeat.org.

Michigan is sending a $1,000 ‘thank you’ to early educators. Is it enough?

2021-11-09T23:34:42+00:00

Many early educators in Michigan will soon receive $1,000 bonuses, a ‘thank you’ to thousands of workers across the state who stuck with challenging, low-paid, and essential jobs through the scariest days of the pandemic.

Child care providers are welcoming the money, which comes from federal COVID aid, even as they say they are struggling mightily to hire for those same jobs.

“I’ve tried everything,” said Beverly Hogan, director of three child care centers in the Detroit area. “They might send a resume, then no call, no show.”

In an effort to attract more staff, Hogan increased entry-level pay in her centers in recent months by $4 an hour, putting it at $13 — far below the Michigan median hourly wage of $19.

Labor shortages in various industries are making headlines as the pandemic reshapes the economy. For the child care sector, a tight labor market only adds to profound problems with turnover and hiring that long predate the pandemic.

“We’ve been sounding the alarm for years now that child care workers are completely underpaid and undervalued,” said Matt Gillard, president of Michigan’s Children, a nonprofit advocacy group. “A $1,000 bonus is not only appropriate but overdue. But it’s not a long-term solution. We fundamentally have to change the program so that we can make this a profession that’s viable.”

The bonuses will be paid to full-time child care workers or administrators currently on payroll at centers or home-based programs. Part-time employees are eligible for $500.

Providers can also apply to receive up to $1,000 for incentive payments for new hires.

A large boost in federal child care spending in response to the pandemic helped most programs remain open despite sharply reduced enrollment and increased costs related to COVID prevention. At least several hundred Michigan child care programs, or 6% of the total, closed during the pandemic, fewer than was feared in the spring of 2020.

More financial help is on the way. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced this week that providers can now apply for a share of $350 million in stabilization funds that will go toward bonuses and hiring incentives. Another round of grants is expected to go out in 2022.

The state also used federal funds to increase payments to providers who serve low-income children. And income requirements for the subsidies were raised, meaning more families qualify for support with child care tuition.

But those funding increases are temporary and advocates say larger, structural changes are needed. A major additional influx of federal support for early childhood education is on the agenda in Congress, which is weighing a proposed expansion of the U.S. social safety net that includes child care provisions. But the fate of that legislation is uncertain as Democrats hold a narrow majority.

The economics of the child care industry are largely determined by government funding levels, especially in low-income communities where parents typically can’t afford private care costs that can be on par with University of Michigan tuition.

Providers have used COVID relief funding to increase pay and benefits for their staff, but they often can’t compete with other hourly industries.

“I love my job, but from the outside looking in, who wants to teach?” said Monique Snyder, director of Brainiac’s Clubhouse Child Care Center. “People say, ‘You want me to sit in this classroom with these kids and make $32,000 per year? I could go to Amazon and do that.’”

How Michigan families will benefit from a $1.4 billion investment in child care

2021-09-22T21:57:11+00:00

Tens of thousands more Michigan families soon will have access to subsidized child care. In parts of the state where child care is in short supply, new funds will help open new centers. Existing centers, many of which struggled to stay open during the pandemic, also will get an infusion of stabilization funds.

Those are just a few features of a $1.4 billion investment in Michigan’s child care system. The new state budget, which draws heavily on federal COVID aid dollars, is expected to have an immediate impact on families with young children, and to close funding gaps in the early education system that have destabilized the early childhood workforce and left wide swathes of the state in “child care deserts.”

“This is a huge step in the right direction,” said Matt Gillard, president of nonprofit advocacy group Michigan’s Children. “The need for investment in our public child care systems is clearly being seen.”

The budget passed the GOP-led legislature on Wednesday with bipartisan support. While Michigan’s multi-billion dollar budget surplus meant there were fewer tough spending decisions to make, advocates also noted that the state’s child care programs have long enjoyed bipartisan support. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said in a statement that she plans to sign the bill, which would go into effect Oct. 1.

Business groups have thrown their political weight behind expanded child care programs, arguing that affordable care frees more adults to enter the workforce. Parents — especially women — stopped working in large numbers during the pandemic, in part because of a lack of affordable child care.

Up to 105,000 additional Michigan children will be eligible for child care subsidies under the proposed budget. That’s more than a threefold increase.

Child care measures included in the budget proposal include:

$700 million in stabilization grants, which will go directly to child care providers to cover costs and help them stay open.
$108 million to increase income eligibility for the child care subsidy program to 185% of the poverty level from 150% through fall 2023, after which it will drop to 160% of poverty.
$36.5 million to contract with providers who care for infants and toddlers. Care for the youngest children is in short supply, in part because it is expensive — an adult can only legally care for 3 or 4 infants at a time. Through contracts — as opposed to biweekly reimbursement — the state can provide more stable funding.
$100 million to help open new child care centers in areas where there aren’t enough early childhood classrooms and to expand existing centers.
$158 million to increase reimbursement rates by 30% for providers who participate in the child care subsidy program.
$222 million to further boost reimbursement rates on a temporary basis. Rates will increase an additional 50% for 6 months, 40% for the next 6 months, and 30% until the funds are used up.
$30 million to pay child care workers a $1,000 bonus.

Education advocates say that high-quality, intensive early education has a lasting positive impact on a child’s life, strengthening their performance in school and reducing odds that they will struggle with substance abuse.

The new budget pours $1.4 billion into Michigan’s largest child care program, Child Development and Care, a system of subsidies that cover private care for low-income families. It comes after the state expanded a separate child care program, Great Start Readiness Program, a state-run free preschool for 4-year-olds from low-income families.

“This is going to be a tremendous investment in supply and demand sides,” said Dawne Bell, executive director of Early Childhood Investment Corporation, a Michigan nonprofit that works with the state on early childhood issues.

Bell noted that much of the new funding will expire within three years, and that several key changes to the child care subsidies — including the expanded eligibility — come with expiration dates.

“Yesterday’s budget deal is historic, and yet we deeply hope that this is a down payment on continued investment in our youngest children,” she said. “COVID-19 has brought into focus how critical and essential child care is to the state’s economy and to future generations and to working families.”

Once the budget is passed, state officials will face a tight timeline to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars. They have just three months to distribute $700 million in stabilization grants, which are intended to cover operating costs and help keep child care centers open. Michigan has lost 6% of its child care providers during the pandemic, according to data from the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, though Bell said that is likely an undercount.

Even if the new funds manage to stabilize or increase the state’s child care supply, the benefits to Michigan children could be muted at first by the pandemic. Some providers say their enrollment is still down as parents continue to shield their children from the risk of COVID. Meanwhile, wages for child care workers remain low, and providers say they are struggling to hire teachers.

Some details about the new funds have yet to be hammered out by state officials.

Nina Hodge, a child care advocate and owner of Above and Beyond Learning Center in Detroit, said it’s not yet clear which areas will be deemed to have child care shortages and be eligible for extra funding.

“Who has access to this? Who’s going to be able to get the money?” she asked.

‘Tiny’ bathrooms, big curriculum: New Marygrove early childhood center boosts Detroit neighborhood

2021-09-17T21:33:42+00:00

When Ariyah Small came home after the first day of school last week at the new, highly touted Marygrove Early Education Center, there was one small thing that had her excited.

“I love my new school,” Ariyah, 3, told her mother, Antoinette Reid, who recounted the conversation Friday as she spoke during the grand opening of the new center.

“I’m like, ‘What about it do you love?’” Reid recalled asking her daughter. “She said, ‘They got tiny bathrooms and I can use it all by myself.’”

The tiny bathrooms are just small features of this big new center on the campus of the former Marygrove College in northwest Detroit. What is most significant about the new $22 million 28,000-square-foot building, is what it represents.

The early childhood center is part of a unique “cradle to career” initiative that was announced in 2018 and already includes the School at Marygrove, a high school operated by the Detroit Public Schools Community District. The initiative will eventually also include a kindergarten to eighth grade school. Construction on the early childhood center, which is being operated by Starfish Family Services, began in 2019. The Kresge Foundation (a Chalkbeat funder), expects to invest $75 million into the cradle to career project, including for the construction of the new center.

Speakers Friday described the opening of the center as an “historic” moment for Detroit, in part, because it represents a full-scale effort to create quality early childhood options that every child in the city deserves.

“It’s not just about the building,” said Wendy Lewis Jackson, the Detroit program managing director at Kresge.

Jackson said “it” is about the curriculum that was developed by Starfish and University of Michigan, about the center serving as a resource for other early childhood providers in the neighborhoods surrounding Marygrove, and about the center providing “essential support for children from birth through higher education and onwards towards a career.”

Principal Celina Byrd poses with student Ariyah Small at the grand opening of Marygrove Early Education Center in Detroit.

The curriculum is focused on literacy, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and social justice.

The cradle to career effort at Marygrove has also spurred development in the surrounding neighborhoods, said Rip Rapson, Kresge president and CEO.

“It is undertakings like these that will define the Detroit of the future, that will give the city’s residents reason to believe that their neighborhood will offer the kinds of opportunities that every citizen has a right to expect and that every citizen deserves,” Rapson said.

Reid toured the new facility in July. It features 12 large classrooms, three interior courtyards that bring in natural light and a connection to the outdoors, and areas dedicated to children’s health and holistic development.

“When I toured the center, I was like finally, someone gets it,” she said. “The building was designed with the whole child in mind, which I’m very appreciative of … Inside is cheerful and just inviting. I like the space for the teachers, for the families. And sometimes it’s the small things that matter, and it was the laundry facilities for me that make the difference.”

The cradle to career initiative is one of the biggest efforts to emerge from Hope Starts Here, an ambitious project publicly launched in 2017 with funding from Kresge and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (also a Chalkbeat funder). The goal of this 10-year project is to ensure that by 2027, Detroit is a city that puts its children first by taking steps such as increasing the number of children in quality preschool programs.

Mayor Mike Duggan, who has been a strong advocate for quality early childhood education programs for all Detroit children, said the Marygrove effort took “what could have been a tragedy for the city,” when the college closed its doors in 2019, and “turned it into a cause for joy.”

He echoed Rapson’s comments about how the effort has spurred growth in the surrounding communities. Duggan said property values in the Marygrove neighborhood and the adjacent Fitzgerald neighborhood have grown faster than any others in the city. Storefronts that were once boarded up are now open for business.

It “has helped the rebirth of northwest Detroit,” Duggan said.

Michigan’s free preschool program is expanding. Will community providers benefit?

2021-09-15T22:09:47+00:00

Early educator Toya Taylor faced a dilemma. Earlier this summer, state leaders announced a major expansion of the Great Start Readiness Program, Michigan’s flagship free preschool program. Would she join?

Taylor, owner of Reign Development Center in Detroit, left the program years earlier, frustrated by needing state approval for her center’s budget.

“At the end of the year you’re like, ‘Man, I worked really hard, and I didn’t really get compensated’,” she said. “How can you drive the bus, do the marketing, be the lead teacher, and they say, ‘Oh, you can’t get paid for that’?”

GSRP is one of the largest and most reliable funding streams available to providers in low-income communities. Taylor, who began working in child care as a teenager, acknowledged that it improved the quality of education at her center, which opened in 2017. “High quality often equates with low or even no profits,” she said. “Business owners must ultimately make a very difficult decision.”

But, when local officials called this summer to ask if she’d take some of the new GSRP funds, she said yes. Enrollment at Reign had dropped due to COVID, cutting into the center’s bottom line. The new funding would help pay for teachers with bachelor’s degrees.

“As an owner, you want high quality, you want to pay your staff top dollar, so you don’t really have a choice,” she said.

Taylor’s decision won’t just bring more money to her center — it could also help steady the child care sector in Michigan’s lowest-income communities, which face twin risks from the pandemic and the potentially destabilizing effects of COVID relief funding.

If Taylor and her peers opt out of GSRP, they would likely end up caring for fewer 4-year-olds and more infants and toddlers. That would send their costs skyrocketing, since younger children require more intensive supervision and lower teacher-to-student ratios. The already fraught economics of providing child care in Michigan’s low-income communities could become untenable, potentially pushing veteran providers out of an industry that is already sorely short-staffed.

That’s one reason advocates scrambled to sign up community-based providers for GSRP when the state announced a plan to invest $168 million — a 67% increase — in the 36-year-old program this year.

In Wayne County, which contains Detroit, local officials launched a blitz of phone calls and advertisements aimed at private providers.

“That is where families go,” said Lena Montgomery, director of Early Childhood and English Learner services for Wayne RESA, an education agency that distributes GSRP funding in the county. “They are already using those sites for children who are infants and toddlers, and this allows them to continue their care in that environment.”

The efforts in Wayne County showed some initial success: Of the 55 new GSRP classrooms that have been added in the county so far, more than two-thirds are being run by private child care centers, with the rest going to school districts and charter schools.

But advocates say that the state should go much further to help community-based providers access GSRP funding.

Michigan requires that 30% of GSRP dollars go to private providers, but that’s a statewide average — many counties fall far below that mark. Some providers argue that the 30% requirement has effectively been treated as a cap, not a minimum.

Veteran private providers in Detroit often have deep community ties that set them apart from K-12 school districts, said Denise Smith, implementation director for Hope Starts Here, an early childhood initiative in the city.

Family engagement occurs more naturally in programs that specialize in young children, in part because these children need to be dropped off by a parent, she said. “More authentic engagement is happening in those spaces than is happening in” K-12 districts.

Far more community-based providers would be eligible for GSRP, Smith added, if the state allowed home-based child care operations to participate. Only larger centers with quality ratings of at least three stars out of five can currently apply for GSRP dollars.

Statewide data about where the GSRP expansion dollars are going won’t be available until October, when enrollment in the program is set to close.

No matter who receives the GSRP funds, advocates say the expansion — which is being fueled by federal COVID relief funds — is good news for Michigan 4-year-olds.

Previous funding increases for the program allowed classrooms to move to full-time instruction rather than half-day, but state leaders say the goal this time is to reach more kids — specifically the roughly 22,000 children who are eligible for the program but aren’t enrolled.

Several studies show that GSRP sends children to kindergarten with more knowledge than peers from similar backgrounds who didn’t attend the program. Researchers consistently praise the program for its use of research-based best practices, such as its requirement that teachers hold at least a bachelor’s degree. In 2018, a study of rising kindergartners showed that GSRP had produced larger gains in math than the six other states in the study.

GSRP is free to families earning less than 250% of the federal poverty line, or $66,250 for a family of four. But, participation isn’t mandatory. The program had roughly 64,000 seats statewide in 2019-20.

Plenty of challenges remain for Michigan’s early childhood sector. Enrollment declines have persisted in many centers throughout the pandemic. Many parents dropped out of the workforce over the last 18 months and can care for their children at home, and others are unwilling to risk a COVID infection for their children given the lack of a vaccine for children under 12.

Before the pandemic, some locations did not have enough classrooms to meet demand. Now, some providers report that filling the new GSRP slots has been a challenge.

“We’re seeing that a lot of children aren’t returning to the program right now,” said Kenosha Witherspoon, owner of Someplace Else Learning Factory in Detroit.

She was approved to open two GSRP classrooms for 32 children, but only six 4-year-olds have enrolled so far. She suspects that some parents with school-aged children are sending their 4-year-olds to school-based GSRP programs with their older siblings.

Enrollment is lower than pre-pandemic levels at Little Scholars Child Development Center, also in Detroit, but the director said she’s already seeing the benefits of the new funding. The center purchased a new curriculum, director Shirley Wright said, and GSRP will cover part of rent and expenses, freeing up money to hire highly qualified teachers.

While Wright said she’d like to see several changes to GSRP, such as allowing home-based child care providers to participate, her main critique is that the program doesn’t reach far enough.

“Why not 3-year-olds and 2-year-olds?” she asked. “What about starting even earlier?”

Leftover child care money gives a boost to cash-strapped Michigan providers

2021-07-27T22:09:01+00:00

Michigan child care providers who serve low-income communities are set to receive an influx of federal child care dollars that went unused during the pandemic.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a bill this week that will send $105 million to child care centers and homes, effectively giving them a retroactive 40% increase in state payments for their work over the last year.

The bill also requires the state to pay providers based on enrollment rather than daily attendance from June to September 2021, a measure that advocates say will provide some added financial stability to an industry where razor-thin margins are the norm.

The money isn’t coming out of the federal COVID relief packages enacted by Congress during the pandemic. Michigan has roughly $1.4 billion in relief funds to spend on its child care system — a potentially transformative sum, advocates say — but lawmakers left for their summer recess with the money unallocated.

Instead, child care providers are receiving funds that weren’t used because of low enrollments during the pandemic. If the money isn’t distributed by the end of September, Michigan would have to return it to the federal government. That has happened before, said Gilda Jacobs, president of the Michigan League for Public Policy and a former state lawmaker.

She cheered state lawmakers for passing the bill, which went through with bipartisan support. Nearly half of Michigan families live in areas with child care shortages, according to MLPP research, and it appears that COVID has made the situation even worse.

“A big part of the reason so many people haven’t gotten back into the workforce — especially moms, and Black and brown moms — is because of a lack of child care,” Jacobs said. “They are a group of folks who really have their lives improved when these child care businesses get back on their feet.”

Providers say they desperately need more funding to pay qualified staff. Despite the well-documented importance of early education and the training needed to work with young children, Michigan child care workers make $12.30 an hour on average — less than housekeepers and parking attendants.

The financial strain is greatest on providers in low-income communities who serve families that rely on Michigan’s subsidized child care program, which pays some of the lowest rates in the nation.

“Under the current structure and the amount we’re paying them it’s next to impossible for them to compete for employees,” said Matt Gillard, president of Michigan’s Children, an advocacy group.

Even before the pandemic, Michigan’s child care subsidy program, known as Child Development and Care, was largely funded by the federal government. The state has three years to spend the money it receives each year. But with enrollment down, there was a lot left over.

For child care programs closed due to declining enrollment, the retroactive funds are arriving too late. Gillard said that the state should have moved more quickly to distribute the surplus funds.

Money has been tight throughout the pandemic at Christios Child Care and Academy, a group of two child care centers in Romulus and Detroit. Together, the centers enrolled 135 children pre-pandemic, almost all of whom rely on the state subsidy program.

These days, daily attendance hovers around 34 with COVID fears looming in communities that have low vaccination rates, such as Detroit.

Enrollment — the number of students signed up for child care at the center — is significantly higher, but with parents spending more time at home and COVID fears rising due to the delta variant, attendance is spotty, said owner Princess Dobbins.

Currently, she is only paid for the hours students actually spend at her center. But under the new law, she’ll be paid based on enrollment through September.

Even more significantly, Christios will receive a 40% retroactive boost on the state payments she received throughout the 2020-2021 fiscal year. She said she doesn’t know how much money to expect from the new law, but she thinks it will make a big difference.

“At this point any money is a blessing because our enrollment is still down,” she said. “I’ll continue to strive, and hopefully by the time the school year starts we’ll start seeing a little increase in enrollment.”

Michigan child care providers struggle as lawmakers recess

2021-07-01T22:11:43+00:00

Michigan’s K-12 schools and free pre-K program for 4-year-olds got historic funding boosts in a budget deal reached Wednesday in Lansing.

But $1.4 billion in federal coronavirus relief for child care won’t be distributed until after state lawmakers return from their weeks-long summer recess, even as business leaders warn that a stable child care supply is essential to Michigan’s economic recovery.

Months after the Biden administration sent $39 billion to states to help child care providers weather the pandemic, some states have begun distributing their share of the funds.

Lansing lawmakers have yet to follow suit. That’s left private child care providers, who account for most child care slots statewide, to struggle with declining enrollment and relentless teacher turnover on their own.

The need is urgent, especially in low-income communities, said Shirley Howard, owner of Pencil Palace Daycare Nursery in west Detroit, one of the oldest daycares in the city.

“We don’t want to run out of payroll,” she said. “When [children] don’t show up, it affects our budget. Because of the community we serve, we don’t charge tuition when they don’t come.”

Nearly three quarters of Howard’s families qualify for the state’s child care subsidy, which covers most or all of the cost of care for low-income families. That means Pencil Palace, like many private child care centers in Michigan’s low-income communities, is largely dependent on state payments tied to daily attendance. Even when enrollment is at normal levels, advocates say the payments are too small to cover the costs of quality care.

Educators and researchers broadly agree that early learning is a linchpin of students’ success in K-12 schools and beyond. Yet access to child care is starkly limited in many parts of Michigan, and low pay ensures that teachers turn over constantly, reducing the quality of care.

One bright spot for the state is the Great Start Readiness Program, a free, high-quality preschool program that got a 40% funding boost in the education budget passed Wednesday. But that program only serves 4-year-olds, and there is evidence that its growth has hurt the private child care sector by removing students who require less supervision and are thus cheaper to care for.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Jim Stamas, a Republican of Midland, defended the decision to prioritize passing the K-12 budget over allocating the federal COVID aid, saying lawmakers still needed to “thoughtfully consider the once-in-a-lifetime federal funding we have received and how we best utilize them to make a lasting improvement in investment in our state.”

Advocates noted that federal aid for child care has already been allocated in other states, including Kentucky, Iowa, and Montana.

“If we’re going to get back to work, then we know child care is vital,” said Denise Smith, a child care advocate and implementation director of Hope Starts Here. “We have to make sure that they’re able to provide the services needed. And right now they’re just hobbling along. The longer we wait, the worse it gets. I don’t want to lose another program.”

The budget passed Wednesday offers some clues as to how Michigan will spend its remaining $1.4 billion in federal COVID relief funding for child care. Lawmakers directed the Michigan Department of Education to begin designing a grant program for early childhood providers, which would use about half of the funding under current proposals.

Rep. Jack O’Malley, a Republican from northwest Michigan said he believes there’s already agreement about some parts of the spending plan, including a shift to paying providers based on their enrollment rather than daily attendance. That change, long sought by providers, protects against sharp, unexpected declines in state funding.

But other aspects of the plan are still up in the air. Some advocates hope the state will expand the child care subsidy program to more families using federal dollars then maintain the larger program using state dollars once the federal aid runs out.

O’Malley disagrees: “We can’t sustain that,” he said. “To do that, we’re going to have to take money from someplace else, and no one wants their budget cut.”

There is also ongoing debate about a set of bills O’Malley helped introduce last month, which reduce some regulations around child care and create programs to open centers in underserved areas.

The time for debate has passed, said Peranica Williams, owner of My Nanny Extended Child Care Services, a home-based child care program in Detroit. She’s had to reduce her services during the pandemic, which means less money to pay teachers and provide learning materials that ensure students receive high-quality care.

“They don’t pay enough [in child care subsidies], and for them to be going on vacation and not even looking at it, it’s letting us know that child care is not important,” she said.

“Although we know that if we don’t have child care, parents can’t go to work.”

Whitmer’s plan for $1.4 billion in COVID aid includes raise for Michigan early educators

2021-06-14T20:08:28+00:00

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wants to use federal COVID relief funds to overhaul Michigan’s child care subsidy and pay bonuses to early educators. The subsidy helps families living in poverty pay for private child care and is the state’s largest child care initiative. Providers have long argued that it is badly broken.

Many of the changes sought by providers are included in Whitmer’s plan, which draws on $1.4 billion in federal child care funds. It is part two of Whitmer’s proposal to beef up Michigan’s child care offerings by tapping federal coronavirus funds and the state’s $3.5 billion budget surplus. Last week, she laid out a proposal to dramatically expand the Great Start Readiness Program (GSRP), the state’s highly rated free preschool system for 4-year-olds.

Under the plan announced Monday, payments to providers would be larger and more reliable, allowing them to build budgets and increase pay for staffers. Income limits would be raised for families participating in the program, meaning more children would be eligible for subsidized care.

“When parents have access to affordable, available, reliable, and safe child care — it is transformative for Michigan’s economy,” Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, a Democrat, said in a statement. “When we invest into our child care system, we’re allowing … parents to work and be even more productive and provide an environment that children can thrive in.”

Funding for the plan will come from emergency coronavirus aid dollars approved during the Trump and Biden administrations. Michigan must spend the last of the funds by 2024.

The Republican-led legislature must sign off on Whitmer’s plans to spend the federal funds. The two sides agreed last month to negotiate over budget issues after months of political hostilities. Child care issues have generally had the support of both parties in Michigan, with Republicans sponsoring the last major expansion of GSRP.

Republican leaders didn’t immediately return requests for comment. Whitmer and top Republicans plan to unveil “bipartisan plans to increase child-care access” on Tuesday.

Michigan’s child care subsidies served 48,000 children in 2019, more than other government-funded programs such as GSRP and Head Start.

The subsidies are paid to private providers, from tiny home-based preschools to child care centers with multiple locations, to help parents with low incomes pay for care. Payments to providers are among the nation’s lowest, and teacher turnover is unrelenting. Michigan child care workers make $12.30 an hour on average — less than housekeepers and parking attendants.

Payments to child care providers would increase 20% under Whitmer’s plan, which experts say would help address low wages for early educators.

Many centers were only able to keep their doors open with the help of emergency federal grants. The pandemic only tightened the financial pinch for providers. More parents stayed home with their children, and enrollment plummeted.

Among other changes, the plan would:

Provide more than $600 million in grants directly to providers to help them reopen or remain open.
Open the subsidies to families earning $53,000 annually for a family of four, between Aug. 1, 2021 and Sep. 30, 2023. Beginning in October 2023, income eligibility for the program would drop to $41,920 annually for a family of four — still a 6% increase over the previous eligibility level.
Provide $500 bonuses to child care workers every three months through September 2022. K-12 teachers received a one-time $500 bonus through an earlier budget deal.
Pay child care providers based on enrollment, not attendance. This change has been long sought by providers, who say they seldom know how much state funding they will receive because attendance fluctuates week to week, a phenomenon that got worse during the pandemic.

Child care advocates applauded the plan, which was released on Monday.

“Governor Whitmer’s announcement today marks a historic opportunity to truly prioritize the needs of young children and their working parents,” Matt Gillard, president of Michigan’s Children, said in a statement. “For far too long, Michigan has trailed behind other states when it comes to supporting investment in our child care system.”

Whitmer proposal would put 22,000 more Michigan 4-year-olds into free, high-quality preschool

2021-06-08T19:05:00+00:00

Michigan’s flagship preschool program for 4-year-olds from low income families would get a $405 million expansion in the next three years under a new proposal from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Many low-income families in Michigan struggle to access high-quality child care. There aren’t enough slots to begin with, and many existing programs receive so little state funding that they struggle to pay staff a living wage. Teacher turnover in early childhood classrooms is unrelenting.

Whitmer said her plan would increase enrollment in the Great Start Readiness Program, a state program that has earned high marks for quality from education researchers, by roughly one third, or 22,000 students. She said the goal is to open new GSRP classrooms for students who are currently waiting for spots.

“Twenty-two thousand kids are eligible for GSRP right now but are not served,” Whitmer said during a press conference Tuesday. “Investments in preschool have massive benefits down the line.”

The proposal relies on state money in addition to federal coronavirus relief funds, and will need support from the Republican-controlled state legislature.

After a year of political hostilities, the two sides agreed last month to negotiate over budget issues, including how to spend $1.4 billion dollars in federal aid for early childhood education. They are working with a massive surplus in the state budget thanks to the infusion of federal money and a healthier-than-expected economy.

Early childhood education has been a rare bipartisan political issue in Michigan and nationwide. Business lobbyists have lined up in support of child care programs for their workers, while education leaders point to evidence that investing in early education pays dividends in learning and life outcomes. The Great Start Readiness Program got its last major infusion of funding when Rick Snyder, a Republican, was governor, and the state legislature was dominated by the GOP.

Matt Gillard, director of the advocacy group Michigan’s Children, said that expansion helped GSRP programs transition to all-day classes, but it wasn’t enough to clear waiting lists for the program statewide. The program is free to families making less than 250% of the federal poverty line, or $66,250 for a family of four, but tens of thousands of eligible families are not using the program, and in some cases are stuck on waiting lists.

Child care advocates applauded the proposed expansion of available slots, but warned that the rollout of the funds had the potential to harm existing child care providers if not done carefully.

School districts and large child care centers have typically won the right to offer GSRP programs, excluding smaller providers from a large, stable funding stream. Smaller providers may lack the trained staff or infrastructure to go through the process of becoming a GSRP provider, which comes with strict requirements for staff credentialing and teacher-to-student ratios.

Advocates worry that a major new investment in the program could make those inequalities worse if the big players vacuum up most of the new funding and smaller providers lose 4-year-olds to the new programs.

“It’s a good thing when we have available high quality seats for our children,” said Denise Smith, implementation director of Hope Starts Here, an early childhood initiative. “I also want to make sure… that we are making sure that all program types can take advantage of the opportunity.”

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said expanding the program would add about 3,500 seats in Detroit, effectively ensuring that every 4-year-old in the city would be able to attend a free preschool program.

“Let’s be honest, third grade reading scores in this state are not what we want them to be,” Duggan said. “In Detroit, they’re particularly troubling. There is nothing we could do more to give our children a better start for education than as a 4-year-old to have full day pre-K.”

Duggan said his administration would create a new office focused on early childhood education, which would coordinate an effort to add 100 GSRP classrooms in the city and attempt to spread the new funding to smaller providers.

If the plan is passed, city officials would reach out to existing child care providers with a quality rating of at least three out of five stars and offer to help them open new GSRP classrooms, he said.

Whitmer’s plan also includes $50 million to help expand the early childhood education system through:

Grants to providers to add the estimated 1,500 additional classrooms that may be needed at an estimated cost of $22.5 million.
Adding $15 million for early childhood education transportation in addition to the $10 million currently dedicated to transportation.
Scholarships for early educators and money for training and curriculum, an expense of $7 million
Outreach efforts costing $5.5 million to let parents know about the free programs in their area.

Editor’s note: June 10, 2021: An earlier version of this story overstated the number of families on waiting lists for the Great Start Readiness Program. Only some of the 22,000 eligible families who are not using GSRP are on waiting lists.

Can Michigan seize a $1.4 billion chance to ‘transform’ its child care system?

2021-04-27T21:11:13+00:00

Michigan’s child care sector is gearing up for perhaps its highest stakes policy debate ever, with $1.4 billion in federal coronavirus aid on the line.

Just about everyone involved in caring for Michigan’s youngest students agrees the money is badly needed. Shortages of child care slots, meager reimbursement rates paid to providers in low-income communities, and disastrously high teacher turnover all highlight problems with the current system.

“This is a huge opportunity for child care,” said Matt Gillard, executive director of Michigan’s Children, a nonprofit advocacy group. “We need to think boldly about how we can transform the system.”

Whether the money leads to lasting improvements for the state’s youngest students remains to be seen. As in states across the country, advocates and lawmakers are scrambling to lay plans for the unprecedented investment in child care as the state also prepares for major new spending in K-12 schools and other sectors.

Advocates have put forward extensive lists of proposals for the money, but only a handful of their suggestions made it into a supplemental budget bill proposed by the state House, which would distribute most of the federal dollars directly to providers to cover operating costs. The debate is wide open, however, as that bill appears likely to get caught up in the ongoing standoff between GOP leaders and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Everyone seems to agree that providers need more support. Various proposals, including from the Republican-controlled state legislature, call for some amount of “hazard pay” for providers and their staff, which could be paid retroactively for the work they’ve done under duress throughout the pandemic. Most K-12 teachers received $500 in hazard pay earlier this year.

“They put themselves on the line,” said Denise Smith, implementation director of Hope Starts Here, a Detroit-based early childhood initiative, of child care providers during the pandemic. “They risked their lives, and we believe there needs to be recognition of that.”

The state has $1.1 billion to spend on child care from the third round of COVID-19 relief, plus $300 million left over from the second round. That will bring the total federal pandemic aid for Michigan child care to roughly $1.6 billion, including the $215 million in first-round funding the state already spent on grants to help child care providers stay open.

Here are some of the key questions about how Michigan will spend its federal funding for child care.

Should the money be spent right away?

A budget proposal making its way through the Michigan legislature would allocate all of the money immediately. Much of the money would be granted to child care providers for operating expenses. The proposal would make some changes to the reimbursement process that providers have long sought, but the changes would expire within a year.

Nina Hodge, a child care provider in Detroit who is involved with Providers for Change, an advocacy group, welcomes those changes but says the state should plan to extend them over a longer period.

“We’re going to be feeling the effects of this pandemic for a few years,” she said. “Why not spread it out?”

In the aftermath of the Great Recession more than a decade ago, state leaders were leery of using money to cover recurring expenses. Gillard, who was then a state lawmaker, said he thinks it was a mistake to spend the millions for Michigan’s child care programs in one-time grants.

“Most of us look back at that as hugely a missed opportunity,” he said. “This notion of one-time funding and every decision being based on sustainability really hindered any sort of longer term thinking.”

The current proposal follows the same formula: It would send more than $700 million directly to child care providers.

Gillard believes the money should be used to augment existing programs over the next several years. For example, the state could increase its regular payments to child care providers.

“Two years from now, three years from now, if we’re looking for more resources to fund these programs, let’s make the argument then” that they should continue with the same level of funding, he said.

More support for infants and providers in low-income communities?

The latest budget proposal does not include any specific funding for infants and toddlers.

Michigan’s largest shortage of child care slots is among infants and toddlers, who require labor-intensive — and expensive — care. State rules sharply limit the number of infants a single adult can care for at once.

Think Babies Michigan, an initiative that includes advocacy groups, philanthropies, and government agencies, is pushing to use federal funds to add more child care slots for Michigan’s youngest children.

Costs associated with very young students are “a huge issue for providers,” Gillard said. Providers in low-income communities are paid more for these students, but still not enough to cover their costs in many cases. Gillard said the federal funds could allow for a “true cost of care model,” which would send more funds to providers who care for younger students.

Smith said she would support a plan to distribute the funds at least partly based on how many infants, toddlers, and students from low income families or with special needs a provider enrolls.

How should the state balance the needs of providers and parents?

Michigan officials must make a key choice every time they add money to a child care budget: Do they use the new funds to expand state-backed child care programs by making them accessible to more parents, or do they try to improve existing child care programs by increasing payments to child care providers?’

In recent years, proposed budget increases for child care have focused on parents.

While the latest proposal sets aside $95 million to allow parents with higher incomes to qualify for subsidized child care, it would send most of the federal money to providers.

Providers in low-income communities have argued for years that state subsidies don’t cover their costs. Michigan’s reimbursement rate for providers who work with students from low-income families is among the lowest in the nation. One key result is that teachers in these programs often make very low wages, which leads to high teacher turnover and hurts student learning.

The current proposal would send hundreds of millions of dollars to providers via direct grants. Some advocates want the state to distribute the money differently by, for example, increasing the reimbursement rate the state pays providers.

In any case, Hodge said the federal funds were an opportunity to pay providers in low-income communities enough to cover their costs and pay their providers a decent wage.

“Put it in the providers’ hands and allow us to take care of our village,” she said.

Need a place for school age students to learn online in Detroit? A new child care scholarship offers a quick solution.

2021-01-15T22:10:54+00:00

A new scholarship could help more families place their school age children in child care centers while classrooms remain closed.

The program aims to alleviate the burden of the pandemic on working parents, many of whom are in an impossible bind: What do you do if your child’s school is online, you need to work, and you don’t have — or can’t afford — care for them during the day?

One solution has been to open child care centers to school age children. This fall, after state officials began to offer child care subsidies to online learners ages 5-12, nearly 20,000 children enrolled. This gives children a place to go during the school day and helps support child care centers that have seen their enrollment plummet. But it can take more than a month for the subsidies to reach the child care providers, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Education said.

That’s where the scholarship comes in: A group of community organizations, including the City of Detroit, and United Way of Southeast Michigan, Detroit SOARS, and the Community Education Commission, will help cover the cost of child care for families until the subsidy payments arrive.

The program is currently available to Detroit residents who qualify for Michigan child care subsidies.

“Parents right now are being asked to do the impossible — at this point for a very long time,” said Monica Rodriguez, director of children and youth for the City of Detroit. “How can we help parents keep all of the balls in the air without losing their minds?”

Parents likely won’t stop needing help with online learning anytime soon. Many school districts still conduct classes online. And even as teachers begin receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, public health experts say it could be months before the vaccine allows for a widespread return to in-person instruction. Backers of the program say they hope child care subsidies will be available for school age students through June with help from new federal funds.

Pandemic learning has been especially hard on Michigan’s youngest students, who are ill-suited to online learning. Child-care providers know that as well as anyone.

Denise Smith, director of Hope Starts Here, an early childhood initiative in Detroit, said many child care providers are concerned about how their former students are faring at home during the pandemic. Families report that some young children have “not been able to withstand” the strain of virtual learning from home, she said. Child care providers can offer additional support to students, while also alleviating some of the strain on parents, she said.

Felicia Legardy, who operates a child care center, Crystal Swann, out of her home in Detroit, said two of her eight students are of school age. They work on online assignments in a separate part of the house from the younger students. The tuition she receives for those students has helped her finances, she said. But she says it’s hard to celebrate the additional funds when all of her students are struggling with online learning.

“Money right now doesn’t matter,” she said. “The children don’t want to be online. They’re stressed out, they’re depressed.”

Child care gets a boost with new Michigan budget, but structural problems remain

2020-09-25T21:07:23+00:00

Michigan’s new budget extends lifelines to working parents who have struggled during the pandemic to find care for their children — including school-aged children — and to child care providers whose businesses are at risk of closing.

Advocates noted that the new funds come amid widespread budget cuts due to the coronavirus pandemic, and said they were encouraged by the move to help stabilize existing child care programs while offering services to more families.

“It’s definitely a step in the right direction,” said Erica Willard, executive director of the Michigan Association for the Education of Young Children.

The additional funding amounts to a stop-gap measure, not the overhaul of the child care system that many advocates say was badly needed even before the pandemic, Willard added. Providers have long argued that state payments are unreliable and too small to adequately pay their staff. Teachers of young children make so little money that their own children often qualify for state child care subsidies. And child care offerings in working class cities like Detroit often don’t come close to meeting parent demand.

Those issues have been exacerbated by the pandemic, and the new budget includes several measures that expand child care access while helping providers weather plummeting enrollment.

The state had refused to pay for child care for K-12 students who are learning online, forcing some low-income parents to choose between going to work and caring for their children, Chalkbeat reported this week.

The new budget offers a solution, setting aside $18 million in federal relief funds that will allow providers to support school-aged children during the virtual school day.

That’s welcome news to parents like Princess Bradley, who was forced to pull her three children out of child care last week and take days off work because the state wouldn’t cover their tuition.

“It’s definitely relieving that I know that my kids will actually be safe and cared for while I’m working, and I’ll still be able to provide for my family,” she said.

Still, the new funds won’t be available until Oct. 1, and Bradley asked why the funds weren’t in place before the start of the school year.

“It should have already been on the table,” she said.

The money for K-12 students could also help child care providers keep their doors open. Many are struggling financially during the pandemic as enrollment craters.

“It means that we’ll at least be able to cover the overhead,” said Monique Snyder, owner of Brainiacs Clubhouse, who lost a dozen school-aged students, including Bradley’s children, when the state said it wouldn’t pay their subsidies. “We’ll be able to bring kids back. With this avenue at least we’ll be able to serve the community and prevent kids from being left at home.”

State officials said that 14,000 children are eligible to receive the subsidy, but noted that the state will only pay for their care if they don’t have the option of returning to school in person. That means students won’t be eligible if they attend the Detroit Public Schools Community District, which is offering in-person learning. However, the district is providing space for students to learn online during the day while their parents work.

Denise Smith, implementation director of Hope Starts Here, a Detroit-based philanthropic child care initiative, said the state shouldn’t deny child care to school-aged children just because their parents don’t want them to attend in-person classes: “Parents should be given a choice.”

Some providers said the new funding doesn’t go nearly far enough. The budget allows centers to bill the state for an additional 60 hours when children are absent — a major issue during the pandemic — those extra hours will soon be used up, said Nina Hodge, a board member of the advocacy group Providers for Change and the owner of Above and Beyond Learning Center.

“We’re going to be through with those hours in probably five months,” she said, noting that flu season could worsen the absenteeism already caused by the pandemic.

Child care measures included in the new budget:

$26 million to expand access to child care for families by increasing the income eligibility from 130% to 150% of the federal poverty level.
$18 million to reimburse child care providers who care for low-income K-12 students whose schools only offered full-time virtual or hybrid learning this fall.
Roughly $80 million in grants to child care centers, allowing providers to bill for an additional 60 hours while subsidized students are absent, a recognition that many students are attending less frequently because of the pandemic. Grant details have not been ironed out yet.
The Great Start Readiness Program for 4-year-olds from low-income families can now be conducted online, and income eligibility for the program is increased to help ensure classrooms are full.
Child care workers are included in the state’s Futures for Frontlines program, which will provide free community college to people who continued in-person work this spring.

Child care centers provided young students a safe place to learn online. Michigan won’t cover the cost.

2020-09-22T22:31:41+00:00

Two weeks into the school year, Monique Snyder had to tell a dozen working parents that they would have to find somewhere else for their children to learn online.

Like many child care providers in the Detroit area, Snyder has opened her centers to young K-12 students whose classrooms remained closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. But Snyder learned this month that the state won’t subsidize care during the school day for children from low-income families.

She told desperate parents that they would have to pay her out of pocket or find another place for their children to learn.

“It was horrible,” said Snyder, whose business is already in danger of closing due to the pandemic. “The biggest question they kept asking me was, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ And I literally did not have an answer.”

The coronavirus child care crunch is falling hardest on low-income families of color, many of whom work in-person jobs in sanitation, grocery, and health care that the state has defined as “essential.” When these families have young students learning online — something that is more likely in Black communities, according to a recent Chalkbeat/AP analysis — many parents find that they have no safe place to send their children during the work day.

“Just imagine the one mom who has to leave the 8-year-old in charge of the 5-year-old and the 3-year-old,” Snyder said. “That’s where my head is, as a parent.”

There’s been no reliable solution to this problem in Michigan, where a patchwork of local agencies have been left to make key decisions about reopening schools and coordinating child care. Some school districts across the state offer free space and support for children learning online, while others charge for child care during the school day or don’t offer any at all.

The same issue is playing out nationwide. In cities where virtual learning is prevalent, kindergarten enrollment is down as low-income families opt to keep their children in in-person preschool programs during the work day.

Many parents in the Detroit area jumped at the chance to drop their children off with their nearby child care provider during the school day, only to be told by providers in the second week of school that the state wouldn’t cover their tuition.

Christina Waller’s 7-year-old son attends a charter school in Detroit, and he will spend the fall learning online. He first attended Snyder’s center, Brainiacs Clubhouse, when he was 2. Waller was relieved when she learned that she’d be able to drop him there while she worked as a clerk at Henry Ford Hospital.

Elementary school students work on virtual school assignments on Sept. 17, 2020 at Brainiacs Clubhouse, a child care center in the Detroit area, while their parents are at work.

Waller is the family’s sole breadwinner. Her income is low enough to qualify him for child care subsidies, and she anticipated that the state would mostly pay for his care. Then Snyder told her that the state wasn’t paying subsidies for school-aged kids — Waller would have to pay $500 a month if she wanted to continue dropping him off while she worked. Waller says she contemplated quitting her job, but ultimately decided she had no choice but to stretch her budget and pay her son’s tuition.

“I can’t afford it, but [not paying] is really not an option,” she said, noting that she was effectively paying out-of-pocket so her son can get a public third-grade education: “I never thought I was going to be paying for public school.”

Other parents had no choice at all — they had to pull their children. Snyder was supporting 17 school-aged kids with virtual learning when she learned from a child care official that the state wouldn’t pay their tuition. After she told parents they’d have to pay, only five of them returned.

State officials say there isn’t enough money in the child care subsidy program to pay for school-aged children. In a typical year, the subsidies provide free or reduced-price care to about 34,000 kids, making it one of the largest child care programs in the state.

The Michigan Department of Education “is aware of the need to support school-age children and providers caring for those children during virtual schooling,” said William DiSessa, a department spokesman, in an email. “However, we need additional funding” to pay providers.

The issue is being discussed as part of upcoming budget negotiations, DiSessa added.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did the office of Shane Hernandez, the Republican chair of the House appropriations committee.

“Somebody needs to figure this out,” said Denise Smith, implementation director of Hope Starts Here, a child care initiative in Detroit. “The early childhood programs are propping up the system in this way, and they’re not being compensated to do it.”

In addition to helping parents, paying providers to care for school-aged kids would provide a badly needed infusion of cash to a child care system on the brink of collapse. In Detroit, one of the largest child care deserts in the country, many providers say their businesses could soon fold as enrollment craters due to the pandemic and federal aid dries up.

This spring, with the help of federal money, the state reimbursed child care providers who cared for school-aged students from low-income families. Memos sent out by the state this summer said that providers would not be allowed to continue billing for these students this fall, but not every provider was aware of the change.

“We’re keeping the children safe,” said Jenice Lomax, owner of Child Star Development Center in Detroit. “We’re keeping an eye on them. We’re helping them out. Why wouldn’t we get paid?”

For many families, child care centers are the only option for keeping their children safe. While some school districts, such as the Detroit Public Schools Community District, provide learning spaces for children whose parents have to work in person, many don’t. Others, like Grosse Pointe Public Schools, charge for child care.

Most of the five elementary-aged students at Lomax’s center attend MacDowell Preparatory Academy, a nearby charter school that opted for fully online learning this fall but doesn’t offer students a space to learn while their parents are at work.

Princess Bradley’s three children also attend a charter school that isn’t opening its doors to virtual learners. For the first weeks of school, Bradley sent the children — ages 6, 7, and 12 — to Snyder’s child care center. But when she picked them up Wednesday, Snyder told her that the state wouldn’t subsidize her children’s care.

Bradley, the sole breadwinner in her house, can’t afford to pay the $1,500 a month she’d need to continue bringing her children to the center.

“That’s rent,” she said.

Since then, Bradley has taken three days off from her job as a bookkeeper for a nonprofit in Detroit to care for her kids. They also spent one day with her mother and one day with her sister, but Bradley thinks she’ll probably have to reduce her work hours.

“I’m digging into my savings,” she said. “I’ve been trying to find different types of funding to pay for them to go to daycare, but I haven’t found anything.”

Michigan child care providers struggle to stay afloat as fewer children show up and federal aid runs out

2020-08-28T21:03:54+00:00

This spring, three adults linked to Little Scholars of Detroit Child Development Center died of COVID-19. One staff member lost her husband and her sister, and another lost her mother. Shirley Hailey, the center’s owner, was infected and nearly lost her husband, who was hospitalized for 23 days before recovering.

The next coronavirus pandemic victim might be Little Scholars itself.

Hailey reopened the center in June, determined to keep serving the community where she has worked as a child care provider for nearly 20 years. But just one-fifth of her usual 148 students came back, mostly the children of essential workers. Money from the federal coronavirus relief package helped, but those dollars are running out. Hailey says her business is near the breaking point.

“Two more payrolls after this one and we’re out of money,” she said this week. “I’m looking at 45 days.”

Many parents are keeping their young children at home, making it difficult for child care providers to make ends meet. There is no certainty of further federal aid and no sign that the state will step up to help child care centers survive. Michigan is at risk of losing 41% of its licensed child care slots, according to an April study by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Hailey is a member of Providers for Change, a new group that’s pushing to save their centers by making significant changes to the state’s child care subsidy for low-income families. The subsidy is too small and unreliable to support providers through the pandemic, they argue. Many say they could be forced to close if nothing is done.

A rash of child care closures would be bad for children, for schools, and for the economy, especially in the state’s most vulnerable communities. Children rely on child care centers for food, socialization, and to prepare them for kindergarten. Without a safe place for children to go, it’s harder for parents to work and for teachers to teach. And closures mean more child care workers on the state unemployment rolls.

“There’s no economic recovery without child care, period,” said Dawne Bell, CEO of the Early Childhood Investment Corporation, a Lansing-based advocacy group.

The pandemic has exposed long-standing problems at every level of Michigan’s child care system. Costs can be prohibitive even for relatively well-off families. Detroit is already a massive child care desert, with 27,000 fewer slots than families need. Families living in poverty often can’t find subsidized care, and the subsidies are so small that early childhood teachers often live in poverty themselves.

“There are things we can do now” to help providers, said Sen. Winnie Brinks, a Democrat from Grand Rapids. “But I would say that we should have been doing most of those things before COVID hit. It just uncovered a lot of the challenges that made [the child care sector] really tough before.”

Helping child care providers stay afloat would require additional state spending, Brinks said. The state would essentially need to pay providers for empty seats, something it did for K-12 schools this spring but has never done for child care centers. But with Michigan facing a substantial budget deficit, Brinks said a major change to child care funding would be a “very, very heavy lift” politically unless Congress passes another federal aid package.

“Everyone right now is looking at the federal government,” said Bell.

Detroit centers, which often rely on a subsidy for low-income families, are at particular risk of shutting down.

The subsidy is tiny, one of the smallest in the nation, said Matt Gillard, director of the nonprofit advocacy group Michigan’s Children. Providers know that the parents they serve can’t pay more out of pocket.

“The easiest fix is for the state to dramatically increase the reimbursement rates that we’re giving providers per child,” Gillard said. “The rates are still abysmally low.”

Many providers in low-income communities are used to surviving from payroll to payroll. But the pandemic is proving impossible to navigate, even for businesspeople used to scraping by.

“The math doesn’t add up,” said Candies Rogers, owner and director of CircleTime with Friends Learning Center in Redford, a Detroit suburb. “At this point we probably won’t make it to the end of the calendar year.”

Rogers is one of the providers pushing for changes to the state’s main subsidy program, Child Development and Care assistance. The program spent nearly $200 million in largely federal dollars in 2018-2019 and served about 34,000 kids, nearly as many as the Great Start Readiness Program, Michigan’s banner preschool program for low-income 4-year-olds.

Rogers brings in funds from both programs, but she says DHHS is the reason she might have to close. She only gets paid for the hours that subsidized students are present, which means that she’s in trouble if they don’t show up.

And they haven’t: On a typical pandemic day, Rogers cares for 16 children. Before the coronavirus, she was at capacity — 68 kids — with a waitlist.

For a few months this spring, the state used money from the federal coronavirus aid package to pay providers based on their pre-pandemic enrollments. But those payments stopped by mid-summer.

In order to meet state requirements for teacher-to-student ratios, Rogers needs to have six teachers on staff to care for the children, who include a 6-month-old, a 3-month-old, and two 2-year-olds. “I can’t pay more than two staff members comfortably,” she said.

Further complicating matters for providers who depend on these funds, the hourly rate makes it impossible for providers to know how much money they’ll bring in. If a child leaves early or just doesn’t show up, they lose income. Providers get to bill for some absent hours, but many have blown through them in recent weeks.

“You don’t know what you’re going to get,” said Toya Taylor, owner of Reign Development Center in Detroit, who says virtually all of her income comes from state subsidies for low-income parents. “Your payment is different every two weeks. And I still have … bills that need to be paid.”

The pandemic made the problem worse, Taylor said, by making it harder to predict whether students will show up. She’s also had to adopt a much stricter sick policy, and is now sending students home for the slightest sniffle.

“I’m definitely in a position where I could be forced to close,” she said.

Difficult financial conditions could put a serious dent in the state’s child care offerings. The Make a Difference Learning Center offered care for roughly 30 children on a typical day before the pandemic.

When owner Valerie Draper reopened in July, only two children showed up, so she closed it back down.

“Staying open for a few kids to me is not worth it,” she said. “It doesn’t pay rent.”

Draper has been a child care provider for more than two decades in the suburbs along Detroit’s northeast border, which has one of the most severe child care shortages in the metro area. She says she’ll probably call it quits for good in September if demand doesn’t pick up when K-12 classes resume.

The pandemic, Draper said, has given new weight to something she has long sensed: that early educators aren’t valued by the state. She spent years working to comply with the stringent training and certification requirements imposed on child care providers, and now she feels abandoned.

“I’m devastated; I’m angry,” she said. The state “still treats us like babysitters. We’re not providers, we’re not professionals. They pay us babysitter rates.”

Need subsidized child care in Detroit? A new website makes it easier to find.

2020-08-20T14:30:00+00:00

Child care is often the single largest expense for working families in Detroit. Roughly half the parents in Detroit with a child 5 years old or younger qualify for some help with child care costs, but often don’t know how to find a subsidized program.

That could be changing thanks to Connect4Care Kids, a new website that helps low-income parents find subsidized child care without requiring them to dig through fine print and several government websites first.

“Quickly understanding what programs you’re eligible for isn’t always easy,” said Jeff Miles, a senior director for early childhood education at the United Way of Southeast Michigan, which runs the site.

“As people start to return to work, we really wanted to make sure that people have a safe way to connect to child care providers.”

The coronavirus pandemic has been disastrous for the child care sector, a collection of mostly private businesses that play a central role in the lives of millions of American children and families. An estimated 20% of child care centers nationwide remain closed due to COVID-19. Enrollment is down at centers that have opened, as many parents remain wary of sending their child back to a classroom setting.

The new site, which launched on July 14, aims to help connect families with providers. Once they’re on the website, parents need to type in their zip code, number of children, and income level. The site tells them whether they’re eligible for subsidized programs such as Head Start, a federal program, and Michigan’s Great Start Readiness Program, then gives them a list of nearby child care providers who offer subsidized services and have listed themselves as open in a state database.

“All of this information exists out there, but it’s in multiple different spots,” Miles said. “We pull all of that into one central website.”

To visit the site, click here.

Michigan’s reopening economy needs child care. This educator’s struggle shows that rebooting centers won’t be easy.

2020-07-16T22:33:51+00:00

LaShawn Bridges had spent months worrying about reopening her child care center in Detroit. But what happened on Monday was more like opening an entirely new center.

Before the pandemic, students would have walked inside with their parents. Now Bridges met them outside with a handheld thermometer to screen them for fever, and parents weren’t allowed in the building. As soon as students walked inside, they were instructed to wash their hands. Everyone, including the kids, wore masks.

“It’s kind of awkward at first,” Lindsay Gray, a preschool teacher at Blessed Beginnings, Bridges’ center, said. “It’s like for that first second, when they hit that corner with the mask on, you don’t know who they are. Whereas before they’d just run in and go straight to whatever and hug you, now it’s different. They feel that it’s different.”

Soon enough, though, things began to feel somewhat normal. The students spent most of the day playing and learning outside, so teachers didn’t have to spend much time sanitizing toys.

“The kids are happy to be back with one another,” Bridges said.

That didn’t mean she could stop worrying. The coronavirus pandemic has already pushed her business — which she has owned and operated since 1999, starting out in her basement — into financial difficulties that would only get worse if children or staff were infected, or if not enough students showed up. Then there was the risk that one of her older teachers or children could become seriously ill.

“I have not slept a full night since Saturday night, just with the anxiety of wanting to keep the families and the children safe,” she said on Wednesday.

Bridges met children outside at the beginning of the day to take their temperature.

Bridges’ center is an example of the challenges child care providers across the state face as they try to reopen in the midst of a pandemic. Nearly 1,000 providers in southeast Michigan have already reopened, about one-third of the total.

What happens at Blessed Beginnings and other child care centers across the state will help determine whether the state can rebound financially. If the reopenings don’t go well and parents — especially essential workers — don’t have a place to send their children when they return to work, the economic recovery will be jeopardized.

That puts a heavy burden on providers like Bridges, who are now responsible for the health of their teachers and students. Yet as government aid for child care centers runs out or falls short, many providers are at risk of closing for good.

In Michigan, child care providers typically own and run their centers themselves, often on razor thin margins. Unlike K-12 schools and universities, which rely on state funding, child care centers depend on tuition payments that can vary week to week.

Nonetheless, providers of early education are among the first educators in the state to welcome children back for pandemic-era instruction.

“There’s all kinds of conversations happening right now about whether school is going to reopen in the fall,” said Erica Willard, director of the Michigan Association for the Education of Young Children. “Well, child care has already been facing this for a few months now. You say this field is essential, but there’s not the financial backing or the recognition of the critical work that this field is doing.”

If Bridges’ experience is any guide, reopening won’t be easy. Even extensive preparations can’t guarantee that children will show up.

“Me getting paid will depend on the children who are returning,” Bridges said late in June. “I don’t feel the financial strain right now, but it’s coming.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics has suggested that child care centers should reopen, saying children are less likely to become infected and spread the coronavirus. But many parents remain worried for their children’s health — and for their own if their children brought the virus home.

In her community on the east side of Detroit, Bridges is viewed as especially skilled and reliable. She’s one of a small number of providers who have earned a five-star quality rating from the state, the highest possible. After running a small program out of her home for 20 years, she won a $75,000 grant from the city last year to expand to a new building that would accommodate 60 children.

Most of her students come from low-income families, and their tuition is partially subsidized by the state. As part of Michigan’s coronavirus relief efforts, the payments kept coming this spring even after the center shut down. That money, plus a federal payroll loan, had allowed Bridges to keep paying her staff through the early months of the crisis.

Even after state subsidies ran out, Bridges brought back her six staff members to sanitize the center and develop a new pandemic-era curriculum, which would mix standard lessons on the solar system with discussions of germs and handwashing practice.

Bridges began working to win parents’ trust months ago, aiming for a June reopening. On a video conference call with parents in early June, she laid out a total overhaul of Blessed Beginnings’ daily routine. The 14-page reopening plan she’d submitted to the state amounted to a rethinking of her entire program, from morning drop-off to lesson topics to the policy on sick students.

Bridges had no choice but to be extremely careful. She knew that a COVID-19 outbreak at Blessed Beginnings would force her to close for at least two weeks and scare parents away, a catastrophic scenario that would raise questions about whether the center could ever reopen.

“It might be days that you guys will be mad at me, because I am going to stick to the sick policy to a T,” she told the 25 parents on the call.

Her efforts seemed to be paying off. Twenty parents signed on to bring their children back when the center reopened — fewer than the 40 she was allowed under COVID-19 rules, but a start.

Jasmine Harris, whose 4-year-old son has been a student at the center for two years, and who is an early childhood educator herself, said she intended to bring him back to child care even though the prospect made her nervous.

“As long as every parent is on board, it can be really effective,” she said, adding that Bridges was known for keeping her center neat and sanitary even before the pandemic.

Bridges told parents on the call that she already had to delay reopening by a week or two. She had leased a ZONO machine — a refrigerator-like device capable of disinfecting multiple shelves of toys at a time — so her staff wouldn’t have to spend all their time cleaning toys, but its delivery was delayed.

A few weeks later, the machine arrived, but now Bridges had another problem: Parents weren’t getting tested for the coronavirus as she’d requested.

With days to go before the center was supposed to open, one parent said she’d rather keep her child at home than undergo an invasive nasal swab. Others seemed to be dragging their feet.

Bridges knew she couldn’t afford to wait. Every day the center stayed closed pushed her closer to a financial precipice. But as opening day neared, she chose public health over her own wallet. She would give families another week to get tested — and forgo a week of tuition.

As the reopening date approached, Bridges called every parent on her roster, hoping to reassure them and bring in more students. Many of the calls were encouraging; Bridges figured that about 20 children would show up on the first day. But it was also clear that the center faced an uphill climb to recruit 40 children, the maximum number it can take during the pandemic.

Some parents told Bridges they weren’t convinced it was safe. One parent, an essential worker, said she wouldn’t bring her child back out of concern that her germs would be passed to other children at the center. Still others said they would wait until September, when they’d likely be able to see how reopening was going for K-12 schools.

LaShawn Bridges washes her hands at a newly installed sink at her child care center in Detroit.

A few days before the center was set to reopen, Bridges gathered her staff and asked them to share “roses, thorns, and rosebuds” — good things, bad things, and areas for growth.

“There were a lot more thorns than roses,” Gray recalled. She and others felt that the center was as well prepared as it could be, but there was no way to guarantee that the virus wouldn’t slip through the cracks. Older teachers expressed concerns about their health, while others wondered aloud if families would take the necessary steps to avoid bringing the virus with them into the classroom.

“We can do everything we can to be safe and to keep ourselves healthy, but we are putting ourselves at risk by opening ourselves up to these kids and to their families,” Gray added.

Finally, on Monday, Blessed Beginnings reopened. Just eleven students showed up. By Wednesday, 15 students showed up, giving Bridges hope that her numbers would continue to grow.

At the same time, though, the center had already sent children home for displaying symptoms of illness. One was sniffling, another seemed to be suffering from seasonal allergies, but Bridges couldn’t take a chance.

By Thursday afternoon, Bridges was beginning to feel that she and her students would get used to this strange new normal. It helped that 14 kids had shown up that day, and that she’d talked on the phone with a group of Detroit-based providers about the challenges of reopening.

“We got to vent, so that was helpful,” she said. “We talked about getting our legislators involved, wanting a seat at the table when they’re making up these policies. Hopefully a conversation can be had with the state about cutting our subsidies, and how it’s putting our businesses in jeopardy.”

Temperature checks and naked dolls: How Michigan child care providers are reopening as safely as possible

2020-06-12T15:48:14+00:00

Parents stand on one X when they arrive at Li’l Graduates Child Development Center. Their children walk to another, taped on the floor more than six feet away, where a staffer takes their temperature and asks if they’ve felt tired or developed a cough overnight.

“It’s kind of like a production line,” said Jamie Middaugh, director of the private center in Chesterfield. “We try to make it as homey as possible so that they can still have that family feel.”

The temperature check is one of the many changes the center made to prevent the spread of COVID-19 as the state lifts its stay-at-home order and more children return to child care.

While months remain before school-aged children in Michigan return to school buildings, a growing number of younger children need care now. More providers are reopening despite the challenges of limiting new COVID-19 infections, hoping to maintain their incomes and meet a community need.

That means the state’s patchwork system of private child care providers will be the first in the education sector to provide in-person, pandemic-era instruction. Just 10% of the roughly 1,000 private day care providers in Wayne County are currently open, according to officials at the United Way of Southeastern Michigan. More are preparing to welcome families back.

These small businesses, which are often run out of the provider’s home, are working to balance a dizzying and often contradictory array of safety and financial concerns.

How can centers pay for extra cleaning supplies while their financial margins, already razor-thin, get even tighter because of lower enrollment? How can they reassure parents who need a nurturing place for their child during the day but are terrified that their child will be sickened by the other children?

Michigan officials released a 14-page reopening guideline in May that addressed these questions. Providers who reopen will be required to submit a safety plan to the state based on those rules.

Those plans can’t guarantee that the coronavirus won’t spread at newly opened child care centers. But as more parents return to work and providers struggle financially, few programs have the option of staying closed.

“Bringing kids back together is going to increase the risk” of coronavirus infection, said Jeff Miles, director of the Center for Early Childhood Excellence at United Way for Southeastern Michigan.

“The safest way is to care for children in their homes, but we know that that is not a reality. Job number-one has got to be keeping these kids safe.”

The United Way is holding webinars to help providers reopen safely. In Detroit, Hope Starts Here, an early childhood education initiative backed by several local philanthropies, created an online tool to help providers create reopening plans that meet state criteria. Federal and state grants are helping to ease some of the financial pain.

Child care providers who have already opened their doors say they’ve shifted virtually every aspect of their operations to limit the spread of COVID-19.

Xs taped in the entranceway of Li’l Graduates Child Development Center help prevent transmission of COVID-19 when children are dropped off.

Financial challenges

These changes aren’t easy or cheap, and they come as child care providers deal with the financial pinch caused by the crisis.

Li’l Graduates, which stayed open during the pandemic, saw its enrollment drop as low as 30 students, down from the usual 200, and has still only reached 60

“Right now we are really only making enough to pay the staff that are here, not the extra for bills and to keep the lights on,” Middaugh said.

Some federal COVID-19 relief funds are available to child care providers, but they’ve been slow to arrive, and it’s not clear that they’ll be enough to help providers stay afloat.

LaTonya Glover runs Bright Beginnings Child Care out of her home in Detroit, typically enrolling a dozen kids. She stayed open throughout the crisis because some of her parents are essential workers. But enrollment is down — zero children showed up this week — and she had been giving discounts to families who lost work. She’s expecting federal assistance funds through a grant from the state Michigan, but the money hasn’t arrived.

“You don’t want to rob Peter to pay Paul, but like maybe I’m going to charge this on my zero-interest card and wait for the payment to come,” she said.

An obligation to the community

Reopening isn’t cheap. In addition to purchasing a mountain of cleaning supplies, Felicia Legardy is providing individual masks, hand sanitizer, paper towels, hand soaps, and learning materials for each student at Crystal Swann Child Care, which she runs out of her home in Detroit’s Brightmoor Neighborhood.

What’s more, four of her 12 families didn’t return when she reopened on June 1, putting a $2,100 hole in her small budget each month.

This wasn’t unexpected, Legardy said. Even though she’s one of the only child care providers operating in her neighborhood, the community was hard-hit by the coronavirus — Legardy knows several people who got sick — and parents are being careful.

She decided to reopen anyway out of a sense of duty.

“After two and a half months [of caring for children at home], family members and grandparents were becoming a little bit exhausted because they’re not used to caring for little ones,” she said. “My parents need me.”

A new reality

As children return to care, they and their providers face a dramatically altered reality.

For providers, days are structured by a new rhythm of constant cleaning.

“We clean from the moment we walk into the building until we walk out at night,” said Katrina Stewart, program director at Ascension Early Child Care Center in Beverly Hills.

“Once we touch the laptop that we use to check the kids in, we clean the laptop.”

While there’s no way to ask toddlers to maintain physical distance from each other, the center’s health protocols became much stricter. Children and teachers are screened daily and anyone with a temperature above 100 degrees is immediately sent home. Parents are asked every day about the health of their families, and children are sent home if anyone in their household falls ill.

Playtime also has changed.

Following state guidelines, Legardy removed all cloth from her play area, including stuffed animal and dolls’ clothing.

One child said, “‘Where are the baby’s clothes?’” Legardy recalled.

“I said ‘Sorry, we had to put those clothes away.’ And she said, ‘But the baby is naked!’ ”

Later that day, Legardy said, a child came to her to be comforted, but she couldn’t put the child on her lap because of state guidelines.

“I just don’t feel right,” she said.

Michigan pledges $130 million to keep child care providers open

2020-04-29T20:54:19+00:00

Michigan will distribute $130 million to child care providers to help them weather the coronavirus crisis.

Providers can begin applying for grants today, according to a statement from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. While some child care centers rely on state funding that has continued during the pandemic, many others operate as private businesses that can’t survive long without payment from families, many of whom are staying home to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus.

Whitmer said during a press conference that the grants will ensure child care centers “have resources they need to reopen for Michigan’s workforce when the recovery process begins and grows, when more families are in need.”

Michigan’s education department will distribute the money, $100 million of which comes from the federal coronavirus relief package and $30 million from the state’s child care fund.

“This crisis has unfortunately revealed the fragility of the child care system,” said Gilda Jacobs, president and CEO of the Michigan League for Public Policy in a statement. Child care is “too costly for parents and child care providers.”

Providers can apply for grants starting at $1,500 for in-home operations and $3,000 for child care centers. Providers who have remained open to the children of emergency workers during the crisis will be eligible for more funds, as will those who enroll more children or have a higher quality rating from the state.

Jacobs said more funds would likely be needed to cushion the blow of the pandemic to the state’s child care system.

“This should be the beginning, not the end, of investments in a child care system that was struggling before this public health emergency,” she said. “With a clearer picture than ever of the importance of child care and an influx of billions of dollars in federal money, we need to make sure the needs of kids and working parents, especially those with lower incomes, remain paramount.

What will it take for Michigan child care centers to survive COVID-19 closures? ‘Pay them today.’

2020-03-30T23:05:37+00:00

As child care programs across Detroit shuttered to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, Carole Williams had no good options.

On the one hand, Williams knew that by shutting down she’d be protecting her own health and the health of the children at Agnes’ Little Angels, the day care center she runs out of her home in Detroit.

On the other, she can’t go without income from her small business for long.

“It’s my only income,” said Williams, who is 58 and has health conditions that put her at high risk if she catches the coronavirus. “It’s terrible. I had a little money saved up, so I’m working on that right now.”

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made the decision for Williams last week, when she ordered Michiganders not to leave home for work unless they are considered essential employees, a category that includes medical staff and grocery store workers. Most child care centers around the state are now closed, part of an urgent statewide effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

The closures pose a danger to the state’s fragile child care ecosystem, especially in Detroit. Advocates worry that the shock of sudden closure will force centers across the city to close permanently. That’s bad news for children whose development depends on getting access to early learning opportunities, and for families who need dependable child care in order to do essential work. An estimated 28,000 children in Detroit don’t have access to quality child care.

“It’s an incredible disruption,” said Matt Gillard, director of the state advocacy group Michigan’s Children. “The road back from this is particularly challenging and fraught for the childcare industry because it is such a fragile position in the best of times.”

Unlike K-12 schools, which are generally completely funded by taxpayers, most child care providers in Michigan operate as private businesses, relying at least in part on tuition from families. If they aren’t open, they can’t earn money.

As large parts of the U.S. economy shut down in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, child care providers across Michigan began sending out distress signals. Of 602 child care providers surveyed by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, 26% said they’d be forced to close their doors without a major government intervention. More than half said they’d already lost money.

Lawmakers and philanthropists have taken emergency steps to help providers in Michigan and nationwide pay their bills and keep their doors open until the outbreak is over.

A $2 trillion spending bill approved by Congress last week includes $3.5 billion in assistance to child care providers, of which Michigan is set to receive roughly $96 million. The state announced Monday that it will also use federal money to offer $600 a month to self-employed workers whose jobs were disrupted by the coronavirus, a category that includes the owners of child care centers.

Philanthropies including the United Way and TechTown are also offering grants that can help private child care centers survive the closure.But child care advocates worry that the aid will be too little and too late for some programs.

“They need to pay them today,” said Camarrah Morgan, a parent and caregiver engagement coordinator for Hope Starts Here, a Detroit-based early childhood initiative. Providers are “scrambling trying to figure out how to get an infusion of cash. Timing matters. That might be a reason programs make it through.”

Williams said she feels confident she’ll be able to reopen.

“It’s going to be a struggle, but I know for sure that I’m going to open back up,” she said.

Other providers in Detroit aren’t so sure.

“I’m praying I can,” said Sheila Wilkerson, 60. Her only income is from her home-based child care center in Detroit. “I’m getting ready to try and pay some bills.”

On Whitmer’s orders, some child care centers across Michigan will soon reopen to care for the children of essential workers. They’ll be paid for that work, but only a small portion of all child care providers will be needed. That prospect is frightening for Felicia Legardy, a child care provider whose sister-in-law was hospitalized with what she believes is COVID-19 over the weekend.

“It seems like I’m living in a nightmare,” Legardy said.

Still, with all 17 child care providers shut down in Brightmoor, Legardy’s neighborhood on the west side of Detroit, she says she told state officials that she’d be willing to reopen. She was concerned that without child care options, children would be left at home.

Nina Hodge, owner of Above and Beyond Learning Center on the city’s east side, said she planned to reopen, but she worried that the COVID-19 outbreak would put an end to recent growth in her business.

Even after the worst of the pandemic is over in Michigan, she said, she would be slow to reopen.

“You had older staff that wouldn’t even go to church,” she said. “I’m not going to make them come in.”

Mayor cheers as Michigan’s governor recommends universal free pre-K in Detroit

2020-02-06T21:46:24+00:00

Mayor Mike Duggan is one step closer to fulfilling a long-standing promise to bring free preschool to every 4-year-old in Detroit.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has backed that vision, recommending the state add $42 million to the state budget to expand prekindergarten offerings in Detroit and Flint, and a number of other cities.

It remains to be seen if the Republican-controlled legislature will go along with the plan. Duggan has claimed that he has already won support from Republicans, though that was news to some top members of the party.

“Great leadership from the Governor!” Duggan said in a statement. Whitmer’s proposal “ensures that every 4-year-old in Detroit would have access to early childhood education, which is proven to dramatically improve educational outcomes for children, especially those from lower income families.”

There’s little question that a strong early childhood education system could make a big difference in Detroit, where few children enter kindergarten ready to learn. Numerous studies show that pre-K prepares kids — especially kids from low-income families — for kindergarten, setting them up to succeed in later grades.

Even if Whitmer’s proposal becomes law, however, there’s a long way to go. One recent study found that the city needs another 28,000 slots in early childhood classrooms, most of them for children ages zero to 3 who would not be included in Whitmer’s proposal.

Duggan promised late last year that Detroit would have free, universal pre-K for 4-year-olds by this fall, a promise that could come true if the state budget process moves more quickly this year than last — and if top Republicans agree to a preschool program aimed specifically at “high need areas.”

That’s a big “if.” The notion of an early childhood program that focuses on Michigan’s largest cities will likely be unpopular with some Republicans.

“We have a lot of families around the state that could use our help, not just in Detroit but in northern Michigan,” said Pamela Hornberger, Republican chair of the House committee on education. She noted that she is still reviewing Whitmer’s recommendations and hasn’t yet decided which parts she will or won’t support.

The proposed program, which would have the same rigorous quality standards as the state’s existing Great Start Readiness Program, would serve 1,920 additional children in Detroit, 440 in Flint, and 390 in Pontiac. Several districts in western and mid-Michigan would add smaller numbers of slots.

The program would be available to students who live in school districts where 75% of third-graders scored “not proficient” on the state English exam and 75% of all students are from low-income families.

Click here for a full list of qualifying districts.

Early childhood advocates have raised concerns that a major new influx of funding into Detroit could prompt a rush of parents into new programs, potentially destabilizing the early childhood system. It’s not clear what the state will do to prevent that. In a statement accompanying the budget, Whitmer’s staff wrote that local agencies “would be encouraged to work together to identify eligible children and coordinate service delivery.”

Whitmer’s recommendations also include an additional $35.5 million for Great Start Readiness, a high-quality preschool program which already serves 38,000 4-year-olds statewide. The money would increase the per-pupil payment to GSRP programs from $7,250 to $8,336, bringing them on par with the state’s funding for K-12 schools.

Hold your bets on a preschool expansion in Detroit

2020-01-15T21:32:02+00:00

Mayor Mike Duggan has been unequivocal: He has secured the necessary support from Republicans in Lansing to offer free preschool to every 4-year-old in Detroit by this fall.

Republicans in Lansing aren’t so sure.

“There’ve been no decisions made,” said Phil Brown, senior budget advisor to Rep. Shane Hernandez, the Republican chair of the House appropriations committee.

Early childhood advocates in Detroit are keeping a close eye on negotiations in Lansing, buoyed by Duggan’s optimism. But amid one of the fiercest budget battles in years, it’s unclear whether the mayor’s confidence is grounded in reality.

Duggan’s office has reached out to legislative leaders about funding for a preschool expansion, Brown said. If the money is going to be available by the fall, it would need to be included in a supplemental budget measure in coming weeks. While Brown didn’t rule out that possibility, he added, “those negotiations haven’t started.”

That’s a far cry from the situation Duggan outlined in comments last November.

“I think we have support from the governor and the Senate Republicans and the House Republicans to fund for next fall universal pre-K for every 4-year-old in the city, if they can just pass a budget,” he told a crowd of early childhood advocates in Detroit. “I’m quite certain that we will be in it.”

A Duggan advisor, Eli Savit, referred a reporter back to the mayor’s previous comments.

Duggan has talked for years about making free state preschool available to all Detroit 4-year-olds, but an earlier attempt to make it happen fell short.

To be sure, the historically contentious budget battle that is still playing out in Lansing has thrown plenty of people for a loop. And Duggan is not the only Detroiter holding out hope that, as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the GOP-controlled legislature continue to sort out their differences, new early childhood funds could materialize.

At stake are the futures of thousands of children in Detroit, and potentially across the state. High-quality preschool has been shown to improve the lives of young students, particularly those from low-income families. In Detroit, where the child poverty rate exceeds 50%, many students are already academically behind their statewide peers upon entering kindergarten.

Studies have found that 28,000 Detroit children go without child care, including thousands from ages 3 to 5. Earlier this year, Whitmer proposed an $85 million funding boost for the Great Start Readiness Program, the state’s highly-regarded free preschool system for 4-year-olds. That would likely have been enough to cover every 4-year-old in the city, but the funding wasn’t included in the final budget.

Rep. Joe Tate, a Democrat who represents parts of Detroit’s lower east side, says he hasn’t given up hope that the funding will come through.

“It’s certainly a priority,” he said, saying he’d spoken to colleagues on both sides of the aisle about the issue.

Funding aside, key questions about the expansion Duggan is hoping for remain unanswered.

Would the state extend the existing Great Start Readiness Program, which has strict quality standards, or would the program operate differently? Is there a plan to ensure that new funding doesn’t disrupt existing operations?

And, crucially, would this money only go to Detroit?

“From the conversations that I’ve been having, there is obviously a special need for Detroit,” Tate said. “But there are also ways of broadening that as well to give broader access beyond Detroit.”

Any funding that was limited to deep-blue Detroit would likely face skepticism from Republican leaders, although the state’s existing program for low-income 4-year-olds has long enjoyed bipartisan support.

“I’d be willing to take a look at it with them,” said Pamela Hornberger, chair of the House education committee. But she added, “I don’t know how the funding happens for [a preschool expansion in Detroit] without making it happen for other kids across the state.”

Q&A: From model preschools to higher pay, Denise Smith has big ideas for early childhood education in Detroit.

2019-12-20T02:45:47+00:00

Last year, Denise Smith traveled to Reggio Emilia, a province in northern Italy famous for its parmesan cheese.

And its preschools.

Smith, a veteran early childhood educator, helped bring Reggio’s focus on hands-on, student directed learning to the Detroit area, and she wanted to see the original in action.

Smith said she was stunned by the community’s commitment to the program.

“Everybody knows where the schools are, and that they’re a part of the schools,” Smith said. “From the restaurant owner to the police officer to the mom who doesn’t have children — everybody.”

“That’s what I want to see here.”

There is no one in a better position than Smith to make that happen. As the new implementation director of Hope Starts Here, Smith has a seat at the tables where those policies are being made. Hope Starts Here is a $50 million initiative to improve early childhood education in Detroit led by the W.K. Kellogg and Kresge Foundations. (Both are Chalkbeat funders.)

The effort comes amid a growing consensus that early education plays a crucial role in preparing children for kindergarten and beyond, especially for students from low-income families.

Nearly three decades ago, Smith started her early education career providing child care in her home. She went on to help build Michigan’s child care rating system and lead an early childhood coalition in Flint.

Denise Smith

She takes on her new role at a potentially pivotal moment, as Mayor Mike Duggan negotiates with Republican lawmakers to offer free preschool to every 4-year-old in Detroit as soon as next year. Yet she recognizes that creating an early education system as strong as Reggio’s is a long game.

We spoke with Smith about the biggest challenges facing early education in Detroit, and about what it will take to overcome them.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Hope Starts here spent its first year supporting existing programs. Now the initiative is opening a high-profile $15 million early childhood center at the School at Marygrove. What’s next?

We intend to have least three other prototypes. We’re definitely looking to see not only can we bring additional high quality programs online, but even prototype some that are more affordable than, say, the Marygrove project.

And can you say anything more about what those might look like?

The goal is really to develop a model that’s more affordable and replicable. So that as we think about filling the gaps in the number of seats available to children, we can do it in a way that’s much more expeditious than it currently is.

What are the major roadblocks facing early childhood in Detroit?

Even with a current potential for the city to get some slots under the governor’s plan for universal pre K, you always have to ask, how are we going to staff it? Talent is a huge concern. We don’t pay these folks anywhere near what they should receive, so it’s hard to attract and retain them. It’s a conversation that I have everywhere I go: How can we address wage?

What kinds of answers do you get to that question?

Other states have tried some things like tax incentives and bonuses. There are examples out there, we just need to think about what works in this context and what it would take to get it over the finish line.

Any other major challenges?

Facilities is one, which is one reason why there are deserts where there are no early childhood programs. So we’re thinking about all of the pieces in this current environment. With the facility issues and concerns that DPSCD has, you know, is there [building] stock that could be used for early childhood instead? Is there potential for charter stock to be used in this way so it has dual benefit?

Do you think Duggan’s universal pre-K plan is going to happen for real?

It looks promising. But one of the things that those slots could do, if not done in a very intentional and thoughtful way, is disrupt the early childhood landscape, even if only by perception. Because every time a program that’s bright and shiny and new [arrives], providers who are already doing the work feel anxious that they’re going to lose their clients because this bright, shiny and new thing is there.

And it goes back to what I was saying before: Do we have enough staff? Are we going to pull talent from our existing programs in order to be able to fill these slots? How do we do that in a way that we’re not creating that kind of rush. How do you make sure that you are supporting the entire landscape with particular workforce development opportunities?

You have a wide range of experience with early childhood education. Will you talk about the experiences that you bring to your new role?

I’m raising my niece, who is 9. She was born with drugs in her system. She had that to overcome — a lot of physical strife in the very beginning. [But she] has read two grade levels ahead all the time since she started being tested. We poured a lot of time and energy into her, and so when folks talk about whether this early childhood stuff works or not, I would say yes, not only because of what I’ve learned from books, but from what I learned and know through experience.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the region of Italy that is famous for its preschools.

Researchers: Detroit could become a national leader in pre-K

2019-12-12T22:09:35+00:00

As cities across the country expand their preschool offerings, Detroit is at the front of the pack.

A new report awarded the city a gold medal for a program that provides free, high-quality pre-K classes to 4-year-olds from low-income families. Only two other cities — Seattle and San Antonio — received a perfect 10 out of 10 from researchers at the National Institute of Early Education Research.

The ratings reflect the high standards of the Great Start Readiness Program, a statewide, state-funded system that has expanded over the last decade. Lead teachers in the program are required to have bachelor’s degrees; teacher-to-student ratios are among the best in the country; and providers are subject to a wide range of quality controls.

Crucially, the ratings also account for the number of students enrolled in the program. Researchers found that 42% of eligible 4-year-olds are enrolled in Detroit — a total of 4,200 kids.

That number is still too small. Other reports have highlighted the need for expanded access to early education in Detroit, where few students enter kindergarten ready to learn. Gaps in access are even larger for less rigorous childcare programs and programs for younger children.

Quality early childhood education has been shown to help prepare students for kindergarten, especially if they come from low-income families.

The report — the 2019 Assessment of City Pre-K Programs — looked at 40 large cities nationwide. In the last edition, Detroit only got a silver medal.

GG Weidenfeld, an assistant research professor at NIEER and Rutgers University, said the city’s rating improved because researchers got access to more accurate enrollment data.

“Last time it was much harder to collect data,” she said. “This round, there’s a lot more going on in Detroit.”

Mayor Mike Duggan recently reiterated his promise to expand the program to every child in Detroit. Weidenfeld said Duggan’s staff helped NIEER experts access more accurate data.

If Duggan is successful, Weisenfeld said Detroit would become a national model.

“Sometimes cities expand access without thinking about quality,” she said. “We’re excited to see what happens. We’re hoping Detroit becomes the next city to really tackle universal pre-K.”

Duggan expects funding for free preschool next fall for 4-year-olds, but faces legislative hurdle

2019-11-22T19:41:37+00:00

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said Friday the city expects to be able to roll out universal pre-K for 4-year-olds by next fall, a development that could have a significant impact in a city where many children lack access to quality preschool programs.

“I think we have support from the governor and the Senate Republicans and the House Republicans to fund for next fall universal pre-K for every 4-year-old in the city, if they can just pass a budget,” Duggan said. “I’m quite certain that we will be in it.”

This isn’t the first time that Duggan has promised a major expansion of services for Detroit’s youngest learners. The mayor insists the state should prioritize Detroit, where just 1% of kindergartners enter school ready to learn. But Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s current state budget didn’t single out Detroit to receive $63 million of federal child care funds, as Duggan had hoped.

Duggan made the comments during an early childhood summit that was held to recognize the work that has been accomplished since the launch of Hope Starts Here, an ambitious effort publicly launched in 2017 with $50 million from the Kresge Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (both Chalkbeat funders). The goal of this 10-year effort is to ensure that by 2027, Detroit is a city that puts its children first by taking steps such as increasing the number of children in quality preschool programs.

The mayor hopes funding for the initiative will be included in this year’s budget through a supplemental appropriation, said Eli Savit, an adviser to Duggan. He declined to say where the money would come from, saying that the details would be worked out in the legislature.

“He’s got an agreement in principle,” Savit said. “Of course all of this is subject to the budget process, the details of which the legislature will presumably have to work out.”

It’s a big hurdle for the city, given how far apart the governor and Republican lawmakers are on some other key issues regarding the current budget, such as a funding increase for charter schools that Whitmer vetoed.

“I don’t want to speculate on what the mayor said or on what could happen,” said Tiffany Brown, a spokeswoman for Whitmer, in a text message. “But I will emphasize the importance of both parties (Governor and Legislature) getting back to the table and working together to get a supplemental done to support programs that are important to Michigan residents like education, public safety, etc.”

If Duggan is successful, it will be a significant step in the city. There have long been concerns that too many children in the city enter school far behind academically, in part because they haven’t had access to strong child care and preschool programs. A 2017 study found 28,000 children in the city lack access to licensed child care providers from birth to age 5. The lack of preparation is particularly important because the state now requires schools to begin holding back struggling third-graders, beginning this school year.

With universal preschool, children across the city would have access to free preschool, regardless of income level.

Wendy Lewis Jackson, Detroit managing director for the Kresge Foundation, said Duggan has been consulting with Hope Starts Here on the universal pre-K plan.

“We fully expect that the administration will be able to roll out universal pre-K by the timeline the mayor laid out,” she said.

“The goal really is to ensure that every child that needs access to a quality early childhood education will be able to find a program that best meets their needs.”

An artist’s rendering of a new early childhood education center that will be built on the campus of Marygrove College.

In the years since it began, $27 million in additional funding from foundations has been raised for the Hope Starts Here effort, and 16,000 more children in the city are in strong preschool programs, said La June Montgomery Tabron, president and CEO of the Kellogg Foundation.

“Yes, change is happening and it’s happening because all the partners in Hope Starts Here have come to the table strong and very committed to what our goal is and what our vision is,” Tabron said.

Rip Rapson, president and CEO of the Kresge Foundation, said that since the beginning of Hope Starts Here, $3 million has been invested in providing wraparound services for young children and $4 million has been invested in improving the physical condition of early childhood facilities.

There are a number of goals driving the Hope Starts Here initiative, and Duggan’s push for universal pre-K fits into the overall vision.

Duggan asked the crowd to imagine what it will be like to tell parents of young children that they will have access to quality full-day preschool programs.

“Let’s give them the advantage,” Duggan said.

It was unclear what the cost of the universal pre-K program would be, and if it would come in the form of a Head Start program or some other type of preschool program.

Duggan was among the speakers during a ceremonial groundbreaking that was held for a major initiative of the Hope Starts Here effort: a $15 million early childhood center that will be built on the campus of Marygrove College, part of a unique “cradle to careers” initiative that began this school year with the opening of a new high school run by the Detroit school district. The early childhood center, funded by Kresge, will be operated by Starfish Family Services, an early childhood provider.

The new building will open in 2021. It will serve about 145 children in 12 classrooms. The building will also include community gathering spaces, a library, and big windows that provide views of the Marygrove grounds, said architect Marlon Blackwell.

Some neighborhood children are already benefiting from programs operating in some classrooms in existing Marygrove buildings. Anisha Evans is among the neighborhood parents already taking advantage of early childhood programs at Marygrove.

Evans said she found the program after searching for “a home, a bond.”

“I’m just overly excited,” Evans said. “She can grow here,” she said of her daughter.

Summit speakers kept coming back to the word hope. Tabron noted that as a child growing up in the city, hope was a given for her. That’s not the case for many children growing up today, she said.

“All of us are bringing back hope as a given for all of the children in the community,” Tabron said. “That’s very important to our children today.”

This veteran educator and advocate will head a $50 million effort to educate Detroit’s youngest students

2019-11-20T21:15:15+00:00

Decades after Denise Smith ran a home-based child care center, she’s returning to Detroit to lead a project designed to transform the city’s education offerings for young children.

Smith was named the first director of Hope Starts Here, a $50 million effort to expand child care in Detroit and improve existing programs, a spokesman announced Wednesday.

“The fact that 28,000 Detroit children lack access to quality child care is just one measure of how far we have to go,” Smith said in a statement.

Backed by the Kresge and W.K. Kellogg Foundations, the Hope Starts Here initiative has focused in its first two years on supporting existing child care programs. (Both foundations fund Chalkbeat.)

Smith comes on board as the initiative breaks ground on a $15 million early childhood center at Marygrove College that will complement a new K-12 school on the same campus.

Smith spent the last decade leading various early childhood initiatives in Michigan, including:

Executive director of Flint Early Childhood Collaborative and Educare-Flint
Vice president for early childhood, Excellent Schools Detroit
Director of Great Start to Quality, the state’s child care rating system

She said her experiences as a parent and as a caregiver for her nine-year-old niece have convinced her of the importance of early education.

“Once you’ve seen the difference that having opportunity can make in the trajectory of a child’s life you know what’s possible,” she said in a statement. “Yes, it’s hard. But it can be done. Now we have the right pieces to take the limits off of children’s lives in Detroit, and we can do it early.’’

Inside 45 minutes of Detroit fun: How artists are helping toddlers dance from home care into kindergarten

2019-08-05T19:39:15+00:00

From the street, it’s hard to tell that Jill Bostic’s home in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood is a laboratory for improving early childhood education.

Step into her brightly painted basement, though, and it’s a different story. Kimberli Boyd’s voice rises over a dozen very young children sitting on a circular carpet. They sing along, patting out the rhythm on their knees: “Hello to Riley, yes indeed!”

Boyd, a dancer and choreographer, works with young children across Detroit through a program called Living Arts Detroit Wolf Trap. Now the program is expanding into home-based centers in Bostic’s neighborhood with the help from a Detroit-area philanthropy, the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation.

The Fisher foundation has invested heavily in Brightmoor for years, hoping to turn a symbol of decline into a signal of recovery. Its investments have ranged from blight removal to early childhood education, where its grants reached $1.3 million last year alone.

Students at Jill’s Creative Learning practice body movements while singing.

Once a thriving middle-class part of northwest Detroit, Brightmoor’s population was halved between 1990 and 2010 amid white flight, the shrinking of the auto industry, and the breakdown of the city’s school system.

Detroit Wolf Trap has operated for years in the city’s federally funded Head Start programs, serving nearly 1,000 students annually. It is part of a national arts education initiative that has reached upwards of 50,000 students and has shown promise in raising their academic outcomes.

After starting at four Brightmoor homes this spring, including Bostic’s, the arts program will expand to seven new child care centers during the 2019-2020 school year.

Expanding to homes is important because they make up a significant portion of all child care centers. Across the state, more than half of all centers operate in private homes.

In Detroit, where many centers are home based, virtually no 5-year-olds are ready for kindergarten level work when they enter school for the first time.

By sending artists like Boyd to in-home child care centers, the foundation hopes that their art-focused approach to education will prove contagious, spreading to child care centers across Brightmoor — and eventually across the city.

“The ultimate goal of our work is to pass down effective arts strategies to teachers so that they can incorporate movement, music, and drama into their daily work with children,” said Erika Villareal Bunce, director of programs at Living Arts, the nonprofit that runs Detroit Wolftrap.

A student sings along with Kimberli Boyd, an artist with Living Arts Detroit Wolf Trap.

On a Monday morning in July, Boyd’s voice filled the small basement at Jill’s Creative Learning. For 45 minutes, she made learning look like a lot of fun. Children danced, stretched, crawled, bounced, and sang. Every time their attention wandered, Boyd came up with yet another song and dance.

Her musical chants are loaded with information — rhymes, primary colors, vocabulary, numbers — that will come in handy when the children enter kindergarten. She believes art is a powerful tool to help students learn.

Bostic, who owns the center and operates it out of her home, agrees.

“It’s helping the children develop language and sounds,” she said. “Once you start singing, that brings the children in.”

Students play with colored scarves as part of an interactive lesson at Jill’s Creative Learning, a child care center in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood.

After a tumultuous decade, is Head Start in Detroit finding its feet?

2019-07-03T21:57:11+00:00

Nearly every available spot in Detroit’s Head Start programs is full, a reversal after years of struggling with enrollment and facilities problems.

Just three years ago, hundreds of low-income children in the city were not attending a high-quality preschool, even though they could have gotten a subsidized slot.

Since then, Detroit has managed to enroll more low-income children in a program whose benefits could ripple through the rest of their lives. That’s a welcome sign of stability after years of tumult and uncertainty for families here who depend on Head Start.

And it’s a significant step forward for a city where 54% of children live in poverty, and where almost no students enter kindergarten prepared to learn. Researchers generally find that Head Start benefits low-income students.

“These are the kids who need the services most,” said Kaitlin Ferrick, director of Michigan’s Head Start Collaboration office. “The fact that they’re getting services is really important to our state.”

Virtually all of the 4,900 available seats in Head Start programs in Detroit Start were filled as of April, according to Patrick Fisher, a spokesman for the federal agency that runs Head Start.

Still, the number of available seats actually declined since last year, when it peaked at 5,200. Fisher said previous trouble with recruitment, facilities, and teacher-to-student ratios led Head Start to cut seats.

It is not unusual for Head Start programs to fill all of their seats — the national enrollment rate is 97%. By comparison, in 2016, Head Start programs in Detroit had managed to fill only about 84% of 4,895 slots. In 2015, just 71 percent of the available Head Start slots in Detroit were filled.

The 800 new students will get a free preschool experience — a lucky break in a state where private child care can rival the cost of university tuition. They’ll also get free meals and other services.

The city is still a long way from meeting demand for licensed child care, which is estimated at 23,000 slots.

Yet there are signs that a tumultuous decade for Head Start in the city has given way to greater stability.

The federal government reauthorized $55 million for various Head Start programs in the city over the next five years. The grants came after they failed to meet quality standards last year and were forced to reapply for federal dollars.

What’s more, the cast of nonprofits that run Head Start programs appears more stable.

“To my knowledge, the Head Start provider network had no new or departing organizations over the last year,” said Ann Kalass, CEO of Starfish Family Services, which runs a Head Start program in the city.

Head Start providers hope this marks the start of a new chapter. In 2012, Detroit officials acknowledged that the city-led Head Start program was badly mismanaged and asked local nonprofits to take over. The transition wasn’t easy — one of the city’s largest nonprofits dropped its program nearly two years ago, sending families in search of new programs.

What’s more, programs were hamstrung by deteriorating facilities, and they faced a severe shortage of teachers willing to do the difficult work of caring for young children for low wages.

Kalass’ organization and others have found ways to offer more seats with help from local philanthropies, which pitched in to renovate facilities and recruit families.

Over the last four years, eight foundations came together to help, calling themselves the Head Start Innovation Fund. They spent $5.9 million to publicize the programs and to convince teachers to stay in the classroom. They paid for professional development and wellness training for teachers; some programs held Zumba classes and served smoothies on twice-annual wellness days.

Also during that time, some programs in the city managed to find or renovate buildings that met federal standards for Head Start classrooms, Fisher said. The Kresge Foundation helped, in 2016 committing $20 million over five years to repair centers and build new ones.

(The Kresge Foundation also funds Chalkbeat. Read our code of ethics here.)

To make it all work, the city’s Head Start programs for the first time formed a collective last year, calling themselves the Detroit Head Start Provider Network. That collaboration made a big difference, Ferrick said.

“Filling 800 slots is very significant,” she said. “The ability for them to improve and coordinate in that way is very impressive.”

‘It makes us better teachers because we’re not carrying it inside’: How a Detroit preschool helps teachers cope with the stress of the job

2019-06-26T17:48:39+00:00

It was a Friday morning in early May, just before Mother’s Day, when a group of preschool teachers settled onto oversized pillows and colorful beanbags for a conversation that would lead to tears, frustration and — eventually — a sense of clarity on a delicate matter involving a child.

Karen Massingille, a preschool behavioral health therapist, sat on a tiny child’s chair, looking at the nine women seated around her in a cozy, carpeted corner of the sunlit room.

She took a few deliberate breaths, then started to speak.

“It’s Mother’s Day,” she said. “Anybody have any plans?”

Her question seemed like a lighthearted inquiry and, indeed, it led at first to answers about planned barbecues and family gatherings. But Massingille’s goal was not lighthearted conversation. She wanted these teachers to talk about mothers — the ones in their own lives, and the ones in the lives of their students. She wanted to know their frustrations and their fears. And she wanted them to discuss them here, in this room, so they wouldn’t come out later in the classroom.

The women around the circle work with young children at the Starfish Family Services Center on Hiveley Street in the inner-ring Detroit suburb of Inkster, where a third of residents live in poverty. The federally funded Head Start preschool program where they teach serves some of the city’s neediest families, including children who face hunger, violence, or fear at home.

These teachers see the impact of those challenges on their students every day — in the loud, disruptive behaviors they see in some children, or the quiet sadness they see in others. They fret about some of their students, bringing that worry home at the end of the day. For some, that can trigger difficult memories from their own childhoods. For others, it can affect their interactions with their own families.

“It’s not every child you take home with you,” said teacher Melanie Swingle, who has worked at the Hiveley Street center for a year. “But some of our children, you think about them … You’re washing your hair and you’re like ‘I wonder if she’s going to get a shower today.’”

The weight of that worry is why the Hiveley center began holding regular monthly meetings like the one Massingille led before Mother’s Day.

The sessions use an approach called reflective supervision that has long been used in the mental health field to help therapists and clinicians work with their supervisors to process their feelings about the difficult situations they see in their work.

Reflective supervision is not used as often in education as it is in mental health. But Starfish Family Services, which runs the Hiveley center and 10 other Head Start centers in and around Detroit, started requiring all of its teachers to participate in group sessions like these four years ago as a way to help them cope with the stress of the job.

The approach is part of a growing effort across the country to recognize and address the impact on educators of what’s known as “secondary trauma,” the distress that comes from learning about difficult things that have happened to others.

As educational research increasingly highlights the role that trauma plays in causing challenging student behaviors and in influencing teachers’ responses to them, more schools are adopting what’s known as trauma-informed practices to help teachers better respond to their students’ needs.

Kathleeen Mulrooney, a program director for infant and early childhood mental health for Zero to Three, an organization that promotes early childhood wellbeing across the country, said that work is especially important for teachers who work in early childhood education.

“Babies and young children stir up very strong feelings in the adults that are a part of their caregiving network,” Mulrooney said. “And because brain development is happening so quickly [at that age] … being able to shape that social emotional development in positive ways is of critical importance.”

Although early childhood educators don’t necessarily have higher rates of depression or anxiety than the general population, research has shown that an early childhood workforce that’s mentally healthy can provide higher-quality care to children, and that programs that build teamwork, respect, and stability at work can improve teachers’ mental health.

That’s the motivation behind a number of steps that Starfish has taken to support teachers, said Brianne Twombly, who is the organization’s manager of trauma-informed care.

Teachers at the Hiveley center are encouraged to share how they’re feeling every day on a board in the school’s office so staff know who might need extra help each day. If teachers need a break, they can go to a lounge that has snacks, drinks, and a massage chair.

And once a month, they gather with their peers and their supervisor for hourlong reflective supervision sessions where teachers can talk through the things that are bothering them.

Teachers say it’s made a difference.

“It makes us better teachers because we’re not carrying it inside,” said Angela Prater, an assistant teacher who has worked at Hiveley for 16 years. “We’re able to release it.”

“It’s not every child you take home with you,” said teacher Melanie Swingle. “But some of our children, you think about them … You’re washing your hair and you’re like ‘I wonder if she’s going to get a shower today.’”

***

When she gathered the teachers of the Hiveley center for their reflective supervision session in May, Massingile touched only briefly on the subject of Mother’s Day before turning to the real purpose of the discussion.

“Speaking of mothers,” she said. “What I wanted you guys to think about today was the mother or father in your classroom that you greet every day and you take home in the evenings. This is the mother that you hold. This is the mother that you hate to see coming. … This is the mother that you look at and smile.

“Who is that mother?” she asked. “You don’t have to say her name, but just talk about that mother.”

She stopped and waited as the room went silent. Some of the women gazed at the floor or looked out the window until, eventually, one teacher decided to speak. She invoked a young child in her class.

“I worry about the whole family,” she said. “There’s a lot of anger at home right now.”

A colleague of hers responded.

“I know who you’re talking about because I think about them too, actually,” she said, as her voice began to shake and she started to cry. “I’m afraid it might turn violent. From what I’m hearing now, it’s just verbal abuse, but I’m afraid it’s going to change. Or it’s been in my head, I wonder: Has it changed and you don’t know about it?”

The child these women were worried about has a parent they fear is being mistreated by someone at home. They’ve gotten unsettling reports of the family that have trickled into the school from friends and neighbors. But they’ve been hesitant to approach the parent, worried they could say something that would result in the child being pulled from school. For some of their students, school is the safest place they can go.

“It’s heartbreaking,” one teacher said. “We’re the outsiders looking in. We can see through the glass but can’t say anything.”

The hourlong conversation, which a Chalkbeat reporter observed on the condition that no teachers or children would be identified because of the sensitive nature of the discussion, covered a number of subjects, including the promising breakthrough one teacher felt she’d had with a difficult student.

As they talked, some women sipped on coffee. Others nibbled on snacks.

But when the conversation drifted toward possible solutions, such as the family therapist the teachers thought could intervene with the parent they had concerns about, Massingile gently steered the conversation back to the women in the room.

“This isn’t the place to fix it,” she told the circle, noting that Head Start social workers were already working with the family. “Part of taking care of yourself is … finding somewhere to put it and believing that what you did was good enough.”

“I hold back a lot of emotions to just stay strong for that child so it helps to be able to let loose with my peers and see that we’re all in the same situation,” said Shantell Buck, a lead teacher at the Hiveley Head Start center in Inkster, Michigan.

***

It’s difficult to know how many schools across the country are taking steps to address secondary trauma or to actively support the mental health of educators.

Though the federal Office of Head Start requires substantive supervision in Head Start centers and offers online resources to providers that want to use reflective supervision, it does not collect data on how many centers use these kinds of tools.

Sarah Neil, the manager of effective practice for the National Head Start Association, which advocates on behalf of the federal program, said she’s seeing more Head Start programs taking active steps to support the emotional wellbeing of staff members.

For now, she said, that’s mostly the larger Head Start providers that have more resources. But in the coming years, as more educators work to address the role trauma plays in students’ and teachers’ lives, she predicted more will sign on. “You’ll see that growing dramatically across the field,” she said.

At the Hiveley center, site leader Krystle Dionise said she’s seen major changes in her school since the reflective supervision sessions with teachers began.

She credits the program with the drop in teacher turnover she’s seen at the center. Last year was the first time that all of the teachers she expected to return for the new school year in fact returned. She’s also seen changes in her staff, she said.

“I’ve noticed that my staff are more empathetic to each other,” she said. “If they see a staff member in the hallway, struggling with a child, having a difficult time, they’re more willing and receptive to jump right in and help. There’s more of a family we’ve created.”

Twombly, the Starfish manager of trauma-informed care, said those changes are also playing out in the classroom.

“The classrooms look different,” she said. “They have more joy in them. The teachers are feeling more confident. More competent. More calm when they’re in there.”

Before, teachers would respond to tantrums or behaviors such as hitting or toy-throwing with judgment, “saying ‘that kid is doing that on purpose. That kid is bad,’” Twombly said.

Some teachers blamed themselves, thinking they weren’t doing their jobs effectively.

Now, she said, reflective supervision and other trauma-informed practices have helped reframe the problem for teachers.

“When they’re able to process what’s happening to them and understand why the child is engaging in that behavior, then they’re able to … look at it in a different way,” she said.

Shantell Buck, a lead teacher who started at Hiveley last year, said she often brings home some of the sadness that comes to school with her students.

“There are killings and shootings and things like that,” she said. “There’s a lot of community violence and there are a lot of kids who are very traumatized by the things they see in their home environments.”

Having a place to discuss all of that makes it easier for her to respond effectively to big behaviors she sees in the classroom, she said.

“I hold back a lot of emotions to just stay strong for that child so it helps to be able to let loose with my peers and see that we’re all in the same situation.”

Swingle, another lead teacher at the school, said she finds the sessions “comforting.”

“It feels good just to be able to say how your classroom’s been going without any judgement,” she said. “It gets a lot of frustration out.”

Swingle talked to a reporter about reflective supervision one morning in June as her young charges ran around on the playground. Afterward, she returned to her classroom where, as she was sitting down to teach a phonics lesson, she found she needed some of the tools she gets from the sessions.

Two children had been squabbling over a toy hammer when one of them picked it up and used it to hit his friend. Swingle rushed over to seize the hammer from the little boy, prompting him to scream.

“I want the hammer!” he shrieked.

She tried to calm him down, holding him and asking him to make a different plan, but he grabbed a fistful of her long hair and pulled as hard as he could.

She glanced around the room. Her assistant teacher had briefly left with another child and she needed backup immediately. She picked up the boy, who was screaming even louder than before and still pulling her hair, and carried him across the room. She picked up the phone, called the office and urgently asked for help.

It wasn’t until the assistant teacher rushed back into the classroom and took the agitated boy out to the hall that peace returned to Swingle’s classroom.

She then took a deep breath and composed herself.

“You want to know why I need reflective supervision?” she said.

She looked toward the door through which the screaming child had just been escorted, a nod to the difficult challenges she faces every day, and the compassion she needs to respond with patience and affection.

She had remained calm throughout the whole interaction and now the boy was out of her room in a safe space with another adult.

“That is why I need reflective supervision,” she said.

Then she went back to her phonics lesson.

Defusing tantrums, tying laces, and changing young lives — while living under the poverty line

2019-06-13T19:43:25+00:00

Cindy Lester calmly sat down on the child-sized couch with the 4-year-old who had been careening around her classroom all morning. He’d just flipped an empty soup bowl onto his head.

“You have a lot going on inside you today,” she said. “What’s going on? Are you tired?”

To a lot of teachers, a high-spirited boy like this one might seem like a problem — the sort of child who might spend preschool in timeouts, then graduate to the elementary school principal’s office. He might fall behind academically, his curiosity and creativity putting him at odds with classroom rules.

But Lester is determined to create a different future for this child and his classmates at Children of the Rising Sun Empowerment Center in Detroit. She devotes herself to that mission 10 hours a day, masterfully defusing tantrums, tying and re-tying shoelaces, and coaxing a roomful of 4-year-olds to sit relatively still for lessons in phonics and math.

Michigan leaders say the state desperately needs more skilled and committed teachers like Lester to prepare young students for the crucial transition to kindergarten. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has warned that if the state can’t recruit enough early educators, that could impede her plan to offer free preschool to all Michigan 4-year-olds by the end of her first term.

One big reason? Salaries for preschool teachers are extremely low.

Lester is deeply devoted to her job, but she’s also a mom burdened by long hours, a small mountain of credit card debt, and by the constant worry that the next rent payment may be out of reach. Spend a day in her classroom and it’s clear why some might be unwilling to take the path she has chosen.

A typical day in Cindy Lester’s preschool classroom includes an outdoor walk in the surrounding Brightmoor neighborhood.

“Wages are actually comparable to animal care workers and fast food workers,” said Tiffany Tilley, a member of the Michigan board of education. “Some of them are on public assistance. Teachers are drastically underpaid.”

Preschool teachers in Michigan make an average of $14 an hour, she said. If, like Lester, they don’t have a bachelor’s degree, it goes down considerably. She makes just $11 an hour and gets no health insurance.

Those wages put Lester, a single mother of three, well below the poverty line, making it hard to survive. She is her family’s sole breadwinner.

“Either you’re here for a paycheck or you’re here because you love what you do,” she said. “I just have to make sacrifices.”

Lester’s boss said she wishes she could pay her staff better.

“I’m not even able to pay them livable wages,” said Zina Davis, director of the center where Lester works. She said it’s not possible because the mostly poor families she serves can’t pay enough to adequately supplement the meager subsidies she receives from the state.

So she counts on teachers like Lester, who are committed to making it work.

Lester’s day begins when her alarm blares at 6:45 a.m. She wakes in her childhood bedroom because an illness a few years ago forced her and her three children — 17, 13 and 3 — to move in with her mother.

She starts with a mantra that she silently repeats in her head so she does not wake up her 3-year-old son. “Ancestors, I ask you to go before me and open any doors that shall be closed and clear any paths that shall be blocked.”

On a Thursday in May, she drove two of her children to their schools, then landed in her own classroom by 8:15 a.m. Nine children were bouncing around her room like pinballs — more than usual — because parents had dropped them off early.

Lester tied on her chosen uniform, an apron printed with the words “I teach tiny humans,” and got started.

She corraled her students around a low table, where they spent a few minutes tracing letters on sheets of paper. It was the first in a string of activities that would help her students get ready for kindergarten. The letter of the week was “k,” so they drew its shape in the air and brainstormed “k” words: “king,” “koala,” and “kangaroo.”

“What does a kangaroo do?” Lester asked when they had finished. Without saying a word, the students started hopping.

“Hop to the table,” she said. “It’s time to make Play-Doh.”

Lester’s students enter kindergarten with basic math and reading skills, setting her program apart from many in the state. Improved school readiness is one reason some economists have estimated that society gains $7 for every $1 of public spending on preschool.

Lester loves everything about her job besides the pay.

“There are days where I get overwhelmed,” she said. “But I love what I do.”

After an episode of postpartum depression, Lester took up meditation and yoga, convinced that her students’ well-being depends in part on her own. She embraced the center’s focus on a child’s emotional and physical needs, attending trainings on weekends to deepen her understanding of the curriculum. She already has a child care credential, and she plans to pursue an associate’s degree in the fall.

Cindy Lester helps her student wake up after a long nap. Nap time is the only break in her 10-hour day.

Another reason Lester is happy in her job: Her classroom in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood is brand new, an upgrade over the house where Davis used to operate Children of the Rising Sun. Thanks to a grant from IFF, a national nonprofit, and other local foundations, there are books in the book corner, a play kitchen, house plants, and lights that dim down for nap time.

“I really like coming here,” said Priscilla Esquivel, an instructional coach for the Early Childhood Investment Corporation. She was working in Lester’s classroom under a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (which also funds Chalkbeat). After observing Lester at work, she said she was impressed by a palpable sense of calm in the room.

“They just do everything so well,” she said. “For the quality they’re offering, the teachers should be making a lot more.”

Making ends meet is a constant struggle for Lester. She has racked up debt on four different credit cards, using them to buy food and gas. She figures she owes more than $14,000, a heavy burden on top of her daily worries about rent and putting food on the table.

She’s not alone. A survey of 685 early educators conducted by Michigan’s education department found that 54% worried about having enough money for food. More than half reported using their savings to cover basic expenses, and 42% said they used credit to make ends meet.

“These are the teachers we’re providing for poor kids, and their kids probably qualify for the programs they’re teaching in,” said Steven Barnett, an economist who directs the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. “That just seems wrong.”

He puts the responsibility for the problem squarely on state lawmakers, who are stonewalling Whitmer’s attempt to increase the state’s childcare budget. Quality childcare is so expensive — largely because of the cost of paying highly qualified teachers — that few families can afford it. When families pay the free-market cost, tuition for child care can be comparable to tuition at the University of Michigan. As a result, pay for early educators depends almost entirely on state subsidies.

“The state is essentially determining the pay level,” he said.

That’s bad news for childcare workers in Michigan, where childcare subsidies are among the lowest in the nation.

As a result, low salaries are the rule at every level of the profession. The highest-paid preschool teachers in the state earn about $42,000 annually to staff Michigan’s free preschool program for 4-year-olds. Kindergarten teachers with similar qualifications make nearly 50% more on average.

Many more, including Lester, work for private childcare centers, where salaries are significantly lower. The pinch is especially severe for private programs that primarily serve poor families, like Children of the Rising Sun.

“Parents can’t afford to pay any more. Providers can’t afford to make any less. We have to figure out a balance,” said Erica Willard, executive director of the Michigan Association for the Education of Young Children.

Lester says she doesn’t pay much attention to political debates surrounding early childhood education. She’d rather focus on her students.

Over a long day, it was impossible to ignore the boy who had flipped his soup bowl onto his head. When the class played music, he seemed to use every muscle in his body to play a toy drum. He focused intently on his Play-Doh, staying behind to add more tiny details long after the other children had tired of their projects. When Lester asked him what he was making, he said, “a jungle.”

The boy had arrived early on the day Chalkbeat visited Lester’s classroom, and she worried that he hadn’t gotten enough sleep. During breakfast, she watched him closely. “Don’t put too much syrup on or you’ll be going 90 miles an hour through the classroom,” she told him. He listened, pouring carefully. Then he finished his waffle, noticed that there was leftover syrup, and drank it straight.

As he sped through the next few hours, Lester said his name more often than any other child’s. She wasn’t angry, just reminding him of the rules. This approach worked well until lunch, when, carried away by a joke, he flipped his empty bowl onto his head.

After they’d talked it out, he fell fast asleep for two hours.

Nap time came nearly six hours after Lester’s morning alarm, at 12:26 p.m. This would be the only break in her long day.

“And now I can take a deep breath,” she said.

She turned on her phone and scanned her Instagram feed. As she decompressed, her mind was still on that boy and his future.

“I don’t want him to be labeled or put to the side in kindergarten, just because he couldn’t focus or pay attention,” she said. “I worry he’s going to get pushed out of the class, or he’s going to get in trouble — and not for doing anything bad, he just couldn’t control himself.”

The boy seemed more relaxed when he woke up, and the rest of the day passed in a blur. There were more crafts, more activities, and a field trip to the gym.

Lester didn’t walk out of the building until 6:15 p.m. The last child had been picked up and her classroom was clean. In one hand she carried a bag of potatoes left behind by a food pantry that set up shop in their building earlier in the day. Part of dinner was covered.

“I’m good,” she said, reflecting on the day. “I can breathe. I’m going home to cook and try it all over again tomorrow.”

Cindy Lester, seen here with her youngest son, takes a deep breath after another 10-hour day leading a preschool classroom.

These foundations have poured millions into Detroit childcare. They’re ready to ‘accelerate’.

2019-05-29T21:20:14+00:00

A philanthropic initiative that has promised to spend $50 million on early childhood education in Detroit is moving closer to that goal, announcing another multi-million grant to improve childcare in the city.

At the same time, the foundations’ early childhood effort, called Hope Starts Here, is hiring a new director, a sign that it is preparing for further investments in the education of children from birth to age 8 in Detroit.

The leaders of the Kresge Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the philanthropies behind this push, announced a new $2.5 million donation on Wednesday at the annual Mackinac Policy Conference. The job posting for its planned hire has been online for several weeks.

“It clearly accelerates the work,” said Rip Rapson, president of the Michigan-based Kresge Foundation, of the director position. “Right now we’ve relied on a third-party consultant to convene the meetings, undertake the research — herd the cats. We need someone who wakes up every morning” and works on Hope Starts Here.

The Kresge and the W.K. Kellogg foundations joined forces in 2017 to launch this initiative — pledging a combined $50 million to the cause. (Both foundations also fund Chalkbeat.)

From the outset, the program’s goal was to improve life outcomes for children in Detroit, where an estimated 28,000 children don’t have access to quality childcare and a staggering 60 percent live in poverty.

The new hire will be tasked with keeping Hope Starts Here in sync with the hundreds of community organizations who help provide early education in Detroit. The new “implementation director” will be a “connector, facilitator and project manager,” said Wendy Lewis Jackson, Kresge Detroit Program managing director, and Regina Bell, Kellogg Foundation program officer, in a prepared statement.

The foundations ultimately hope to build new childcare options, starting with an early childhood center that will complement a new district school. But the first few years of the initiatives have largely been dedicated to improving the numerous existing childcare centers in Detroit, many of which are operated out of homes.

“We have so many people providing services in Detroit, that our whole business in the first phase will be to upgrade quality and provide greater support,” Rapson said.

The strength of Michigan’s early childhood system is a well-regarded free preschool program for four-year-olds, but it has far less to offer children between ages 0-3.

That’s where Hope Starts Here comes in, said Matt Gillard, president and CEO of Michigan’s Children, an advocacy group that backs the initiative.

“People seem to have a good handle on pre-K,” he said, adding: “Where we’re struggling is childcare for infants and toddlers. The Hope Starts Here initiative will be a great help towards solving some of those issues in Detroit.”

So far, the foundations’ money has put mental health, healthy eating, and arts programs in some existing Detroit preschools. Another portion will support the an early childhood center set to open in 2020 at a new “cradle-to-career” school on the campus of Marygrove College in northwest Detroit.

The newest $2.5 million donation will go to improving childcare facilities in Detroit. The money includes a $1 million contribution from the PNC Foundation.

Over the next eight years, the new director will help spend the tens of millions of dollars that remain. While the initiative has so far focused mostly on existing programs, it could also play an important role in Mayor Mike Duggan’s goal of offering free preschool to every 4-year-old in Detroit.

It’s unclear whether universal pre-K in Detroit is politically feasible. It would require Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to emphasize that policy amid political fights over K-12 education, and funding to repair Michigan’s roads.

If it happens, the director of Hope Starts Here would become an important player. In that case, Rapson said Kresge would consider underwriting a new city office to back early childhood programs.

“We believe that the implementation director will play a key role in working with city leaders, including the Mayor’s Office and other partners,” Jackson and Bell added.

The job description is here.

The 4-year-olds are alright in Michigan. The 3-year-olds, less so.

2019-05-09T22:40:51+00:00

The landmark expansion of Michigan’s preschool program for 4-year-olds is earning high marks compared with the rest of the nation. But the strength of Michigan’s early childhood education system is limited by the lack of any state-funded programming for 3-year-olds.

Those are two key findings of a national ranking of states by the strength of their early childhood education efforts.

The program for 4-year-olds, known as Great Start Readiness Program, offers free, high-quality schooling to students about to enter kindergarten.

As policymakers debate whether to further expand the program, they will look for proof of its success. At least one major research group thinks it’s doing a pretty good job.

Many advocates would also like to see Michigan expand supports for younger children and their families. The brain develops rapidly in the early years, and researchers largely agree that educating children who are 3 years old or younger could come with significant payoffs in academic and other life outcomes.

The National Institute of Early Education Research, a think tank within Rutgers University, has been ranking states’ early childhood education since 2002.

The latest ranking puts Michigan in the top half nationwide in several measurements based on data from 2017-2018. Michigan is 18th nationwide in access for 4-year-olds, and 14th for state spending on early learning. What’s more, the state was one of only three that met all the criteria for high-quality programming, from teacher credentialing to class size requirements.

That’s not enough for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose budget proposal calls for an additional $85 million investment in preschool for 4-year-olds in the state. Senate Republicans have countered with a much smaller increase of $5 million. Many observers think budget disputes won’t be settled until the fall.

The ranking notes that funding for the Great Start readiness program declined between fiscal years 2017 and 2018, when adjusted for inflation.

Read Michigan’s full report here.

Gov. Whitmer wants universal pre-K by the end of her four-year term. Will there be enough teachers?

2019-04-05T21:33:04+00:00

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wants to see every 4-year-old in Michigan have access to free preschool by the end of her first term in 2022.

It’s an “aggressive” goal, she said, and the most concrete timeline she’s laid out to date after promising on the campaign trail to greatly expand educational opportunities in the critical years before kindergarten.

“We’ve gotta get serious about this,” Whitmer told reporters from Chalkbeat Detroit during an exclusive interview in her Lansing office on Friday. “I think that we absolutely have to have a concrete goal when it comes to universal pre-k.”

In a 30-minute interview, Whitmer addressed a range of education issues facing the state including school funding, charter school oversight, and the tough third-grade reading law that next year will start requiring schools to hold back third-graders who are reading below grade level. (We will publish additional takeaways from the interview, as well as a full transcript, next week.)

A dramatic expansion of pre-K for 4-year-olds would be a major shift in Michigan’s education landscape, one that experts insist would help reverse decades of backsliding academic performance.

Whitmer’s comments on preschool came in response to a question about whether she had concrete targets to deliver on her campaign promise of bringing universal pre-kindergarten to Michigan schools. Whitmer, in her State of the State address, vowed to ensure that 60 percent of adults completed some form of higher education by 2030, but that speech did not mention early childhood education.

That doesn’t mean it’s not a priority, she said Friday. But expanding preschool to all 4-year-olds is made more complicated by a statewide lack of qualified preschool educators, she said.

“If we went to 100 percent today we wouldn’t have the expertise in the classroom to serve the children,” she said.

That’s not the only wrinkle in the plan: The Republican-controlled legislature vehemently opposes the gas tax that is a key piece of Whitmer’s proposed budget. She wants the tax to help pay for an $85 million increase in funding for the Great Start Readiness Program, Michigan’s highly regarded preschool program for 4-year-olds, a boost that she called a “first step” towards universal pre-K.

If that first step falters, does she have a plan B?

“Nope,” she said. “I’m confident in my budget, and I feel that any alternative probably won’t address all the issues that mine does. But if someone has one that does, I’m open to having that conversation.”

Whitmer’s proposal to dedicate more money to preschool programs this year is aimed partly at raising teacher salaries. Pay is currently so low that some pre-K programs say they are losing teachers to cash-strapped K-12 districts.

The lack of teachers “has been a challenge,” said Matt Gillard, president of Michigan’s Children, an advocacy group. “When we expanded our Great Start Readiness Program under Gov. Snyder it was a challenge.”

Under Whitmer’s plan, regular increases in funding over four years would help draw more people into the field, making it possible to jump from the 36 percent of 4-year-olds currently enrolled in government-funded pre-K to 100 percent by the time her first term is out.

Still, Denise Smith, executive director of the Flint Early Promise Collaborative, said that expanding access for 4-year-olds is just one of the steps Whitmer could take to strengthen early childhood education in Michigan. For starters, the regulations attached to the statewide pre-K program are often incompatible with Head Start, a federal program that includes preschool for 4-year-olds, she said. That makes it difficult for many programs to access all the available government funds that should be available to them, she said.

“There are things that can be done within the current framework” to improve access to early childhood education, Smith said. “It would require the state to be more flexible.”

Some argue that Michigan should simply be doing more as advocates increasingly turn their attention to children who are even younger. Michigan recently expanded its program for 4-year-olds, and its options for younger children are significantly less robust.

“Learning begins at birth,” Gillard said. “A universal program for 4-year-olds is great, but what happens between birth and age 4 is critically important. There are huge gaps and huge discrepancies in the experiences that people have, based on demographics and their surroundings.”

Whitmer’s proposed budget also would expand childcare subsidies to more families. She wants to pay for the increases using federal Child Care Development Block Grants.

Mayor Duggan had wanted to use that money for a universal pre-K program in Detroit, but Whitmer said Friday that there was less money available than he initially believed. Still, she said she supports the idea of a free pre-K program in Detroit, and she said she’d be willing to talk with Duggan about other paths forward.

Universal pre-K in Detroit “adds to some of the momentum that’s happening in the city and gives people confidence about opportunities for kids the city,” Whitmer said. “I think it would be incredibly helpful.”

What Whitmer’s budget means for preschoolers in Michigan — and Detroit

2019-03-07T00:28:31+00:00

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer campaigned hard on the promise of offering preschool to every Michigan 4-year-old. Now she says it could still happen — just not this year.

Whitmer’s first budget proposal does take a step in that direction, opening Michigan’s highly regarded free pre-kindergarten program to thousands of additional families while also boosting the state budget for child care.

That was welcome news to advocates of early childhood education, who know that Whitmer is trying to simultaneously increase access to child care, address major problems in infrastructure and K-12 education, and fend off what is sure to be a strong political challenge from the Republican-controlled Legislature.

“We have limited dollars to do everything we need to in our state, but she (Whitmer) is committed to education and to kids, and she understands the importance of early investment,” said Gilda Jacobs, president of the Michigan League for Public Policy, and a former Democratic state senator.

Mayor Mike Duggan has repeatedly floated the possibility of a Detroit-specific universal pre-K program. But under Whitmer’s budget, the windfall of federal funding that he’d been eyeing would be allocated to child care statewide, raising questions about where Duggan would find the money to pay for plan.

If approved by the state Legislature — a big “if” — Whitmer’s budget would nonetheless make it easier for the youngest Detroiters to get the well-documented benefits of early education. Under the proposal, a family of four making roughly $77,000 a year would be eligible for the Great Start Readiness Program, the state’s high-quality program for 4-year-olds. At least 85 percent of families in Detroit fall below that threshold, according to census data from 2017.

“It’s probably not the solution the mayor was looking for, as far as universal pre-K, but it’s still more public dollars into our pre-K system, which is going to benefit Detroit and Detroit public schools,” said Matt Gillard, president of Michigan’s Children, an advocacy group.

Duggan did not mention pre-K in his State of the City address on Tuesday night. An adviser in the mayor’s office with knowledge of his plans declined to comment.

A state-funded pre-K program solely for Detroit would likely face stiff opposition from Republican lawmakers, who control both chambers of the state Legislature. To reach every 4-year-old, the city would need to add 1,900 seats in pre-K programs at a cost of $11 million, according to a memo obtained by the conservative news site Michigan Capitol Confidential.

That would be a big chunk of the $85 million that Whitmer proposes to add to boost the state pre-K budget by 35 percent. Instead, she wants to use those funds statewide to help more families access pre-K, expanding the number of seats by 5,100. And, she wants to send more funding per pupil to preschool operators.

“I hope it’s not the death knell for the conversation around of universal pre-K in Detroit,” Gillard said. “I think that’s a good conversation to have.”

Whitmer’s proposal also adds about $30 million to expand access to child care programs for younger children. About half of the money would go to boosting pay for child care workers — part of an effort to help more child care providers keep their doors open. Michigan lost about one-third of its child care providers from 2010 to 2017, according to Public Sector Consultants.

The other half would open a state funded program to families whose income is 140 percent of the federal poverty level, adding 2,000 families to the program.

Michigan previously ranked 49th in the nation for access to child care, and Whitmer’s proposed change likely won’t take the state out of the bottom ranks, Gillard said, but he said it’s a start.

“We’re a long way from the finish line,” he said.

Universal pre-K for Detroit? Affordable child care? How Michigan could spend new federal funds

2019-02-07T22:44:14+00:00

Advocates for Michigan’s youngest children were thrilled last year when the state received an unexpected windfall: a $63 million increase in federal child care funds.

Then the jockeying began.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan quickly identified that money as a way to pay for the universal pre-K system he envisions for Detroit — one that would allow every 4-year-old in the city to attend preschool for free.

It’s something the mayor thinks is urgent.

“The challenge of kindergarten readiness is perhaps nowhere more acute than it is in Detroit,” said Eli Savit, Duggan’s top education advisor.

Other advocates say the money should be used the way Michigan and most other states have traditionally used federal child care subsidies — to help parents afford child care so they can work or go to school.

They note that Michigan has one of the lowest income cutoffs in the nation for subsidized child care, meaning only the poorest families in the state can benefit from the program. They want Michigan to catch up with other states that allow even middle-class families to qualify for subsidies. And they want the state to pay child care providers more so more of them will accept children whose parents are using subsidies — and more providers will stick with the program rather than drop out after struggling to make ends meet.

“We have 100 licensed early child care and education providers closing their doors in Michigan every month,” said Dawne Bell, who heads the state’s Early Childhood Investment Corporation. “There hasn’t been clarity about the urgency of the unmet need and … families are losing out every day that we don’t have a plan.”

A spokeswoman for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said the governor won’t comment on specific budget matters until she releases her executive budget in March. But advocates on all sides hope the new governor will drop some guidance in her first State of the State address next week.

What she says could offer important insight into how she plans to approach the needs of young children in Michigan, whether that means focusing on certain cities or prioritizing the needs of 4-year-olds versus those of younger children.

“It’s an interesting policy debate as well as a positive debate to have,” said Matt Gillard, who leads an advocacy organization called Michigan’s Children. “I could easily make an argument that universal pre-K in Detroit is a worthwhile expenditure of these funds, but on the other hand, our overall child care system is so lacking.”

The money at the center of the debate comes from a $2.37 billion increase to federal child care funding that was approved by Congress last March. It was the largest increase in annual funding to states in the history of the nearly 30-year-old child care program.

States have until September of this year to earmark the funds, but many have already started spending the money.

A report by the National Women’s Law Center last month found that more than half of states are using the money to raise payment rates for child care providers. Others are using the money to serve additional families, or to improve the quality of existing programs.

In Michigan, former Gov. Rick Snyder last year spent some of the money, using $15 million to improve the way child care providers are compensated and $2.5 million for a scholarship program that helps early childhood teachers pursue college degrees or teaching certificates, a spokesman for the state education department said.

The state also saw an increase in demand for child care subsidies, which claimed another $14.6 million. But more than $30 million of last year’s funds has yet to be earmarked, giving Whitmer a chance to set her own priorities. She could reallocate the money in future years if, as expected, the money continues to come in future federal budgets.

Whitmer, a Democrat, campaigned last year on the promise of extending universal pre-kindergarten to all 4-year-olds in the state.

She could use the child care money to start that effort in the state’s largest city, where many of the state’s neediest children are concentrated, and where Duggan prominently supported her campaign last year.

But the idea faces a number of hurdles. Among them: Spending a lot of money on a program primarily in Detroit could be a hard sell to GOP lawmakers from across the state, who control both chambers of the legislature.

An analysis from the state education department last year found that the mayor’s proposal to create the 1,900 additional pre-K seats that would be needed to serve all 4-year-olds in Detroit would cost more than $11 million.

That would mean, that “18 percent of $63 million would be going to one city while ignoring needs in others,” a state official wrote in a memo that was prepared for Snyder. The memo was posted by the conservative news site Michigan Capitol Confidential.

Other critics of the mayor’s proposal argue that directing the child care money to a pre-K program for 4-year-olds doesn’t make sense given that the state already has a successful pre-K program called the Great Start Readiness Program, while options for younger children in Michigan lag behind other states.

Another hurdle for the mayor’s proposal is that federal law and state policies impose restrictions on who can benefit from federal child care funding.

For example, only children whose parents make less than $47,000 a year — 85% of the state’s median income — currently qualify for child care subsidies, and generally only if those children’s parents are working or going to school.

Supporters of the mayor’s vision argue, however, that the state relaxed some of the rules in 2016 when it approved emergency funding to meet the needs of young children in Flint who were affected by that city’s water crisis.

The emergency funding enabled Flint to create two full-day, high-quality preschool programs and to relax some of the rules that normally apply to the funding. “That gave us the flexibility to make sure that any child who could have been impacted by the water, either in utero or alive, was eligible” for the new programs, said Denise Smith, who heads the Flint early childhood collaborative.

Smith notes that funding for the programs is set to expire next fall. Flint advocates are also on the list of people hoping for a piece of the new child care funds. The city needs $2.7 million over three years to continue operating at current levels, Smith said.

Detroit hasn’t faced an acute emergency on the scale of the one in Flint, but supporters of Duggan’s vision argue that the dire state of Detroit schools calls for a similarly robust response. The stakes for schools just got higher because a new state law next year will require schools to hold back students who aren’t reading at grade level by the third grade.

Smith, who is on the stewardship board of the Hope Starts Here initiative, which is a push to improve the quality of life for young children in Detroit, said she is sympathetic to the argument that Detroit needs the money for pre-K. But she notes that the number of 4-year-olds needing preschool in Detroit — about 1,900 — is dwarfed by the more than 20,000 babies and toddlers who need preschool or child care.

“I don’t know, given our current landscape, that we can target just 4-year-olds,” Smith said. “I think it makes sense to have a plan to involve multiple age groups … We know that the earlier the foundation is laid, the more persistent it is. And we need to get those young children in a stream of critical thinking and discovery sooner rather than later.”

Savit said Duggan shares the desire to see more and better programs for babies, toddlers, and even pregnant moms, but the mayor believes that pre-K is a good place to begin.

“There’s no question that we need far more investment in the 0-3 space,” Savit said. “But there’s a pressing need, and real opportunity, for 4-year-olds as well. When you invest in 4-year-olds, you have an opportunity for continuity with the school system.”

A silver medal for Detroit pre-K. Now where are the kids?

2019-01-23T14:50:31+00:00

Detroit has earned a silver rating, the second-highest possible, in a national ranking of urban preschool programs published Wednesday. But the report by the advocacy group CityHealth also says that too few eligible 4-year-olds are enrolled.

CityHealth, a foundation-funded organization that rates America’s largest urban centers based on their public policies, looked at how big cities stack up in offering preschool programs in a report published Wednesday.

Researchers at the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University conducted the study and compiled the report.

Following standards set by the largest state-funded pre-K organization, the Great Start Readiness Program, Detroit requires teachers in state preschool to have at least a bachelor’s degree, limits class sizes, and requires health screenings of children.

Those are some of the hallmarks of a high-quality program, according to CityHealth.

Only eight of the 40 cities whose policies were reviewed earned a silver rating, and only five earned the top gold rating. A handful of cities — Indianapolis and Phoenix, Arizona, among them — were far behind, with low enrollment and few or none of CityHealth’s model policies in place.

Still, the gap in Detroit’s pre-K system is a big one. The city has far fewer pre-K seats than it reportedly needs. That’s the case in many of America’s largest cities, according to CityHealth. In nearly half of the cities studied, pre-K programs reached less than one-third of the cities’ pre-schoolers.

The lack of preschool slots is one reason advocates from Michigan’s largest cities are pushing lawmakers to put early childhood on the agenda in Lansing. And it’s part of why Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has gotten behind the idea of a expanded pre-K system for Detroit.

Read the full report here:

Here’s how Detroit, Flint, and Grand Rapids advocates are trying to put early childhood education on the state policy agenda in Lansing

2019-01-17T21:05:09+00:00

With scores of new Michigan lawmakers sworn in this month, and new leadership taking shape in Lansing, parents and advocates from across the state are ramping up efforts to put the needs of the state’s youngest children on the political agenda.

Parents from Detroit, Flint, and Grand Rapids plan to converge on the capitol next week for an “Early Education 101” session with lawmakers that organizers say is the first significant early-childhood event to be held in the capitol in about a decade.

“We decided to do this together so that we can speak with a collective voice,” said Denise Smith, who heads the Flint early childhood collaborative and runs an early childhood center called Educare Flint. “These are not just Detroit or Flint concerns.”

Organized advocacy like this has long been common in Michigan when it comes to K-12 education. Lansing veterans are used to seeing busloads of parents arrive to push for funding or policy changes. But early childhood education advocates haven’t invested the resources to organize events like these in recent years.

Advocates hope that next week’s event will to put the needs of young children and their parents on the radar of lawmakers as the process for thinking about policy and budget priorities for the upcoming legislative session begins.

Among major concerns for parents across the state is a third-grade reading law that, starting next year, will require schools to hold back students who aren’t reading at grade level by the third grade.

Elementary schools have been working to ramp up their reading instruction, but advocates say the work has to begin much earlier, starting with getting children ready for school when they’re babies or toddlers.

“We need to have the resources and the other investments in early childhood so we can insure that fewer children will be retained,” Smith said.

One of the efforts behind the event is the Hope Starts Here initiative in Detroit, which is a $50 million campaign led by the Kresge and W.K. Kellogg foundations to improve the lives of the city’s youngest children. (Kresge and Kellogg also support Chalkbeat. Read our code of ethics here).

Hope Starts Here has brought parents, advocates, educators, and others together in Detroit to set priorities, such as making early childhood programs more affordable, improving their quality and expanding their reach.

“We have a lot of momentum right now,” said Camarrah Morgan, who is helping to lead community engagement and advocacy efforts for Hope Starts Here.

It’s not just parents and educators pushing the cause, she said. “We have corporate partners at the state level who are advocating for child care because they’re trying to recruit and retain workers … This is about helping policymakers understand why childcare is important.”

Organizers say that 165 lawmakers or members of their staffs have signed up for the Jan. 22 “lunch and learn” event in Lansing, including new and returning officials. There also will be 75 parents from across the state.

The parents will be learning too, said Felicia Cash, a parent and community advocate from Detroit’s east side who plans to participate.

“Success would be the parents being fired up once we come back,” Cash said. “It can’t just be a one-time event. We have to have the energy and the perseverance to continue lobbying, to continue writing, to continue having town hall meetings here in the city, to return back to Lansing. This is our voices being lifted up, our voices being taken seriously.”

A year later, here’s what’s happened with a $50 million effort to improve the lives of young Detroit children

2018-12-17T23:01:10+00:00

When the ambitious Hope Starts Here initiative kicked off a year ago with the news that two major foundations would spend $50 million to improve the lives of Detroit’s youngest children, much of the coverage focused on what would be shiny and new.

The 10-year early childhood “framework” put forward by the Kresge and W.K. Kellogg foundations called for a significant effort to expand preschool offerings, including new schools and funding streams that would make it possible to create more programs for kids.

The effort called for major policy initiatives, such as a universal screening program that would identify young children with disabilities or developmental delays. It called for a citywide testing program that would measure how ready children are to start kindergarten.

But as the two foundations (which also fund Chalkbeat) have begun to dig in over the last year, their early investments have focused primarily on improving existing programs, rather than just creating new ones.

“We’ve learned we have to be able walk and chew gum at the same time,” said Khalilah Burt Gaston, the Michigan program officer for Kellogg, which spent more than half of its $25 million commitment in the last year. “While you’re planning and while you’re listening, you have to be able to think about ongoing community engagement.”

The two foundations are talking with Mayor Mike Duggan as he explores the possibility of universal pre-K, meaning free preschool for all city 4-year-olds. An advocacy network of parents and providers is coming together to push for major policy changes at the city, state, and federal levels.

And there is at least one new facility in the works — an early childhood center on the campus of Marygrove College that will be part of a new Kresge-funded “cradle to career” campus. Plans call for the center, expected to open in 2020, to also help preschools and childcare centers in the neighborhood.

But the first grants by the two foundations under Hope Starts Here have largely focused on schools and programs that already existed.

Tuesday, Kresge plans to announce $2.2 million in grants to nine organizations that are providing arts and cultural programing, mental health services, or fresh and healthy food to preschools around Detroit.

The money, the largest share of the $3.9 million Kresge has put toward Hope Starts Here so far, is to help preschool owners and people who operate child care programs offer better programming. Many providers, whether they charge tuition or get state or federal funding, often struggle to make enough money to provide much more than a basic curriculum, said Wendy Lewis Jackson, the managing director of Kresge’s Detroit program.

Kellogg has put the money it’s spent so far on Hope Starts Here into training preschool teachers, improving facilities, and helping low-income families pay for high quality childcare.

That includes a program that works with preschools to help them improve their standing on a state quality rating system; a scholarship program that gives money to families that don’t meet state or federal requirements for free childcare but need help to afford private tuition; and, a program to renovate 12-14 preschools with what Gaston called “an HGTV-style remodel project.”

Another effort is focused on improving the quality of care offered by in-home providers and family members who are often unlicensed but do the bulk of early child care in communities across the country.

Gaston said the early focus on existing programs emerged from the yearlong listening sessions the two foundations held in 2016 and 2017.

“What we learned listening to parents, to politicians, listening to Lansing, is that people don’t know where quality currently exists in the city and two people may have a different perception about quality in Detroit so we want to make sure that what we currently have is moving the needle toward higher quality,” Gaston said.

Kellogg isn’t just backing preschools. The foundation also announced a $3 million Hope Starts Here grant for the Detroit Public Schools Community District that funds a parent academy, a kindergarten bootcamp and a home visit program that sends educators to children’s homes.

By early next year, the people behind Hope Starts Here plan to launch a website that will track progress on each of its 15 strategies and 26 policy priorities. The online “dashboard” will also track movement on some of the alarming statistics that led to Hope Starts Here in the first place. That includes the city’s alarmingly infant mortality high rate, its high rates of babies with low birth weights and the fact that almost 30,000 young Detroiters have no access to high-quality preschool or child care.

Statistics like that contribute to learning problems later on that partly explain why the vast majority of Detroit third-graders — more than 80 percent — aren’t reading at grade level.

At some point, Hope Starts Here could be managed by a centralized entity. Ideas have included an office connected with city government, or one that would be a freestanding non-profit.

“That’s part of the sorting that needs to occur on this so we get the right kind of structure going forward,” Jackson said, noting that Hope Starts Here is currently run by a “stewardship” board.

“The stewardship board is committed to making sure that there’s a comprehensive and sustainable solutions so they’re’ taking all of that into account,” Jackson said.

As Hope Starts Here enters its next phase, the foundations behind it say the challenge has been staying focused while staring down a massive to-do list in a city where extreme poverty and intensive need makes the work seem urgent.

“The biggest challenge has been the vastness of what we’re trying to accomplish,” Gaston said. “System building work is not sexy. It’s just not but it’s vitally important for us to have a coordinated, high-quality effective system.”

This growing program is addressing Detroit’s literacy crisis — just don’t say it’s filling a ‘word gap’

2018-12-13T01:28:27+00:00

A small program that started in Detroit last year with an innovative plan to improve infants’ language skills has proved promising and is preparing to expand.

When Concepción Orea entered the program, LENA Start, with her 18-month-old son, the boy was making a few simple sounds. She worried that he was displaying the same delays as her older son, a kindergartner who receives speech therapy.

“Now he grabs a book and pretends to read,” she said, speaking in Spanish at a graduation ceremony for the program on Tuesday. “Watching him pick up more sounds … it’s an emotion I don’t know how to explain.”

Over the course of the free 13-week program, Orea was coached to speak more to her child and read books to him. Her son was outfitted with a recorder that shows his — and her — progress. Each family is asked to place a recording device in a bib near their child’s chest, where it tracks and analyzes the sounds the baby hears at home.

The approach is based on research showing that when parents make a habit of talking to a very young child, that child is more likely to learn to read on grade level, with all the long-term benefits that come with literacy. That’s a big deal in all of the 20 cities where LENA Start operates, but the stakes are even higher in Detroit, where a tough new “read-or-flunk” state law, taking effect next year, will tighten the screws on a citywide literacy crisis.

“What our data are telling us is that for every one month in LENA Start, there are two months of growth,” said Kenyatta Stephens, Chief Operating Officer of Black Family Development, Inc., one of the program’s funders.

Growth, in this case, mostly means an increase in language comprehension and “turn-taking,” a verbal back-and-forth between parents and children that researchers view as an important sign of healthy language development. Parents are trained to verbalize their thoughts to their children, then look for a response.

A rise in turn-taking also correlates with other benefits: Parents talk to their children more frequently, for one, and kids are exposed to less electronic noise from TVs or cell phones over the course of the program. LENA gives books to parents, and parents typically report reading aloud more to their child.

The program started in Detroit last year with 50 parent-child-pairs. Thanks to promising results, LENA Start’s nonprofit supporters — including Black Family Development, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the LENA Foundation, the Michigan Children’s Health Access Plan, and Brilliant Detroit — plan to enroll another 150 parent-child pairs in Detroit.

(The W.K. Kellogg Foundation funds Chalkbeat. Read our code of ethics here.)

Program leaders say they hope to keep expanding, though the recording technology is pricey.

Using the bib recordings, LENA Start’s computers produce a detailed report for parents. It tells them how much electronic sound the baby is hearing (differentiating between a computer and a live voice), how much the baby is speaking, and how often the baby “takes turns” in conversation with someone else in the home.

The program draws on the research of Betty Hart and Todd Risley, the source of the much-cited notion that children from poor families typically hear 30 million fewer words before age three than their non-poor peers. That statistic went viral in academic and nonprofit circles, but it has come under fire in recent years, partly thanks to data collected by LENA programs, which pointed to a gap that is probably closer to 4 million words.

The challenge for program managers in Detroit is working to close the gaps that do exist while rejecting the idea that poor families do less for their children. Framing the problem as a “word gap” can be discouraging to parents and can even cue educators to expect less from children whose families live in poverty.

That may be why Stephens sees the recording data as “an affirmation tool.” Even when parents are stretched thin by poverty, she says they are able to change their speaking habits, especially when they’re given evidence that it is helping their child.

“What’s important is that we’re affirming that they’re already their child’s best teacher,” she said.

That may be one reason that Detroit’s program boasts an unusually high graduation rate — upwards of 90 percent of families compared to the national average of 80 percent.

Graduation ceremonies tend to be loud, Stephens said, because babies become more vocal over the length of the program.

Yuliana Moreno, one of the graduates, entered the program almost by default. She was already at Brilliant Detroit’s Southwest Detroit location at least twice a week before she entered LENA Start, attending infant massage classes for her seven-month-old and English classes for herself.

She said the benefits of the program extended to both of her children, even the one who didn’t attend LENA Start with her. It’s not that she wasn’t talking to them before — it’s just that no one had told her how important her communication could be, and the normal demands of life got in the way.

These days, she reports reading to her children more often, and says she uses her cell phone less while they’re around.

Children left in limbo as Detroit Head Start providers stand to lose federal grants

2018-11-15T19:28:01+00:00

Four major providers of Head Start programs in Detroit must re-apply for funding after losing their federal grants this year, throwing the future of dozens of classrooms in doubt for the fall.

One of the four providers was forced to re-compete for funding after leaving a 3-year-old outside in freezing winter weather and putting children in unsafe classrooms. The other three were ranked poorly in a federal performance review that scores how students and teachers interact.

Head Start, the federally funded program that provides free preschool and other services to the nation’s neediest children, has long struggled in Detroit. Years of program neglect while under the supervision of a cash-strapped city agency left providers without adequate buildings and a teacher shortage so severe that two years ago, 800 funded seats for the most vulnerable children in the city were going unused.

Since then, the program had expanded, but providers are still struggling to create enough programs to use all of the 5,200 Head Start seats the federal government would fund. As of last spring, 260 seats were going unused, according to Patrick Fisher, spokesperson for the Administration for Children and Families, the federal organization that oversees Head Start.

Thousands of Detroit families rely on these programs for free childcare and meals for ages 0 to 5. Head Start is especially important for low-income families struggling with the skyrocketing cost of childcare. Despite the longstanding issues, these Head Start facilities are many families’ only option for affordable quality early childhood education. Studies on Head Start show the program can influence everything from whether kids succeed in school, to whether they become smokers as adults.

While federal Head Start funding will continue to flow to Detroit, the organizations currently providing the program could be pushed out. That could force some classrooms to be closed or moved — a prospect that has been unsettling to families who might not be able to bring their children to a school that’s farther away.

“It would definitely be a disruption because I would have to travel, and a lot of us don’t have the means to travel,” said Monika Chester, the mother of three children who attend Head Start at the Samaritan Center on Detroit’s east side. “A lot of us are walking, taking the bus, getting a cab, even in the winter, and my baby is five months old.”

“But the worst thing would be for my babies to adapt to new teachers,” she said. “That’s the worst. That’s really bad.”

The four providers that must recompete — Matrix, Starfish Family Services, New St. Paul Tabernacle Head Start Agency Inc., and Metropolitan Children and Youth, Inc. — must divert attention from running facilities to competing for the federal money that allows them to run the programs.

The process to reapply for one of the five-year grants is significantly easier if providers have no issues with their federal scores, providers say. Meanwhile, providers who score in the bottom ten percent on a federal ranking or have other issues are forced to undergo a multistep process that can take several people a month or longer to complete.

Ann Kalass, whose Starfish Family Services leads the coordination of a large Head Start collaborative called Thrive by Five Detroit, said her biggest concern is how reapplying affects the children and families in the program, rather than the time it takes for staff to reapply.

“What I worry about is that it creates a disruption and they leave our programs in May and June not knowing who to count on in the fall,” said Ann Kalass, who runs Starfish Family Services.

“There is a lot of work going on among many providers to submit quality plans and applications in mid-January, so yes, it’s definitely taking resources for us to do that,” Kalass said. “But from my perspective, we do this work all the time — we’re always competing for grants and new opportunities, so it’s people spending time on writing grants who might otherwise be thinking about the program strategy and implementation.

“The real concern for me at a system level is that we’re trying to rebuild and reinvest and it feels like taking a step back to move a step forward,” she added.

The federal auditors grade classrooms in three categories: emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support. Providers are compared against one another nationally, and the lowest scoring 10 percent must automatically rebid for the federal money that pays for the program.

In the category of classroom organization, Matrix, Starfish, and New St. Paul all scored in the bottom 10 percent range nationally.

Kalass said teacher turnover played a role in why the scores were so low in that category.

“Classroom organization looks at the routines and the structures of learning in the classroom,” Kalass said. “It talks about routines in the classrooms, the overall management of what’s happening in the classroom, and we have a high level of teacher turnover in the city, and some of the highest rates of teacher turnover in the country.”

The median salary for a preschool teacher who works full-time in Michigan is less than $30,000 a year, according to one study, making it hard to retain teachers. A report from the Kresge and Kellogg foundations pointed to the shortage of qualified preschool teachers as one of the challenges to improving early education in Detroit.

The next category, instructional support — how children are taught — “involves how teachers promote children’s thinking and problem solving, use feedback to deepen understanding, and help children develop more complex language skills,” according to a guide to understanding the scoring metrics.

Nationwide, providers struggle to post high scores for this category. The passing score has a low threshold — it is only about 2.31 out of seven. Similarly, in Detroit, all four providers had low scores, but New St. Paul fell below the threshold for passing in that category.

In the emotional support category, all of the providers in Detroit scored above the minimum. This area measures how teachers “help children resolve problems, redirect challenging behavior, and support positive peer relationships.”

The federal Office of Head Start, which conducts the reviews, has proposed a change to the bottom 10 percent rebid rule and other scoring guidelines, but it won’t have an effect on the current process.

Providers in Detroit support the change. They believe comparing the city with providers outside of the area isn’t right. Last year, 32 percent of grantees nationwide had to recompete for grants. In Detroit, that number is higher as providers struggle with crumbling buildings, high teacher turnover, and a Head Start program that has endured years of turmoil.

But the other issues submitted to the federal office by the facilities themselves are harder to debate.

At the Samaritan Center, a Matrix facility on the east side near Chandler Park, on Jan. 8, 2018, a teacher was terminated after kicking a 2-year-old who fell asleep in a chair, according to the federal report released in February. The Samaritan Center had another violation in October of last year, when a 3-year-old was told to walk back to class unsupervised and was later found by personnel “alone, lying on the floor in a classroom crying,” according to a May report. The teacher was terminated.

The Eternal Rock Center, another Matrix facility located in Southwest Detroit, was given a violation after a 4-year-old was left in a classroom unsupervised for a short time in January. The teacher was terminated in this case as well.

Matrix officials say they systemic improvements at all of their facilities. The office of Head Start later found that all issues had been effectively corrected.

A report on the Metropolitan Children and Youth, Inc.’s facility was enough to trigger the contract rebid process. In winter of 2014, at the Harper/Gratiot Center on Detroit’s east side, a 3-year-old was left outside on a playground and later found by a parent crying and knocking on the door of the building. Neither the center’s investigation nor a review by the federal office was able to determine how long the child was outside in freezing temperatures.

Only Metropolitan Children and Youth is forced to rebid because of the offsite reports.

“Reviewers examine documentation sent by the grantee to identify program strengths or weaknesses, deficiencies, or that an issue has been remediated,” said Patrick Fisher, a spokesperson for the Administration for Children and Families, the federal office that oversees Head Start.

In Detroit’s Head Start classrooms, reported treatment like this is rare but not out-of-the-blue: underpaid teachers working in buildings struggling to keep the heat on sometimes results in poor conditions.

If the four providers don’t manage to win contracts, families could be forced to find new centers and forge new connections with teachers. Moving locations can be hard on families and children alike, and requires a concentrated effort between the old and new provider to successfully transition students and staff.

A transition occurred last year after Southwest Solutions abruptly shuttered 11 Head Start centers. Luckily for the 420 children affected, Starfish Family Services was able to transition the children and many of the teachers to other agencies, allowing many to remain in their existing facilities.

There’s no guarantee that relocation of families could happen so smoothly in the future, but the Detroit providers are keeping lines of communication open.

“I think there are a lot of encouraging signs for early childhood programing in Detroit,” Kalass said. “Providers are meeting monthly to problem solve together — around workforce, facilities, and about better connecting with families.”

“We’re in a place of rebuilding and I’m optimistic that we won’t see a situation like this again. We won’t be in this place a few years from now.”

Scroll down to read some of the reports that led to one Head Start agency being asked to reapply for funding.

As Michigan’s poorest 4-year-olds wait for classroom seats, free pre-K for all kids seems elusive

2018-10-22T23:09:15+00:00

Michigan is the home to America’s most famous study on the benefits of early childhood education.

But when it comes to providing free prekindergarten for all children, other states and cities are leading the way.

Vermont, Florida, Oklahoma, New York City and the District of Columbia have public programs for all 4-year-olds, regardless of income. Seven more states have greatly expanded their pre-K programs, too, including Wisconsin, where free voluntary pre-K is in the state’s 1848 constitution.

But not Michigan. Not yet, at least.
The pioneering Perry Preschool Study began in Ypsilanti in 1962 and followed 123 study participants starting at age 3 through the age of 40. Among the study’s findings: Those who went to pre-K were more likely to graduate from high school and less likely to repeat grades. They were also less likely to use drugs or commit crimes.

As they grew older, they were more likely to be employed and to have stable homes, savings accounts, significantly higher incomes, and report good relations with their families.

Skills such as cooperative play lay the groundwork for children to get along with others. In addition, learning to use fine motor skills and mastering shapes, colors, numbers, and the alphabet, contribute to future growth.

Further research has underscored the worth of pre-K, making it a rare realm of bipartisan support. In fact, funding for early childhood education has risen under the past three governors.

“I’ve been around long enough to see Democrats and Republicans in office, and early childhood education continues to be on the radar as a positive,” said Lena Montgomery, director of the Wayne County branch of the Great Start Readiness Program, a state funded initiative for 4-year-olds from low-income families.

But even though the governor’s own 21st Century Education Commission recommended that Michigan expand pre-K with $390 million in new investment, he chose instead to further study the impact of Great Start. In his most recent budget, he allocated $300,000 to do that research, and kept spending for Great Start flat at $245.6 million.

Momentum toward providing publicly funded pre-K, often called universal preschool, has been slowed by cost, teacher shortages, and family resistance, advocates say. They also note that there is no incentive for different institutions to pool their money to pay for a more comprehensive pre-K program in the state.

Other states and cities have navigated similar challenges. But Michigan families face a patchwork of options. They may keep young children at home, pay for private childcare or pre-K, or, if they meet income or disability requirements, they can enroll them in Great Start or federally funded Head Start. Both are designed to support vulnerable children, including families with low-incomes.

But there aren’t enough seats, even for every child in need. Great Start’s Montgomery said she has 27 programs with qualified families on wait lists. It’s common, she said, for policymakers to say they support children. But some families are still falling into the gaps because more money is needed, she said.

About 133,000 Michigan children are not enrolled in any early childhood program.

Half of Wayne County’s 3- and 4-year-olds are enrolled in various pre-K programs, said Iheoma Iruka of Highscope, though she added that “we can’t vouch for the quality of these programs.”

The education plan of Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic nominee for governor, advocates for a universal program that expands Great Start until all 4-year-olds are eligible, similar to what the 21st Century Education Commission recommended. It would be paid for, according to her campaign staff, with anticipated increases in the School Aid Fund, which is mostly made up of sales, income, and property taxes. It would also use tax revenue from, among other things, the marijuana ballot initiative that’s expected to pass in November. Tax hikes shouldn’t be necessary, her staff said.

Bill Schuette, the Republican nominee, has an education plan that emphasizes third-grade literacy over pre-K. It mentions need-based transportation scholarships for preschoolers, and he said in a recent interview that universal pre-K was an option that he’d consider.

Hope Starts Here, the $50 million initiative created by the Kellogg and Kresge foundations to improve Detroit’s early childhood systems, has a number of suggestions to pay for universal pre-K. Among them: a dedicated tax proposal, a local sales tax on alcohol, coordinated philanthropic and corporate giving, and leveraging all federal grant money.

States and cities around the nation have experimented with other strategies. Georgia tied pre-K funding to the state lottery. New York City’s new universal program for all 3- and 4-year-olds comes from a mix of city, state and federal funding. Oklahoma, a pioneer in the field, discovered that school districts with half-day kindergartens were receiving state money meant for full-day programs. Lawmakers reformed the state aid formula so that those resources went into pre-K. (The districts had been spending the extra money on sports.)

Others have expanded access by combining different sources of money. North Carolina integrated pre-K with its K-12 schools and contributed part of the Title 1 money that’s allocated to school districts. Chicago is moving toward universal pre-K with a mix of state and district budget increases, and block grants. Washington, D.C. blends Head Start and local funding into its education formula.

A pilot model for blended funding in Michigan can be found in Flint, where the state’s only Educare program is based on the grounds of a former elementary school. The national Educare Early Learning Network draws from multiple revenue sources, including federal, state, and philanthropic dollars.

But regardless of where the money is coming from, opportunities to expand pre-K programs may be missed because of the statewide teacher shortage. In addition, salaries are not as high as they are in K-12 schools. The median salary for Head Start teachers is $27,613, and for lead Great Start teachers, $37,440, according to a statewide advocacy organization.

To recruit and retain more teachers at all levels, including pre-K, a new public-private initiative called Teach 313 launched in Detroit in August. Other places facing shortages or high turnover for its preschool teachers have turned to Teach for America to fill gaps, or provided scholarships for early childhood educators to obtain degrees that would raise their wages.

But before Michigan can explore other strategies and expand into universal pre-K, it needs to make the program it already has available to more families.

If you ask Montgomery from Great Start about her wish list, it begins with providing pre-K to all the children who are sitting on waitlists.

“It would be wonderful to to say to parents, ‘We have a spot for your child,’” Montgomery said. “ ‘You don’t have to wait for someone to drop out or leave.’ It would be wonderful to say to the people who want to run programs, or to expand their programs in their communities, ‘We have the funds for you set up and run a high quality program.’ ”
Correction: October 24, 2018. An earlier version of this story erroneously included Washington State among those that offer preschool to all four year-olds. Washington does not offer universal preschool but Oklahoma, which was not initially on the list, does.

Kindergarten ‘boot camp’ aims to ready young Detroit children — and their parents — for school

2018-08-16T22:13:05+00:00

In a back room of a church on the city’s near east side, Abraham and Magaly Gonzalez attended a summer camp with their 5-year-old twins. Six other children from the church’s child care center were seated around a rectangular table lit by fluorescent overhead lights, working on exercises to teach them colors, numbers, and shapes.

“They have to learn more,” Magaly Gonzalez said, explaining that the couple has been working with the boys, Rafael and Nicholas, at home using books and videos, “and we have to learn more to help them.”

This was their second session in the Detroit main district’s newly launched Kindergarten Boot Camp, a four-week summer program led by district staff that focuses on the basics children need to start school. The Gonzalezes sent their sons to preschool when they were 4 years old. But the couple was so excited about what their boys learned in an earlier camp that they came to the People’s Missionary Baptist Church, a community site, to help them learn more: how to count to 20, spell and write their names, and recognize letters and shapes.

Although school readiness is not a new notion for educators, in the past couple of years, the summer programs for children who are about to start kindergarten have become a national trend, said Robin Jacob, a University of Michigan research associate professor who focuses on K-12 educational intervention.
“They are a fairly new idea, and they are important,” said Jacob, who researched more than a dozen similar programs that recently have sprung up from Pittsburgh to Oakland, Calif., many targeting children who had no prior preschool education.

A full year of preschool is the best way to get children ready for kindergarten, she said, “but we know there are kids who fall through the cracks and it’s important to catch those children, and preschool doesn’t always include parents so they learn how to help their children at home.”

A growing number of districts and schools have added the programs, recognizing that they last only a few weeks, are relatively inexpensive, and keep students engaged during the summer months, she said.

These early lessons are important for children and their parents, said Sharlonda Buckman, the Detroit district’s assistant superintendent of family and community engagement, because officials too often hear from teachers that children don’t know how to sit in their seats, line up, or hold a pencil.
Even when they’ve gone to preschool, she said, some children still have trouble, because kindergarten requires more discipline and structure than preschool. The children’s parents often don’t know how to prepare their children for kindergarten and lifelong learning.
That’s why the district’s program requires parents like the Gonzalezes to attend the boot camp sessions with their children.

“People automatically assume Kindergarten Boot Camp is about the kids,” Buckman said. “For us, it’s about the parents.”

About 100 parents attended the classes this summer in nine elementary schools and the church to build on the belief that “parents are the child’s best teacher,” Buckman said.

Parents also are involved in programs sponsored by Living Arts, a nonprofit arts organization, that is offering a range of programming in Detroit through Head Start to help preschool children and their parents get ready for the first day of school.

“Our movement, drama and music activities encourage children to learn how to be part of a line to transition to another part of the day such as going outside, the bathroom or a circle,” said Erika Villarreal-Bunce, the Living Arts director of programs. “The arts help children understand this new space they’re in is not like things were at home, and helps children learn to function in those spaces.”

Although not all camps require parent involvement, they offer similar lessons to prepare children for kindergarten.

In suburban cities such as Southfield and Huntington Woods, the Bricks 4 Kidz program uses models made of brightly colored bricks to teach preschool children letter recognition, patterns, colors, counting, and vocabulary. Maria Montoya, who works for the charter school office at Grand Valley State University, the city’s largest charter school authorizer, said Detroit charter schools have offered a range of options over the years including week-long and single-day programs to help kids get ready for kindergarten.

The best of them teach basic academics, instruct children in a classroom setting, and engage parents in student learning, Jacob said.
“Educators have thought about school readiness for a long time, but understanding how important that summer transition period can be is something that people have started to think about more carefully recently,” she said. “Summertime is a key time where kids can be learning.”
Regina Bell, a W.K. Kellogg Foundation program officer, said the foundation funded Detroit’s Kindergarten Boot Camp because of the importance of focusing on the earliest years of life to ensure students’ success in K-12 and beyond.

“Part of this is recognizing that most of the the human brain is developed by the age of 5, and when you think about early learning opportunities, those are the foundation for the future,” she said. “It is that foundation that really takes children into the K-12 system.”

Kindergarten Boot Camp, funded by a $3 million Kellogg grant, is only one part of the Detroit district’s efforts to increase parent involvement to improve student attendance, discipline issues, and test scores. The three-year grant also funds the Parent Academy and teacher home visits. (Kellogg is also a Chalkbeat funder).

As for Abraham Gonzalez, the twins’ father, parenting and teaching children doesn’t come naturally. So he says the early learning opportunity for his sons is essential for them — and their parents, although they spent a year in preschool at the Mark Twain School for Scholars in southwest Detroit.

“We are trying our best to teach these kids,” he said, and it’s even more challenging teaching them when Spanish is their first language.

Now, he said, the boys’ are getting so proficient at English, they understand more than their parents.

“They are understanding what the people tell them,” he said. “Sometimes, we don’t.”

For Michigan’s 3- and 4-year-olds with special needs, ‘it’s hard’ to find a place to learn

2018-07-30T23:46:46+00:00

Nicole Maloy has been trying to get her son Alexander into a preschool that can address his speech delay since the day he turned 3.

When he was younger, he was in a program called Early On that works with babies and toddlers who have special needs. When he’s older, he’ll be in a kindergarten program where teachers will be required by law to make sure he gets what he needs.

But right now he’s 3 and, in Michigan, there’s no clear path for parents trying to get special services for their 3- and 4-year olds.

That’s because the state’s lumbering process for transitioning 3-year-olds with special needs and disabilities into early childhood intervention programs is rife with miscommunication, lack of easily accessible information, and a shortage of spaces for 3- and 4-year-olds.

For the state’s estimated 13,000 preschoolers with special needs, it’s more difficult for parents to find places that will accept their children than it is for other preschoolers, said Richard Lower, the state’s director of preschool education.

In fact, there is a shortage of spots for all the state’s preschoolers. But “when you have a subset of 3-year-olds with disabilities, it’s even harder for them to find care,” said Lower. “It’s not impossible, but it’s hard.” Early On is the state’s early intervention program for children with special needs from birth to 36 months.

Parents often are confused by the options, or they just don’t know what the options are.

Experts and advocates call this time between Early On and kindergarten a gap – the lack of adequate seats, services, and widely available education for 3- and 4-year-olds with special needs.

There is no one program in Michigan that will accept all 3- or 4-year-olds regardless of the severity of their disability. Depending on eligibility and availability, parents can opt for the state-funded Great Start Readiness Program for 4-year-olds from low-income families, and the federal Head Start program, which accepts 3- and 4-year-olds with special needs regardless of income.

The local district can help evaluate a child with special needs, obtain a diagnosis, and place the child.

Parents are desperate for better resources to figure out how to best help their children obtain the critical early education they need to be kindergarten ready. Studies show that the impact of early education extends through their lifetime, determining kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading proficiency, school attendance, high school graduation rates, and even income-earning potential in adulthood.

As they grow older, children with special needs who successfully receive early intervention services may not need to be in special education classes in school, studies show. Early On, at its best, reduces the number of children who need special education services when they reach school age.

A recent annual federal education report ranked Michigan among the nation’s worst for serving children with special needs starting at age 3, and said the state “needs intervention,” the second lowest ranking in the report. That, combined with a special report from Lt. Gov. Brian Cally’s office last year that found schools are shouldering $700 million a year to pay for services for children with special needs that are not funded by the state, contribute to mounting evidence that Michigan is failing children with special needs.
Although Gov. Rick Snyder successfully pushed to include an extra $5 million for Early On in next year’s state budget, no new funds were added for children older than 3.

“This is a statewide issue,” said Marcie Lipsitt, a parent advocate and consultant who helps families in southeastern Michigan navigate the complex special education system.

“There just isn’t enough support or funding for families of children with special needs,” she said. We need more capacity and more outreach for families.”

Lipsitt and other advocates said although systems already are in place, obtaining a transition plan from Early On or a local district often is where the system breaks down.

If a child is enrolled in Early On, district staff called coordinators help parents develop a transition plan to enroll their children in preschool, but it’s up to the parents to make sure the meeting happens.

The meeting is crucial, because coordinators also work with parents to set up appointments with therapists, doctors, and specialists.

Caryn Ivey, a parent advocate and co-director of Michigan Alliance for Families, said an array of issues may arise during the process that leave parents confused.

Some parents skip the transition meeting because they don’t understand its importance, she said. Parents may not understand the plan. Others don’t act quickly enough after the meeting; waiting for benchmarks like a formal evaluation and a diagnosis can take time, sometimes months.

If the child is not enrolled in Early On, parents should contact their local or intermediate school district. The process is similar. The district would help create an IEP, or an individualized education program for the child. The IEP describes any services, accommodations, or therapies the child may need. District staff would also help get a diagnosis for the child, and then take steps to enroll the child in preschool.

To prevent delays, Ivey advises parents to speak to their home school district as soon as possible.

“That could be as simple as writing a letter to the home school district and asking a question: ‘My child just finished Early On, what should I do?’ ” she said.

This helps explain why Maloy’s struggle is not unusual. Before it was time for Alexander to graduate from Early On, she met with a transition coordinator in Detroit’s main district — a meeting all parents in the program should expect to happen six months before the child’s third birthday.

Alexander doesn’t have a formal diagnosis for his suspected autism and delayed speech. But Maloy’s coordinator scheduled appointments with specialists to evaluate him, and set up his education plan to accommodate his special needs. Maloy followed through on the appointments and received his individualized plan, but the Detroit school district doesn’t have a summer preschool program. Maloy must wait until fall to enroll him, leaving at least a five-month gap in his education.

Also, to enroll him, she needs a diagnosis, which so far she said she hasn’t been able to get. Although some specialists she spoke with were hesitant to diagnose Alexander before his fourth birthday, others shared he could have been diagnosed as early as 18 months.

In the midst of this, Maloy feels her son is losing valuable time.

“I really want him to go somewhere as soon as possible so he can get the help that he needs,” she said.

Maloy thought the process would be faster and her son would be in school by now. While she waits for school to start in the fall, she is homeschooling Alexander and investigating other options for care.

She, like many parents with children who have disabilities, didn’t know Head Start was an option.

Head Start, a free federally funded program for children from low-income families, will accept children with special needs no matter their income. That means it may be a good choice for families who need a slot for their young sons and daughters.

In Head Start, children with special needs attend classes with other students, and they are given a formal assessment and a diagnosis soon after they apply for admission. While other parents may wait indefinitely, it typically takes up to two months at Head Start, saving parents time, and ensuring that necessary steps aren’t overlooked.

“We want to serve those children,” said Kate Brady-Medley, director of Head Start and Early Head Start for Starfish Family Services. Starfish is a social service agency that leads a collaborative of Detroit Head Start providers. Studies on Head Start show the program can influence everything from whether kids succeed in school, to whether they become smokers as adults.

“We have a federal mandate, and we’re trying always to have at least 10 percent of the children in our program have an identified, documented disability,” she said.

Children can miss valuable early intervention in school for a variety of reasons.

Stephanie Onyx successfully enrolled her daughter, Alexa, in preschool in her home district of Madison Heights with no disruptions, right after she graduated from Early On.

Alexis gets tickled by parents, Art and Stephanie Onyx, with brother Drew behind them.

But she pulled Alexa out of the program after the first year because she was dissatisfied with its quality. Onyx was confident it would be easy to enroll Alexa in another program.

It wasn’t so easy.

Several districts turned Alexa away because they considered her disabilities — cerebral palsy, low muscle tone, and inability to speak — too severe.

“Nobody would take her, and it was heartbreaking in this day and age,” Onyx said. “They had special education programs that had openings, but they wouldn’t take her.”

By law, school districts within the same county have to accept children with special needs – no matter how severe the disability is – but when parents don’t know the law and can’t afford an attorney – this happens often, advocate Lipsitt said.

“When a parent makes a request, legally the school district has to request the parents consent for an evaluation or give the parents a reason they are refusing an evaluation,” she said.

If Onyx had made a formal written request for an evaluation and allowed a district to deny her in writing, Lipsitt said, she could have taken legal action.

Making the request is as simple as saying in a note to the district: ‘I am the parent of this child, and I am requesting a special education evaluation,’ ” and there is a 10-school-day time limit on that, ” she said.

When Onyx wasn’t able to get her daughter into a preschool, she gave up and homeschooled Alexa. The disadvantage of missing precious preschool time with other children became evident when Alexa, now 7, finally was accepted into kindergarten in the Troy district.

After a year of being homeschooled, she was not socially or emotionally prepared to attend school with her peers.

“That first year was a struggle — the entire year,” Onyx said. “We had a lot of meltdowns when she couldn’t get her way.”

Now, after just completing first grade, Onyx said Alexa is doing better and has fewer tantrums, but she still needs more time to catch up.

“She is able to learn and grow. She is able to progress,” Onyx said. “I knew that once in a program, she would progress, and I also know that she would be even further ahead had she been given that opportunity.”

New options could be opening for parents of 3-year-olds with special needs in the future, said Lower, the state’s director for preschool.

For the past few years under the Snyder administration, Lower said he’s researched and discussed with state legislators the possibility of expanding the Great Start Readiness Program, including possibly expanding it to 3-year-olds.

But it all comes down to money, he said.

If all the state’s 68,000 3-year-olds who fall at least 250 percent below the federal poverty level were included in such a program, and funding was calculated at the current per pupil rate of $7,250 for a 6- to 7-hour school day, the annual cost would be at least $493 million, he said.

That figure doesn’t factor in additional costs, including a required 1-to-6 teacher-student ratio, time for meal preparation, brushing teeth, and other activities throughout the school day that add costs to providing care for 3-year-olds.

Lower said a bigger investment in education is needed to increase the number of 3-year-olds in school.

“It’s a complex system that is not as fully developed as K-12, and it’s still being built in early childhood education. There are pieces that are great and high quality, and other pieces that are not as highly developed.”

New grant aims to bring programs like arts and nutrition to Detroit preschools and childcare facilities

2018-06-28T11:00:48+00:00

Half a year after unveiling an ambitious $50 million effort to improve the lives of young children in Detroit, the foundations behind the Hope Starts Here initiative have started to spend some money to put their vision into action.

The Kresge Foundation Thursday is announcing plans to spend $3 million to fund organizations that support preschools and childcare centers in Detroit. That includes groups providing things like healthy eating programs and arts or cultural programs that could improve the offerings at local preschools.

Kresge is inviting organizations to apply for up to $300,000 over three years for services that will support licensed childcare facilities.

The funds are one strategy to address a critical shortage of quality early childhood facilities in Detroit where an estimated 28,000 young children don’t have access to quality care.

Michigan has one of the lowest reimbursement rates for childcare providers in the nation, which makes it difficult for providers to make ends meet, let alone offer things like cultural activities or social and emotional support to the children they care for.

The foundation aims to “change the culture and reality of the early childhood systems in Detroit,” Wendy Jackson, Kresge’s Detroit program managing director, said in a statement.

The investment is one of the first Kresge has announced from its commitment to Hope Starts Here, which is an ambitious partnership between Kresge and the W.K. Kellogg foundation to improve the health and education of children ages birth to 8 in Detroit. (Kresge and Kellogg also support Chalkbeat).

Kresge and Kellogg formally announced the effort late last year following a year of meetings with Detroiters to determine the needs of young children. Each committed $25 million to the effort for a total of $50 million.

The $3 million program announced by Kresge Thursday is the largest it has announced to date toward its $25 million commitment.

One of Kellogg’s first investments, announced earlier this spring, was a $3 million grant to the Detroit Public Schools Foundation to fund a parent academy in the main Detroit district, a kindergarten “boot camp” to help get young children ready for school and a home visit program that sends teachers and principals into student homes.

VIDEO: How a Detroit preschool teacher tries to meet her students’ needs

2018-06-27T22:12:32+00:00

Dawn Bruce, a prekindergarten teacher in Detroit’s main district, fondly remembers her own first-grade teacher, Miss Kessler, who treated her students as if they were her own children.

Decades on, Miss Kessler remains a touchstone for Bruce, who strives to nurture her four- and five-year-old students in much the same way.

“I want them to know they’re loved, and that they’re safe,” said Bruce, who has been teaching for 26 years. “I teach children that from day one. I’m a safekeeper. If they feel safe, they are more inspired to participate and to learn what they need to learn.”

Bruce recently spoke with Chalkbeat about how she assesses and works to meet the needs of her students, and why she sometimes feels like a rock star on the school yard. The interview is part of Chalkbeat’s “story booth” series that invites students, educators and parents to discuss their experiences in Detroit schools. Do you know someone who has a story to share? Reach out to us.

From reading to breastfeeding, Detroit dads learn how to engage with their pre-K children

2018-04-23T21:55:39+00:00

Although he grew up without a father or male role model, Dwayne Walker is the kind of dad who goes on his 5-year-old son’s school field trips, sits in on his classes, and dresses him in a mint green golf shirt and khaki pants to match his own.

At Dad’s Day in Pre-K, a Detroit district event to help fathers better connect with their young children, the 43-year-old realized how much he has changed over the years. His youngest son, Braylen, was with him at the event.

“I broke the cycle when I became a father. I’m involved, and this is helping me to learn I can do even more as a father and a father figure,” he said.

Walker was one of about 100 fathers who attended Dad’s Day in Pre-K, sponsored by the main district to help remove barriers that prevent fathers from engaging in their children’s lives and their schools.

District leaders are working to get parents more involved in their children’s education through a new Parent Academy, teacher home visits, and other efforts. They also are trying new approaches to get parents to participate when their children are younger — including focusing more on fathers.

A study published in 2016 in the Journal of Family Psychology indicated that the more fathers took part in bathing, dressing, reading, and playing with their infant children, the more these nurturing activities increased as the children got older and started school.

That’s why the district held its second Dad’s Day, said Franchott R. Cooper, preschool supervisor with the district’s Early Childhood Department, who coordinated the event.

“If we keep the fathers involved from preschool, they’ll be there for elementary school, middle school, and high school,” he said. “They’ll be there to support their children with homework, help them with math, help them with reading, supporting them in their academic pursuits.”

Services that the program helps with include job placement and training, helping to reinstate their driver’s licenses so they can get to work and see their children, and assisting with child support issues. Fathers also got tips on how to nurture their children by reading to them, and advice on helping their mates breastfeed.

Wilma Taylor-Costen, former executive director of the district’s Early Child Education program, came up with the idea for Dad’s Day just before she left the district last year. Her department held the first event of its kind a year ago.

“I recognized there was a gap in early child education with our fathers, particularly with black fathers” she said. “They have been beaten up a lot and the conversation always is they are not in the home, and they don’t care about their children.

“I wanted to give an opportunity for our fathers to come together in a structured support system and if there were barriers preventing them from being in the child’s life, we would bring the courts, the elders, and services they may need under one roof so they can learn lessons and be great dads.”

Durrail Sanders of Highland Park said he was excited to attend because it was positive food for thought for him and other fathers.

“I’m for anything positive that’s going to better myself as a father, other fathers and our youth,” said Sanders, father of five sons, including 5-year-old Isrrail Simmons, who loves to play basketball video games with his dad. “I can get better at this.”

Keynote speaker, author, and educational consultant Jelani Jabari reminded the fathers of the importance of playing with their children, reading to them, helping them with homework, and simply spending time with them. He said he learned that by making mistakes he didn’t realize he was making. He was so busy being a good provider, and working so much, that he was barely at home.

He said he received a wake-up call on July 1, 2011, when he came home from work early and his youngest son, then 3, looked very confused and asked him why was he home for dinner.

“Dinner time, daddy gone,” his son kept repeating.

The comment left him shocked and speechless, but it prompted him to spend more time with his family.

He reminded the men to avoid being so busy making money that they forget to spend time with their children, and to be engaged in their lives. He urged them to add specific activities, such as reading, doing homework, or coaching their child’s sports team, to add structure to the time they spend with their children.

“We are in this together,” he told the fathers. “There is no manual for teaching dads how to be great fathers. It’s a process. Some of us seem to figure it out earlier than others.”

Despite top scores in quality standards, Michigan’s early education programs neglect English language learners

2018-04-19T15:11:22+00:00

Michigan’s 4-year-olds receive some of the highest quality education and care available in the country — that is, if your child can speak English.

Michigan was one of only three states to meet all 10 quality benchmarks designed by a national advocacy organization that released its annual State of Preschool Report this week. However, the state met only one out of 10 benchmarks for English language learners.

Four-year-olds enrolled in privately funded programs are not included in this data.

Enrollment and state spending per pupil stayed largely constant from the same report last year. About 30 percent of 4-year-olds are enrolled — some 38,371 children — while state spending was steady at $6,356 per pupil.

Compared to the rest of the country, Michigan ranks 16th out of 43 states and Washington, D.C., in enrollment for 4-year-olds and allocates about $1,000 more dollars on per pupil spending than the average state.

These findings come from the State of Preschool 2017 report published by the National Institute for Early Education Research, or NIEER, at Rutgers University.

Three states — Alabama, Michigan, and Rhode Island — met all 10 of the institute’s benchmarks for minimum state preschool quality standards. Benchmarks included things like student-to-teacher ratios, teacher training, and quality of curriculum.

But the only benchmark the state met for English learners is permitting bilingual instruction in the state-funded preschool program. Michigan did not meet benchmarks for assessing children in their home language, allocating more money for English learners, or making sure staff are trained in working with students learning English.

Authors of the new report say supporting English learners is important, especially early in life.

“For all children, the preschool years are a critical time for language development.” said Steve Barnett, senior co-director of the institute. “We know that dual-language learners are a group that makes the largest gains from attending high-quality preschool. At the same time, they’re at elevated risk for school failure.”

About a quarter of early education students nationwide are English learners. Michigan does not collect data on the number of early education students who are English learners, so it’s unclear how many students the low quality of instruction impacts.

Chalkbeat Colorado’s Ann Schimke contributed to this report.

In this program, artists help prepare children for kindergarten — and their teachers learn, too

2018-04-09T23:29:54+00:00

Teacher Jeanette Samuel stands up before a Head Start class and begins bouncing and chanting a song aloud in a lilting voice, “Can we go OVER it? Yes, we can. Can we go UNDER it? Yes, we can.”

While the children gather around to sing with “Miss Jeanette,” Katy Schoetzow, a performing artist, uses props to transform other parts of the room into an adventure to follow Felix the mouse to a circus. The 3- and 4-year-olds track a hand-drawn map and line up to go around an imaginary lake, under a tower, through trees and across a pond.

This unique classroom experience is part of the Detroit Wolf Trap program. Twice each week at a Matrix Head Start center in Detroit’s New Center neighborhood, performing artists visit to work with instructors and students. Schoetzow was teaching the children about colors, helping them develop body coordination, and strengthen what Wolf Trap calls positional vocabulary — words like over, under, around and across.

Other teaching artists, as they are called in the program, might also use singing, dancing, drawing, and other art forms to help teachers and parents prepare children for kindergarten.

As Detroit heavily invests in early childhood education and seeks new ways to improve the quality of instruction, this is one program illustrating a path forward. While lots of schools have nonprofit partnerships that bring arts or music to classrooms, this national initiative brings artists to train teachers and collaborates with parents to help in the process of everyday learning.

“This is arts integration, the ability to use dance, visual arts, theater arts, music, take them and make them elemental so we can really start connecting the basics,” said Erika Villarreal Bunce, director of programs for Living Arts, the nonprofit organization that sponsors the interactive arts program. “We use those art forms like Katy did, using drama techniques to connect them to what the children are already doing and push those forward.”

Each year since 2012, about 1,000 Detroiters as young as 3 months have been learning an array of academic and social skills in highly creative classroom environments at this Matrix and three other Head Starts.

While the children are learning, so are the teachers. Schoetzow shows them how to engage the youngsters so they can continue the lessons when she’s not around. On this recent morning, Samuel has shown she has mastered singing aloud as a classroom management technique.

The teachers participate in workshops, consult with Schoetzow and develop a plan for the students, and learn performance arts strategies to enhance instruction.

In addition, the children’s parents can sit in the classroom and attend workshops to learn how to engage their children. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and older siblings also come along to learn how to work with the children at home.

In fact, the program has been so effective, Detroiter Karen Hernandez said it’s changed her family’s life. Her 6-year-old son, a shy boy, emerged from his shell when he started the Detroit Wolf Trap program at the Ford Resource and Engagement Center in southwest Detroit. Now, she said, he is a better English and Spanish speaker because of the bilingual program there. And the family is writing stories and songs together.

“It’s connecting us more as a family. We’re not so involved in our phones or the television,” said Hernandez, who also is mother to a newborn. “It’s connecting me more to him and he doesn’t have to feel left out with the new baby. Since we participate in this class together, it’s really connecting us.”

Schoetzow, the teacher artist, says the movements students learn will help prepare them for kindergarten.

“At the end of this school year, we’ll have a lot of kids who are kindergarten ready,” she said. Schoetzow is a musical theater performer and choreographer in Detroit area theaters. All of the teachers in the Wolf Trap program are working artists.

Researchers say the Wolf Trap program works for the 50,000 children it serves each year in 17 states. The program supports the need for children who lack access to arts education resources, especially those from low-income families, children who are English learners, and who have other challenges.

In 2016, the American Institutes for Research released findings from a study it conducted on the program. The study found that children who participated in the first year received the equivalent of 26 extra days of learning.

In the second year, the study found the additional learning amounted to 34 additional days of math learning in school. Among other findings, teachers said using artist techniques especially helped those who were shy, had never been to school or who were speaking another language.

In Detroit, a five-year study from 2012 to 2017 had similar findings after measuring how children progressed in core academics and cognitive growth, and how they developed socially, emotionally, and physically, Bunce said.

“Our study has proven the children who have had a Wolf Trap experience are making significant improvement in comparison to children not having the experience,” she said.

Riley ran a daycare for 25 years before she started teaching Head Start this school year. She said Wolf Trap enhances life in her classroom. She recalls how Schoetzow recently made pretend pizzas with the students. They were very engaged in the shapes of their pizzas.

“Sometimes, our day gets to be a little dry because the kids hear things over and over again,” Riley said. “The arts helps us with the mix, and I can see the advantage for the children. I see them learning and growing from this.”

Most Detroit kindergartners miss too much school. They’ll likely struggle to read later.

2018-02-28T17:38:17+00:00

Truancy might bring to mind teenagers skipping class to hang out with their friends or play video games, but in Detroit, it’s the kindergarteners teachers have to worry about.

Almost 70 percent of all kindergarteners in Detroit’s main district miss 10 days of class or more a year, five times the national average for all students.

Parents may think of kindergarten as finger painting and playing games, but missing a large number of days likely means a child will struggle in school. Experts say children who miss too many days are the least likely to be able to read at grade level later on.

“Among poor children, chronic absence in kindergarten predicts the lowest levels of educational achievement at the end of fifth grade,” a report from the National Center for Children in Poverty says.

That’s a pressing issue in Detroit, because in 2020, a new state law will force schools to hold back third-graders who can’t read at grade level.

Research on the effects of missing schools is clear: When a child misses two or more days a month — or in other words, is chronically absent — the absences hurt not only the child’s progress, but also the progress of the rest of the class.

Attendance advocates say the misconception that kindergarten is not important is a major reason parents keep their kids at home.

“Anecdotally, one of the things we hear in Detroit is that many parents of kindergartners don’t necessarily know it’s important to get their child to school every day and part of that might be that it’s not mandated in Michigan,” said Sarah Lenhoff, a Wayne State University education professor whose research is focused on attendance issues in Detroit’s main district.

An outdated idea about what happens in kindergarten is only one reason parents don’t bring their kids to school. Another is chronic health issues.

When Esmeralda Torres’ 6-year-old son Eduardo wakes up on a school morning at his home in southwest Detroit with swollen eyes and a runny nose — complications from his chronic asthma — she keeps him home.

“Usually I would take him and my other kids to school every chance I get,” she said, “But I wouldn’t feel as guilty not taking him to school in kindergarten.”

Torres’ attitude is not unusual, but kindergarten is no longer all about playtime. It’s about building a foundation for the rest of a child’s school years.

A 2016 report from the University of Virginia found that the focus of kindergarten has shifted from art, music, and free play to “literacy and math content, teacher instruction and assessment.” In national media, kindergarten has often been called “the new first grade.”

A national leader on attendance issues, Attendance Works, has been researching the issue for more than a decade. Executive Director Hedy Chang said families don’t know just how crucial early education, including kindergarten, has become. And it’s especially important for families living in poverty.

“When you’re in school, it’s allowing you to benefit from a literacy-rich, high-quality learning environment,” Chang said. “Kids in poverty are dependent on that literacy-rich environment.

“Their parents are working multiple jobs, and there’s research from multiple places that it has consequences for third-grade reading.”

Last year, only about 10 percent of third-graders in the Detroit district read at grade level. The district has doubled down on getting those scores up, but the updated instruction won’t matter if students don’t come to class.

“We have a view of kindergarten that it’s kind of a nice entry to socialization, but it’s more content and critical learning and families aren’t aware that it can have adverse consequences,” Chang said.

In Detroit, Chang said health issues like asthma are a particular challenge. The asthma hospitalization rates in the southwest Detroit area are almost triple the state average. Eduardo is part of that statistic. Usually he misses class because he is struggling with his asthma.

Even if a child is able to attend, if parents are sick or their car breaks down, there’s not much a kindergartener can do.

A recent study by two Wayne State University researchers found that school-level issues, like teacher-parent trust and discipline policies, can also play a role in whether a child’s parent brings her to school.

Despite the challenges, the issue of chronic absenteeism has been a priority for the prominent education and business leaders who’ve formed the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren. Members issued a list of recommendations for ways to improve Detroit schools in December.

It’s first priority is to reduce rates of chronic absenteeism by collecting more data, improving the school culture, more money for health needs like school nurses, and getting parents invested in bringing their children to school every day.

But the coalition needs the help of other groups to move their plan forward. The Brightmoor Alliance, 482Forward, Urban Neighborhoods Initiative, and the Congress of Communities banded together to form Every School Day Counts Detroit in 2015, a group at the forefront of reducing chronic absenteeism.

They are working in seven Detroit district schools to help track of attendance and inform families of the importance of attending school.

A spokesman for the main Detroit district said it recognizes the importance of attending kindergarten and has “taken an active role in sharing key messages as it pertains to being in school every day through our newly implemented PTAs, newsletters, backpack mail, and automated phone calls.”

Esmeralda Torres may not be convinced. She keeps Eduardo home because she doesn’t believe he’ll be properly cared for. In addition to her son’s asthma issues, he is hyperactive, and she thinks in a classroom of 25, the teacher can’t look after them all.

But in the long run, Chang says the best thing for kids like Eduardo is to still come to class.

“Parents don’t realize what kids are learning in the early grades and how much it’s critical to school success.”

Michigan’s governor wants to catch young students before they fall behind

2018-02-26T20:17:33+00:00

Alesia Jackson noticed her two-year-old son Aaron could only speak about 50 words and wasn’t yet forming sentences. As a preschool teacher herself, she knew he was behind.

Now, at 12, Aaron is thriving in middle school and his mother credits the benefits he got from the Early On Michigan program, which provides help for children from birth to three with learning disabilities or delays. Federal money currently pays for that program, but for the first time, Gov. Rick Snyder wants to add $5 million more in state funds to make it available to more families.

The money for EarlyOn is the only increase for special education proposed by the governor for next year’s budget. Some advocates were hoping for a more robust increase in special education funding following a report last year from Lieutenant Governor Brian Cally’s office blasting the state’s current funding formula for special education. However, Snyder said money for Early On ultimately would save costs for special education once children reach school age. That’s because children will start school better prepared and will be less likely to need further special education services.

“Specifically, this money is going to be very helpful for children with a less severe delay or disability,” said Robert Dorigo Jones, a spokesman for Michigan’s Children, a nonprofit policy and advocacy organization based in Lansing.

Lawmakers are expected to vote on Snyder’s budget recommendations in June. They have been skeptical of spending additional education money and are looking for ways to cut taxes in a crucial election year.

Christy Callahan, president of the Early On Michigan Foundation, which advocates for the program, said more money could dramatically enlarge and improve the program for the state’s youngest children.

“Reaching children when they are the youngest and supporting their families is our best chance to mitigate delays and support them for success in school, with friends, and for life, she said.”

The state receives more than $12 million every year in federal money for about 19,000 young children who need the mild special education services provided by Early On. But advocates believe the majority of families who need Early On are not receiving them.

That’s because the counties that distribute money to school districts supplement federal special education funding by using local millage dollars, which vary across the state.

Dollars spent on the program have saved money in the long run: The state saves cash every year for the estimated 37 percent of infants or toddlers who receive Early On services who did not later require special education services.

The program assesses children’s needs and provides help designed for their families. Some children are hearing impaired, others are developing more slowly than their peers. Some may have delays caused by underlying medical conditions such as autism, cerebral palsy or Down syndrome.

Alesia Jackson and her son, Aaron

Aaron received speech therapy and a chance to talk to other children his age. His parents were encouraged to increase time reading aloud to him, and learned techniques to help him refine his verbal skills. Specialists visited their westside Detroit home, and Aaron also attended classes at the closed Detroit Day School for the Deaf.

“It gave him the right interaction with other children,” she said. Aaron, now 12, attends a Harper Woods middle school.

“He had struggles, and he was able to start working on them. Without that help, it would have taken him much longer to improve.”

Months after ‘scary’ disruption, Detroit Head Start programs get new management, make room for additional kids

2018-02-01T16:51:59+00:00

The alarming news last fall set off a frantic rush to solve an urgent problem.

Southwest Solutions, a major social service organization, had unexpectedly announced in November that it would no longer operate its 11 Head Start centers in Detroit because of financial difficulties.

That meant 420 vulnerable Detroit children faced losing access to the free, federally funded preschool program that not only educates low-income children, but provides them with hot, healthy meals, and supports their parents.

“It was scary,” said Evangelina De La Fuente whose twin grandsons attended a Head Start program run by Southwest Solutions inside a Salvation Army women’s shelter in Southwest, Detroit.

But a little more than two months later, De La Fuente’s grandsons are in a new program about two miles away. They’re surrounded by many of the same teachers and classmates they knew from their former school and De La Fuente says she’s pleased with their new situation.

“They are great and I am happy,” she said. “It’s a very organized program.”

The happy outcome for De La Fuente and other families was the work of social service providers, state officials, and charitable foundations who all came together to quickly try to repair the damage from Southwest Solutions’ departure from Head Start.

The disruption was the latest crisis for a program that provides critical services to some of the city’s neediest children but has struggled to recover after years of deterioration and neglect in Detroit. Head Start supporters say they’re hopeful that the response to this issue speaks to the program’s ability to address systemic challenges.

The response to the Southwest Solutions news was led by Starfish Family Services, the lead agency that coordinates a large Head Start collaborative called Thrive by Five Detroit. Starfish quickly brought social service agencies together to find new managers for Southwest Solutions’ Head Starts.

Although four sites were closed in the process, Starfish CEO Ann Kalass said Head Start providers not only created enough programs for the children who were displaced, but classrooms were added to serve even more, enough to eventually enroll 600 children.

“We were really pleased that we were able to figure out a plan as quickly as we did,” Kalass said.

Of the 11 Head Start sites that Southwest Solutions had been operating, seven have remained open and are now controlled by new managers, following a hurried effort to negotiate new leases and secure new licenses.

Starfish is operating some of the sites itself. Others will be run by other agencies including Development Centers, Focus: HOPE and two new Head Start providers, The Order of the Fisherman Ministry and American Indian Health & Family Services.

Kalass said she believes the new providers will help bring new children into Head Start, including Native American children who have been getting other kinds of support from American Indian Health & Family Services.

The Southwest Solutions sites that closed include the one at the Salvation Army that De La Fuente’s grandsons attended.

Those classrooms were transferred to a new Head Start program at the Covenant House Academy Southwest, a charter school that serves non-traditional and older high school students.

Starfish tried to keep the Head Start children in the same classroom groups they were in before. It hired some of the same teachers to provide as much consistency as possible.

One of those teachers, Brenda Tolbert, said when she first heard Southwest Solutions was pulling out of Head Start, she was not only concerned about her own job security but about the children.

“I was worried about how they would adjust to somebody new in the middle of the school year,” she said.

But when the children arrived at their new school in early January, they saw the familiar faces of their teacher and classmates.

“Everybody came in, they looked in the door, they saw me and they came on in like it’s their regular room,” Tolbert said. Tolbert even went back to her classroom at the Salvation Army to gather up some of the children’s favorite toys so there’d be some familiar playthings in the new classroom.

Tolbert said she was happy at the old site — and made more money at Southwest Solutions because she was both a teacher and a program manager there. But the new facility offers larger, well-lit classrooms, she said, and she hopes to have career opportunities with Starfish that will bring her pay back up.

The new site also doesn’t have the heavy security that the Salvation Army facility had.

Because the Head Start was inside a homeless shelter, Head Start staff had to greet visitors at the door and escort them into the building. Parents at Covenant House can be buzzed into the building.

“It’s a regular school,” De La Fuente said. “Everything is open. You can come anytime you want. There are no restrictions.”

The new site has also been embraced by the staff and students at the Covenant House Academy, which serves students ages 16 to 22, giving them a chance to earn their diplomas through online coursework.

Covenant House has a total of four Academies in Michigan including three in Detroit and one in Grand Rapids. Of the 150-200 students who attend the school in Southwest Detroit, 20 are parents to young children who need childcare. Having a Headstart program in the building allows them to continue their educations, said Covenant House Superintendent Michael Krystyniak.

Covenant House had cut ties with a different Head Start program two years ago, Krystyniak said.

The charter school had been working with Southwest Solutions to try to reopen the Head Start last fall when news broke that the agency was getting out of early childhood education. When Starfish stepped in, the agency was able to quickly get the center renovated and licensed in time to open in early January.

“We’re grateful,” Krystyniak said. “We all know that if mom graduates from high school, the chances of that baby graduating just went up tremendously.”

In addition to the Covenant House site, Starfish is opening new classrooms that will eventually serve 128 students in a building on Cecil Street. That building has long had a Head Start program run by Matrix Human Services on the first floor. The Starfish classrooms will be on the second floor. They’re scheduled to open next week and the two programs — Matrix and Starfish — will now operate separately in the same building.

Among students that Starfish hopes will enroll are children who had attended the Southwest Solutions Head Start in the old Phoenix Academy building, another site that has closed.

The rush to get the new sites up to code and fully licensed has been challenging, said Katherine Brady-Medley, the Head Start program director at Starfish.

“You just get to the point where you put your head down and you run as hard as you can,” she said.

Normally, getting a site licensed and opened takes six months or longer, she said, but organizations came together to speed up the process, including working during the holidays. State officials helped fast-track licensing.

Kalass said charitable foundations stepped up with funds — $400,000 — to help pay for things like moving expenses and applying for licenses.

“This is just a really good lesson about people pulling together,” Kalass said. “We’ve just tried to look at this as ‘How do you turn a challenge into an opportunity?’”

How to make a good reader? Combine in-school tutoring with hundreds of books for toddlers and babies

2017-12-20T01:42:25+00:00

A new literacy program for children from babies to third grade will focus on tutoring students and encouraging reading at an early age as it works with 100 families in the Munger Elementary-Middle School area.

The 3-year pilot program will combine the resources of 80 volunteers, the Munger school staff, and Brilliant Detroit, a social service organization. Brilliant Detroit will house a national program called Raising a Reader, which will ensure that the families receive as many as 100 books each over the next three years to read to babies and toddlers.

“We believe the city of Detroit is turning around,” said former state Supreme Court justice Maura Corrigan, who is spearheading the program. “But we understand that Detroit cannot turn around effectively if the schools don’t turn around, and that can’t happen unless the children learn to read.”

The program is part of a state-wide push to help more children learn to read before a new state law takes effect in 2020 that will force schools to hold back third-graders who aren’t reading at grade level. This year, fewer than 10 percent of Detroit students met that grade-level threshold.

Announced today, the program launches in January and has more than $20,000 in funding.

Munger Principal Donnell Burroughs said students who received the lowest reading test scores will likely be the ones who receive tutoring.

“Here at Munger we want our students to continue to grow,” Burroughs said. “We will identify certain families and students from preschool to third grade and they’ll work with individual tutors who come into the school every day.”

Students will work with a tutor in groups of three for 40 minutes a day.

Lt. Gov. Brian Calley described another benefit of the program: helping students with disabilities.

“Perhaps an unintended consequence of the work that’s happening here is we can identify developmental delays and disabilities earlier for intervention.”

Calley, whose daughter has autism, is an advocate for people with disabilities. Studies have shown that early intervention improves outcomes.

“We still have so far to go there,” he added. “This is a reading initiative, but it’s gonna have benefits beyond reading.”

Special education has been a pressing concern for education advocates in the state. The Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren issued a list of recommendations for ways to improve Detroit schools in early December. Among them was a priority to fully fund special education.

Plans to continue or expand the program are unclear, and depend on the pilot’s success. The effort is supported by 15 local and state partners, including Gov. Rick Snyder and Raising a Reader.

A high-tech approach to boost language skills starts with infants in Detroit

2017-11-29T23:15:18+00:00

Eleven mothers sit around a table bouncing infants and chatting in Spanish in a converted church in Southwest Detroit, the site of a pricey new program designed to close the language gap between resource-scarce children and their affluent peers.

The program, LENA Start, comes at a time when Detroit students’ reading scores are a pressing concern for school administrators and lawmakers statewide. Last year, only 9.9 percent of third-graders passed the state English Language Arts exam.

A new state law will require children who test a year or more behind third grade reading level to repeat the grade starting in the 2019 school year. If that law were in effect in 2016, 90 percent of Detroit students would have been qualified to be held back.

The LENA Research Foundation (short for learning environment analysis) is a public charity based in Boulder, Colo., which focuses on closing the language development gap. The foundation operates on research from Betty Hart and Todd Risley that said “talk environments in the first 24-36 months of life are the most important determinant of language ability, IQ and school success.”

In 1995, the two researchers released a groundbreaking study called “Meaningful Differences in the Lives of Everyday American Children” that would pave the way for later models like LENA Start.

Hart and Risley found that children from resource-scarce families heard 30 million fewer words by 4 years old than their more affluent peers. This word gap was an excellent indicator of school success, and children who heard more words “had bigger vocabularies, were stronger readers, and got higher test scores.”

One of the most important findings was how early the disparity started: “Kids who started out ahead, stayed ahead; the kids who started out behind, stayed behind,” the report said.

LENA Start is a response to that research.

How it works

An infant-sized vest covered in polka dots with a large front pocket is unwrapped and lifted out of a package. It’s not a baby shower present; rather, it’s clothing designed to position a recording device close to an infant’s chest where it will document 16 hours of noises—speaking, singing, crying, television—that software will turn into a streamlined feedback report for parents.

The technology is coupled with on-the-ground learning sessions for caregivers. In Detroit, it means sitting around a table at an early morning meeting every Tuesday to check in with organizers and learn using a combination of workbooks, discussion and digital slide presentations.

The program doesn’t come cheap. At an initial investment of $200,000 for training, supplies and incentives, funding presents a hurdle.

Financing a portion of the rollout in Detroit is Black Family Development, Inc., a nonprofit that’s been around since 1978, with a long list of support programs and Detroit public schools as partners.

Chief Operating Officer Kenyatta Stephens said Black Family Development chose to support LENA Start because of its history of data-documented success and the shared idea that parents are invaluable.

“It’s operating on the idea that parents are the child’s first teacher, and no matter how many professionals work with your child, it will never be as important as your relationship with your child,” she said.

Training parents to communicate effectively with their children is part one of LENA Start. At the weekly sessions the workbooks and slideshow are used to show the impact of back-and-forth communication with children (called “turn taking”) and how constant and consistent speaking affects brain development.

At the beginning of a session, leaders ask caregivers what challenges and improvements they’ve seen with their child and work to troubleshoot any setbacks. Then the instructors dive into the teaching, explaining how television shows, even the educational ones, do not have the same effect on language development as speaking with a child.

For instance, a video plays of a young boy and his mother cooking; the mother says the steps out loud as they add ingredients and stir the mixture.

“It’s about developing a new pattern of communication at home,” Stephens said. “The curriculum really walks parents through what to say and how to be expressive. So if there’s a mother riding on a bus, she said, ‘we’re pulling up to a stop sign, and a stop sign is an octagon, and has a primary color and that’s red,’ so you’re teaching them to share their experiences with their children.”

“All of that is enhancing the number of words children hear.”

Why it works

LENA Start has been used nationally, starting in 2015 with two locations nationwide. By the end of 2016, 300 families were participating, and this year 16 cities implemented LENA Start, one of them Detroit, which is now in a pilot phase. Nationwide, they serve 728 families.

LENA’s president, Steve Hannon, said development of the program started in 2014 when the company was looking for scalable ways to close the language gap. LENA Start was formulated with the “three truths that govern LENA,” he said. “Early talk is key, parents and caregivers are the ‘secret sauce,’ and you can’t improve what you can’t measure.”

So is LENA Start proposing resource-scarce parents don’t know how to interact with their children effectively?

Stephens said no.

“The model is effective because we have families and communities where the priority is making sure you have food every day for your child and other basic everyday needs and challenges,” she said. “You love your child just as much as someone else who doesn’t have to worry about food, shelter and immigration issues. But it’s an issue of bandwidth. It’s a study of capacity. If survival is where your brain is focused, you have to decide that other things, while they may be important, become secondary.”

“The premise of the [LENA Start] model is, ‘how do we help families think about another priority?’ We equip them with resources they can incorporate in their everyday experiences.”

Besides the classroom learning, the second portion of the program is technology-based. The recordings document and then throw off data about such communications as turn taking, the number of words spoken and the amount of time spent with media like television and cell phones. The data is presented in weekly reports for parents, with easy to read graphs showing things like the time of day a child interacts with parents or technology. There’s also a “stars” system to indicate progress if conversational turns and words spoken increase while media decreases.

The program lasts 13 weeks, and by week eight, the results from the pilot were already looking positive. Turn taking increased by 81 percent, 100 percent of the families were set to graduate from the program (and with a perfect attendance rate, and exposure to media was dropping, with one caregiver cutting exposure by 113 percent.

Long-term sustainability

Hannon said once the program has been running for two years, the cost per child and caregiver drops from $269 to about $200.

Other national programs that focus on the language gap tend to cost much less. For one child to participate for a year with Reach Out and Read costs $20, and Ready Readers costs $80.

Detroit organizers are planning on a two-year expansion plan: 50 clients in the first year and 150 in the second.

To find funders, LENA can look toward the growing number of organizations that are looking to bankroll language development programs that are proven effective. Data from the recordings can be presented by LENA as evidence of its success.

“We’re excited about the beginnings in Detroit and it’s a strong team there implementing things and we’re very optimistic about the results we’re going to achieve,” Hannon said. “Parents have the power. We are not empowering parents; we’re helping them harness their power as their child’s first and best teacher.”

Stephens of Black Family Development said the best indication of the program’s sustainability in Detroit is actually the response from families. “After the first session there were families that said ‘finally, we’re now getting what we need for our children, to teach our children, that rich people get.’”

Foundations put $50 million behind effort to improve lives of young Detroit children

2017-11-10T17:40:44+00:00

The two major foundations behind the creation of a ten-year plan to improve the lives of Detroit’s youngest children are putting up $50 million to help put the plan into action.

As they unveiled the new Hope Starts Here framework Friday morning, the Kellogg and Kresge foundations announced they would each spend $25 million in the next few years to improve the health and education of children aged birth to 8 in the city.

The money will go toward upgrading early childhood education centers, including a new Kresge-funded comprehensive child care center that the foundation says it hopes to break ground on next year at a location that has not yet been identified.

Other foundation dollars will go toward a just-launched centralized data system that will keep track of a range of statistics on the health and welfare of young children, and more training and support for early childhood educators.

The announcement at Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History drew dozens of parents, educators and community leaders. Among them was Detroit Schools Superintendent Nikolai Vitti who said one of the major impediments to improving conditions for young children has been divisions between the various government and nonprofit entities that run schools, daycares and health facilities for young kids.

Vitti said the district would do its part to “to break down the walls of territorialism that has prevented this work from happening” in the past.

Watch the video of of the announcement here.

In a city where 60 percent of young children live in poverty, a ten-year plan aims to improve conditions for kids

2017-11-10T03:25:20+00:00

A coalition of community groups led by two major foundations has a plan to change the fortunes of Detroit’s youngest citizens.

The Hope Starts Here early childhood partnership is a ten-year effort to tackle a list of bleak statistics about young children in Detroit:

More than 60% of Detroit’s children 0-5 live in poverty — more than in any of the country’s 50 largest cities;
13% of Detroit babies are born too early, compared to nine percent nationally;
13% of Detroit babies are born too small, compared to eight percent nationally;
Detroit has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country;
Nearly 30,000 of eligible young Detroiters have no access to high-quality early learning or child care options.
That translates to learning problems later on, including the 86.5% of Detroit third graders who aren’t reading at grade level.

Hope Starts Here spells out a plan to change that. While it doesn’t identify specific new funding sources or propose a dramatic restructuring of current programs, the effort led by the Kresge Foundation and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, names six “imperatives” to improving children’s lives.

Among them: Promoting the health, development and wellbeing of Detroit children; supporting their parents and caregivers; increasing the overall quality of early childhood programs and improving coordination between organizations that work with young kids. The framework calls for more funding to support these efforts through the combined investments of governments, philanthropic organizations and corporations.

Read the full framework here:

As a major provider of Head Start exits the program, hundreds of vulnerable Detroit families brace for change

2017-11-06T19:13:23+00:00

Hundreds of Detroit’s most vulnerable families just received some alarming news.

The Head Start centers they rely on for free, federally funded preschool, healthy meals and other services will be undergoing significant change and could potentially close.

Affected are the 420 low-income Detroit children who attend 11 Head Start centers operated by Southwest Solutions, a prominent Detroit social service organization. The organization notified families last week that, because of severe financial and logistical challenges, it will cease operations at its Head Start centers at the end of December and lay off its 122 Head Start employees.

The news is the latest upheaval to a Head Start program that has struggled to regain its footing in Detroit after years of deterioration and neglect. And social service advocates say they are worried that the problems that beset Southwest Solutions — which has had shortfalls in its financing for three years, a spokesman said — could also affect other Head Start providers in the city.

“We know that the latest challenges are symptomatic of larger systemic challenges facing early education providers across the city and region,” said Katie Brisson, a vice president of the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, which coordinates the work for a group of 10 philanthropic organizations that have partnered together to support Head Start. “Such challenges as facility shortages, financing gaps, and uneven care quality, among others, must be addressed if we want our youngest children to excel in elementary school and beyond.”

All of the Southwest Solutions Head Start programs will be transferred to other operators who could rehire existing staff, but their ability to smoothly pick up the added children and find classroom space for them is uncertain. That is adding stress to the lives of families already in crisis.

“They’re the only ones who’ve been able to help me,” said Rosanna Ramos, 40, a mother of three who said her children’s Head Start program supported her through a painful divorce.

Rosanna Ramos says staff at her children’s Head Start have been “the only ones who’ve been able to help me.” She fears coming changes could hurt her kids. “My children need the consistency of the same school to reiterate that we’re safe now.”

The staff at the Head Start, which operates inside the Escuela Avancemos charter school near Ramos’ southwest Detroit home, was there for her when she lost her job, when fire damaged her home, when her water was shut off, she said. Teachers got help for her son, Eliseo, now 5, when he developed behavioral issues and a stutter in the wake of a traumatic incident, she said. (He recently graduated from the program and started kindergarten.) A beloved teacher — Mr. Jason — worked with Ramos’ daughter, Elisabet, now 4, when she stopped taking naps as a toddler “because she felt vulnerable,” Ramos said.

“They’ve been like a second family to us,” she said. “We’ve had so many hardships and the school has supported us with the resources we need, with counseling and all-around understanding.”

Even if the program stays open, the thought that staff might change is highly distressing to her, she said. “My children need the consistency of the same school to reiterate that we’re safe now.”

Another parent, Evangelina De La Fuente, burst into tears at the thought that the Head Start her 3-year-old twin grandsons attend could close or change.

The school, inside a Salvation Army women’s shelter near Corktown, was an oasis for her family after her daughter, Christine, died shortly after giving birth and left De La Fuente to care for infant twins.

“We’re concerned and worried about what’s going to happen,” said De La Fuente, 55. “My health is not that great and this program is a lot of help for me … It’s become like a second home.”

De La Fuente says she’s been told that her grandsons, Randy and Prince, will likely still have a spot in a Head Start program but she worries about how they’ll cope with possible change.

“Our babies are used to their teachers,” she said. “They not only get an education here, they get attention, they get love, they get protection. For us, it’s hard to go back and trust another staff … We are very comfortable with our social worker, our director, our instructors. The babies are secure and they’re happy and they’re well fed and they’re well cared for. It’s scary to think it could change.”

Gabriela Alcazar, a family services worker at the Salvation Army Head Start, comforted De La Fuente as she cried while talking to a reporter.

“Continuity of care is one of the biggest tenets in social and emotional development,” Alcazar said. “We talk about intellectual and academic rigor but … [quality early childhood education] is teaching how to regulate your emotions and being able to participate in a classroom setting. That’s how you prepare children for school. That’s why continuity of care is so important and that’s basically being swept away from all of these children.”

Alcazar is union representative for the Head Start workers who are being laid off. She expects that most of the affected workers will land other jobs given the teacher shortage that affects many preschools in Detroit, but she notes that Southwest Solutions employes are in a union, which is not necessarily the case for other Head Start providers. That means that even if they are offered a spot at their current schools, they could face reductions to wages and benefits.

The decision to walk away from Head Start wasn’t easy for Southwest Solutions, said spokesman Steve Palackdharry.

“I cannot tell you what a painful decision this is for our organization” he said. “The mission of Southwest Solutions has to do with trying to put low-income families on the path to success and when you think about trying to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty, early childhood education has to be a part of that process.”

But a complicated federal funding system for Head Start that requires providers to match some of the funds and the challenge of finding and renovating classroom space that meets state and federal regulations made it difficult for Southwest Solutions to continue operating the program, he said.

“We were suffering significant losses for three years,” Palackdharry said. “We have more than 70 different programs … We’re the lead agency on homelessness, mental health, the leading provider of affordable housing in Southwest Detroit … and if you’re bleeding money in one particular area, there are concerns in the organization that it’s starting to affect the viability of the many other programs.”

Southwest Solutions has been operating Head Start centers since 2014 when it was part of a group of local nonprofits that collectively took over management of the program. The city of Detroit had administered Head Start for years but the federal government under former President Obama put the Detroit program out to bid to trigger a fresh start after years of mismanagement and neglect.

Since taking over the program, the new providers have struggled to find enough classrooms that can be affordably brought up to code. That hurdle, along with the difficulty of finding enough teachers, has left hundreds of Head Start seats unfilled in a city where thousands of needy children and their families could benefit from the highly regarded program.

Getting classrooms open was one of the major challenges facing Southwest Solutions, Palackdharry said.

The agency was approved to enroll up to 606 babies, toddlers and preschoolers but currently has only 420 kids in its 11 sites, Palackdharry said. That means the agency has spent money trying to get classrooms licensed but hasn’t been able to collect funds for those classrooms since children haven’t yet been able to enroll.

The organization has also spent money on classrooms inside public schools only to lose them when the schools decided they needed the rooms back. This year, Southwest Solutions lost seven classrooms in Detroit Public Schools Community District schools. That includes three at Durfee Elementary-Middle School that were lost when the school’s building was sold to a community group, Palackdharry said.

Starfish Family Services, a social service agency that leads the collaborative of Detroit Head Start providers, is working to find new operators to take over the Southwest Solutions centers, said Ann Kalass, the chief executive officer at Starfish but the process is complicated. New providers will have to negotiate leases for classrooms, hire staff and consider the impact on their existing programs.

“Our goal is to have minimal disruption for the families,” she said. “At this point, I’m not comfortable saying there will be no disruption but we want families to know that … we’ve got all of our resources deployed in making sure that the sites are stable and that everything is there that families should expect.”

Kalass acknowledged that the challenges that hobbled Southwest Solutions could very well affect other providers but she said she hopes this setback will encourage government and community leaders to create better support systems for the program.

“This is really a reminder to all of us,” Kalass said. “There’s an opportunity in front of us to develop a plan that puts all of our best thinking on the table to have a strong sustainable system for kids.”

Head Start, “is an amazing program,” Kalass said. “We see really promising outcomes for kids when we offer them quality programs but it’s complicated work so we need to have all systems aimed in the right direction for kids.”

Local philanthropic organizations have already come together to help Head Start providers weather the changes in recent years, but the millions of dollars in support from the 10-foundation Head Start Innovation Fund wasn’t enough to keep Southwest Solutions in the program.

Brisson, the vice president of the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, said there’s a lot of work left to do.

“Participants in the Innovation Fund are working together, and each in their own unique ways, to build short-term and long-term solutions to ensure families continue to receive the early childhood education that they need and deserve,” she said.

This story was edited on November 8, 2017 to remove statements by a parent that were not fully verified.

Reading, writing and soap suds: The unusual new program that teaches kids while their parents do the wash

2017-08-08T18:21:16+00:00

The days of bored kids hanging out in front of the TV at Detroit’s Fit and Fold laundromat could be over.

Now, there are books for kids to read — and take home — near the washing machines. There are computers stocked with educational software. And, a few times a week, there’s a picnic table in the parking lot where instructors read to children and work with them on their writing skills.

“This is good for everyone,” said Aaron Eley, 31, who was washing clothes inside the Fit and Fold in the city’s North End neighborhood on a recent evening as his children — Christian, 10, Ma’Kayla, 6 and Aaliyah, 2 — sat with instructors at the table outside.

“It’s good for the parents. They get to wash the clothes,” he said as his children played a matching game that involved finding words in books and writing them on index cards. “And it’s good for the kids. They get to learn some stuff.”

The books, the computers and the picnic table are part of a program called Wash and Learn that’s taking place this summer at three Detroit laundromats through an organization called Libraries Without Borders.

As educators increasingly recognize that teaching children during traditional school hours is simply not enough, Libraries Without Borders and its local partners have been experimenting with bringing literacy programs into people’s lives.

That includes people whose lives are too complicated to allow them to attend classes or tutoring programs at libraries or community centers. And it includes the kids from low-income neighborhoods who are more likely to lose academic ground over the summer than their more affluent peers.

“The folks who would benefit most from library programs often don’t know they exist, don’t know they’re eligible for a library card or don’t have a consistent enough schedule to go to a Tuesday 6 p.m. program every week,” said Allister Chang, Libraries Without Borders’ executive director.

Chang’s organization offers programs that help children and adults with reading, computers and other skills. It has brought pop up literacy programs to places such as train stations, hospitals, parks and street corners, testing different times and locations in different cities to see what works.

Those experiments proved that some locations were problematic, Chang said.

At the park, “you’re competing against nature at all times,” Chang said. People couldn’t see the computers if it was too bright. If it rained, the park would empty out.

At train stations or on street corners, people don’t usually hang around. “Everyone’s rushing to go somewhere else,” Chang said.

But at laundromats, people have time, they have shelter and they’re often looking for something to do.

“At the laundromat, there is a population that often has fallen through the cracks,” Chang said. “For the most part, especially during the day, you have unemployed adults and very, very young children.”

So Libraries Without Borders started piloting Wash and Learn this summer, testing out child literacy programs at the Fit and Fold and two other Detroit laundromats — the Sunshine Laundry Center in Southwest Detroit and the Coinless Laundromat on the city’s west side.

In New York City, the organization piloted an adult Wash and Learn program, helping people create digital resumes and apply for jobs online at a laundromat in the Bronx.

“We’re talking about equal opportunity here,” Chang said. “After school and over summer vacations, we find in the data that wealthier families are able to send their kids to continue doing more literacy-developing activities than children from low-income families.”

Stacy Lorne of Libraries Without Borders reads a book with children at the Fit and Fold laundromat in Detroit.

Some studies show that households in low-income neighborhoods have just one book for every 300 children — far less than in wealthier neighborhoods.

“Isn’t that terrifying?” Chang asked. “We know how just having access to reading materials outside of school can help make sure that you develop a vocabulary over the year and we know how much that affects graduation rates and job employability.”

Wash and Learn aims to change that, which is why books are available at the laundromats for children to take home, whether or not the instructors are present. It’s why the computers are available whenever the laundromats are open.

And when the program is in session, instructors work one-on-one or in small groups with kids, helping them with whatever they need. On a recent night, that included a one-year-old who was just learning to connect with books, older children who were practicing their writing skills and several kids who wanted to spend time on the computers.

So far, the program has been a big hit at the Fit and Fold, said Justin Johanon, who manages the laundromat.

The Fit and Fold has always had exercise equipment available for adults to use while they wait for their clothes to get clean, but there wasn’t much for kids, Johanon said.

“Their parents would plop them down and they would hang around, doing nothing,” he said.

Now, he said, kids are taking the free books and using the computers even on days when the the instructors aren’t there. “It’s awesome,” he said.

The Wash & Learn program has been in three Detroit laundromats this summer, offering kids instruction in reading, writing and computers.

The North End neighborhood has been surrounded by dramatic change in Detroit. Less than a mile to the south is the New Center neighborhood, where developers are building expensive new condo buildings and where the new QLINE train picks up commuters to deliver them downtown.

Nearby to the north, the price of historic mansions in the Boston Edison neighborhood has been climbing.

But the blocks around the laundromat are filled with families who have struggled for years, Johanon said. Right next to the laundromat is an apartment building that’s home to many children whose parents have trouble making ends meet.

“No one in there has internet. No one has a computer,” Johanon said. “There’s a bunch of apartments, a bunch of kids, and no one in there has anything. A lot of people can’t afford even to do laundry.”

Johanon said he’s tried to let the neighborhood know that kids can come to the reading program even if their parents aren’t washing clothes.

“I just care about what’s happening in the neighborhood,” he said.

It is that enthusiasm from laundromat owners and employees that has been the best part of the program so far, said Stacy Lorne, the Wash and Learn Detroit program coordinator.

“They take such pride in this program and such excitement,” Lorne said. “They’re bringing the kids to the computers when we’re not there and they’re making sure they know how to use the technology to get the kids logged on.”

One Detroit laundromat owner gave her $150 to buy snacks for kids, she said. Another printed flyers to help spread the word.

The Wash and Learn pilot program will end later this month but Libraries Without Borders has signaled that it plans to extend and expand the program, serving kids after school and on weekends once the school year begins. Local community partners say they, too, are invested for the long haul.

Wash and Learn “was their idea but we see the benefit so we’re going to keep this here,” said Cindy Eggleton, whose Brilliant Detroit organization is the local partner at the Fit and Fold and Sunshine laundromats.

Brilliant Detroit has family centers focused on families with kids aged 0-8 in several Detroit neighborhoods including one a block from the Fit and Fold. The organization sees the laundromat program as a great way to spread the word about its other programs, including a free all-day “Kids Club,” parenting classes, financial literacy classes and a teen gardening and nutrition program, Eggleton said. “It serves as a place for us to meet neighbors and if they want to come for more, they can come to the Brilliant Detroit house.”

Eggleton notes that programs that promote early childhood literacy are especially important in Michigan now that a new state law will soon require kids who can’t pass a third-grade reading test to repeat the grade.

Libraries Without Borders is encouraged by the early results from the pilot program this summer. The number of kids who have been served so far is relatively low — more than 80 children and their parents have worked with instructors at the three Detroit laundromats. Almost 100 books have been distributed, including children’s books and books geared for young adults.

But the organization sees this pilot program as a first step to possibly someday turning laundromats into places where people know they can go for help.

“This is something we are planning to take nationally,” Chang said, noting that the group soon hopes to have Wash and Learn programs in four other cities.

It just makes sense, he said. “Laundromat workers are in the local community. They care about the local families and this is also a way for them to get more business. This laundromat has programs and computers that others don’t.”

How generous private donations have created a tale of two pre-Ks in Detroit

2017-06-14T19:57:55+00:00

LaWanda Marshall and Candace Graham both teach pre-kindergarten at the Carver STEM Academy on Detroit’s west side.

Both have colorful, toy-filled classrooms, computers for students to use and assistant teachers to help guide their four- and five-year olds as they learn and explore.

But Marshall’s classroom has other things too — lots and lots of other things that regularly arrive like gifts from the pre-K gods.

“The office calls and says you have a package, and we’re like ‘Yay!’ and the kids get excited. It’s like Christmas,” said Marshall. Boxes filled with classroom supplies like musical instruments and science kits arrive every few weeks.

Marshall’s students — part of the Grow Up Great program funded by the PNC Foundation — go on regular field trips and get frequent visits from travelling instructors. The parents of her students get access to support programs like one that connects job seekers with employment opportunities. And Marshall receives special training in teaching arts and sciences that she credits with upping her game as an educator.

Graham and her students, meanwhile, hang back when the kids down the hall board the bus to go on field trips. Few packages or visitors arrive.

“We get left out a lot,” Graham said. “It’s unfortunate because I feel like all the kids should have the opportunities … They get more resources than we do. They have more materials in their classroom.”

The tale of two pre-Ks at the Carver STEM Academy is a problem well known in high-poverty school districts like Detroit that rely on the generosity of corporate and philanthropic donations to pick up where government resources leave off.

Districts are happy to accept gifts from private donors — baseball tickets or classroom supplies or money for school renovations. But inevitably, there’s not enough to go around. Schools then have to choose.

At Carver, all of the pre-K students are getting a quality education and a leg-up on school. But the children in Marshall’s classroom get to experience a program that shows how much more is possible when teachers have enough resources to fully involve parents, to engage community partners and to focus as much on science and art as they do on the ABCs.

The pre-K enrichment program is in 38 Detroit classrooms including 28 that receive PNC Grow Up Great funding and 10 that are supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Children in most of the city’s 177 pre-K classrooms don’t get to participate. That’s an inequity that Pamela Moore says she’d like to change.

Moore heads the Detroit Public Schools Foundation, which raises private funds for district schools. She’s trying to raise money to expand the program to all of the district’s preschools.

“We’ve got lots of partnerships so some kids get some things. Other kids get other things … but a lot of money is needed,” she said.

Moore is also looking for new ways to distribute private dollars so things like donated equipment or invitations to the Grand Prix are more coordinated — and less like a game show with prize-winning contestants.

“You’re the winner!” Moore said. “You and you and you. If we could coordinate that, maybe everyone could get a field trip or two and teachers could plan on it and count on it.”

* * *

Students in LaWanda Marshall’s pre-Kindergarten class at the Carver STEM Academy regularly receive boxes with new toys like these ramps and balls that teach physics concepts through PNC’s Grow Up Great program. “It’s like Christmas!” Marshall said.

The PNC Foundation launched Grow Up Great in 2004, investing $350 million in quality education for young children across the nation. The bank’s effort was part of a national push from philanthropists, advocates and governments to help children become better prepared for school.

“For every dollar spent on high quality early education, the society gains as much as $13 in long-term savings,” said Gina Coleman, a PNC vice president and community relations director.

PNC approached the Detroit school district about participating in 2009, said Wilma Taylor-Costen who at the time was an assistant superintendent in charge of district early childhood programs.

District officials worked with PNC to design a program that would expose kids to the arts and sciences through extra classroom resources and partnerships with museums and arts organizations, Taylor-Costen said. The idea was to connect families with those groups through field trips and classroom visits, and to train teachers so the benefits would continue even if the money dried up.

“It has been an awesome opportunity for exposure of not just our children but their families,” Taylor-Costen said.

When kids in the program go on field trips, their parents come along. This year that included trips to the North American International Auto Show, the Grand Prix education day at the Palace of Auburn Hills, the Cranbrook Science Center and a Music Hall puppet production of Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Parents also benefit from classes and programs that help them support student learning at home.

And Marshall credits the program with expanding her approach to teaching preschool after 22 years in the classroom.

“The professional development has been key, very valuable,” Marshall said. “Before, I focused on the reading and the math and making sure they could write their name. Now I know that by incorporating arts and sciences … I’m adding that missing element.”

Tayor-Costen said she couldn’t recall how classrooms were selected for the program but said district officials made sure to include schools in different city neighborhoods.

* * *

Detroit Pre-K teacher LaWanda Marshall poses with her students at the Carver STEM Academy before a bell choir performance that was made possible by the PNC Grow Up Great program. She learned to play bells when the Music Hall brought the instruments to her classroom.

Principal Sabrina Evans first brought the PNC program to Carver when she came to the school in 2012. She had seen the program at her prior school, the Beard Early Learning Neighborhood Center, and wanted it for Carver’s pre-Ks, she said.

“For them to have the first time going to school with all these things at their disposal, it’s like ‘Wow! I like school!’ Not only the kids, but the parents. I see more parents coming to the field trips and then I see them coming to school to participate.”

Evans was able to put both of Carver’s two pre-K classrooms into the Grow Up Great program in 2012 but when the school added a third pre-K in 2016, there wasn’t room for a third Carver classroom in the coveted program.

That’s why Graham’s students can’t participate.

“It’s lonely,” Graham said. “A lot of times we don’t even know when they have somebody coming to their classroom because it’s almost like a secret society.”

On a recent morning, when Graham’s class came out to play on the playground, her students ran past students in the school’s two PNC classrooms. The PNC kids were launching bottle rockets they had learned to make when visitors from the Charles H. Wright Museum, a new partner, brought bottles, baking soda and vinegar to the school.

Evans said she tries to support Graham’s classroom with other resources. She sets aside $20,000 from her budget every year to pay for school-wide field trips (Marshall’s students go on those field trips, too). And Marshall says she shares as many classroom resources with Graham as she can. She also passes along ideas and tools she develops through the supplemental teacher trainings.

But Evans regrets that some of her classrooms get benefits that others do not.

“I’m blessed to have two [PNC classrooms] because some schools don’t have any,” she said “But … If they’re going to offer it, it should go to every pre-K class in the district.”

Detroit Pre-K teacher Candace Graham talks to a student on the playground at the Carver STEM Academy. She says her students get “left out a lot” because the school’s two other preschool classrooms are in the PNC Grow Up Great program.

Moore has been trying to raise money to expand the program — and continue it in case the current funding dries up.

Last year, Moore put together a proposal to share with potential funders that put the cost of the program at $882 per child per year.

“PNC was the one that stepped up and said they were going to write a check and … we were so excited about that investment, we just said ‘woo hoo!’ and took it,” Moore said. “But now it’s time, if we all agree that it’s valuable … to go and find the resources.”

Moore is encouraged by the Hope Starts Here initiative, led by the Kellogg and Kresge Foundations, which has brought parents, experts, community organizations and political leaders together over the past year to develop a city-wide strategy to improve the lives of young children in Detroit.

“Hope Starts Here is an excellent example of bringing everybody into the room, figuring out where the gaps are and coming up with a plan we all agree with,” Moore said. “Then we’ll have a road map.”

Kellogg has been funding programs in the Detroit Public Schools for years but has recently ramped up its focus on early childhood education, said Khalilah Burt Gaston, a Detroit-based program officer with the Battle Creek-based foundation.

The foundation has worked closely with district leaders, she said, but the string of state-appointed emergency managers in recent years has made city-wide collaboration with the district challenging. “I think it would be fair to say that it’s been difficult during transitioning leadership to articulate a clear vision and strategy,” Gaston said.

That could change now that the district has a new superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, who has said he plans to stay for at least five years. Gaston said Hope Starts Here hopes to work with the district as it looks for new ways to expand high-quality early childhood programs.

Grow Up Great offers one model that the planners are looking to, she said. “It’s wonderful but it’s only serving a small number of children so what are the strategies needed to scale that? Replicate it across the entire district?”

Coleman said PNC knew that limited resources would prevent the bank from providing the program to all of the district’s preschoolers. The goal, she said, was to show what can be accomplished with extra funds.

“Obviously you can’t help every classroom,” she said. “But we have helped set the bar in how it can look.”

Students in LaWanda Marshall’s Detroit pre-Kindergarten class attend the North American International Auto Show through PNC’S Grow Up Great program

Detroit has low-income families needing preschools — and preschools needing low-income families. They don’t always connect

2016-12-06T20:42:10+00:00

This story was reported by the Teacher Project, an education journalism fellowship at Columbia Journalism School dedicated to covering the issues facing public school families and teachers.

When Monica Hernandez moved to southwest Detroit last spring from California, she headed to her local Head Start center to enroll her two young children, who are 1 and 4. Hernandez, 21, wanted childcare so she would have time to go back to school and earn her GED. She also hoped that with Head Start—the half-century-old federal program that provides low-income pre-kindergarteners with free education, health, and nutrition services—she would help prepare her children academically and socially for kindergarten.

At the Head Start center at Harms Elementary School, Hernandez made an appointment to discuss enrolling her kids, but the meeting never happened. “They just kept postponing it, and then they never called me back,” she said. “I just gave up.”

At a time when cities and states across the country are trying to expand publicly funded preschool programs, the stories of Detroit families like Hernandez’ show how simply adding publicly funded seats for the littlest learners is not enough—particularly when it comes to low-income families who often have the most to benefit from quality early childhood education programs.

Of the roughly 30,000 low-income children below the age of five in Detroit, only about 3,900 are enrolled in a Head Start program. Funding for about 850 Head Starts slots goes unused. Some parents don’t know of the program’s existence; others struggle to navigate a complicated landscape of Head Start providers with impenetrable enrollment procedures. The experience in Detroit shows that serving more of the country’s youngest students depends not only on expanding access, but getting much better information to the most disconnected communities and parents. (Head Start is federally funded, but delivered by hundreds of local agencies that can be public, private, for-profit or non-profit.)

“The struggle to fill vacant seats is something you could not even imagine in other cities…where the waiting lists are interminable,” says Maria Montoya, who works for Excellent Schools Detroit, an organization devoted to helping families traverse Detroit’s education landscape.

Though Hernandez eventually found a spot for her children in another Head Start center run by an agency called Matrix, her initial problem—wanting Head Start seats and struggling to get them—is frustrating to many people working in that sector. Laura Lefever, who runs the Children’s Center, a Head Start program in northwest Detroit, has more seats available than pupils to fill them. “Where are the children?” she asks, staring at a chart showing the number of vacant seats in the center she oversees.

Lefever’s program is in a neighborhood with a large number of single, working parents in desperate need of childcare. Yet 10 of the seats at the Children’s Center haven’t been filled. “I am becoming a walking billboard,” Lefever says, pointing to her red T-shirt with the name of the school on it. “I carry flyers everywhere.”

The reasons for the Head Start vacancies are numerous, intertwined, and contain valuable lessons for a nation hoping to better serve its youngest students.

Many parents, particularly those who were underserved by the education system themselves, don’t understand the value of early childhood programs—or remain unaware of their existence. This can be especially true in states where even 5-year-old kindergarten is optional. “They don’t realize the impact early education can have, and the importance of learning how to support your children’s studies in the years to come,” says Lefever. “Head Start is not a parking space for babies but the beginning of a journey. It is for parents just as much as for children.”

While the research and policy world remains divided on the quality of Head Start, studies have shown that it can have a positive significant impact over the long term. Children who participate are more likely to earn a high school diploma and less likely to be convicted of a crime. While traditional Head Start programs serve kids once they turn three, Early Head Start enrolls younger children. Some Head Start centers in Detroit also offer Early Head Start, but parents tend to be even less aware of the programs for younger children.

Sheritta Dew might never have discovered Head Start if she hadn’t gone back to school herself. “When I had my first child I did not know about these programs,” said Dew, 21, who has a three- and a one-year-old, and is six months pregnant with a third child. But when someone at her GED center mentioned Head Start, Dew realized she had more options than keeping her children at home. They’re now enrolled at a Head Start center in southwestern Detroit, not far from the homeless shelter where the family lives.

Dew’s three-year-old spent his first two years at home, where he didn’t have nearly as much exposure to educational activities. “I just regret that my son wasn’t here sooner, he could have learned a lot more,” she says. But after hard times in the past, Dew feels that her life is on an upswing. Staying at the homeless shelter means she doesn’t need to worry about where her family will find its next meal, and social workers are helping her to find an apartment. Most important, her children seem content and engaged. “They look happier since they started,” she said.

* * *

While parental reluctance and lack of awareness play a role in keeping Detroit’s Head Start centers underoccupied, a blurry enrollment process doesn’t help the matter.

The city administered the Head Start program for about half a century, from the 1960s to 2012. At that point, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it no longer wanted the city to distribute the money because of longstanding issues, including mismanagement of funds. In 2014, control over the program was handed over to a variety of local organizations and nonprofits that now run the centers, a more typical model from a national perspective.

There are a number of different factors that determine Head Start eligibility, which can vary slightly from center to center, with some exemptions permitted. A child’s family income typically needs to be at or below the federal poverty guidelines of $16,000 for a family of two and roughly $20,000 for a family of three. Other factors that must be taken into consideration are homelessness, disability, and the English language proficiency of the family. But some others factors, like the age or the employment status of the parents, depend on local needs and context. In a neighborhood with a rapidly growing number of refugee youngsters, for instance, they might receive greater preference than they would in other areas.

Skeptics say this system not only confuses parents but allows for a fuzziness that less-than-scrupulous operators can exploit: turning away families they should serve by saying they don’t meet the enrollment criteria. Some center operators are far less responsive and helpful than Lefever.

The complicated, and not always transparent, enrollment process can be particularly detrimental for the most vulnerable kids: those with special needs. Head Start centers are required to enroll at least 10 percent of children with special needs, but according to parents and center operators some make it clear that they are not able to accept students with more severe disabilities.

Tina Edwards, the enrollment coordinator at the Children’s Center, recalls a three-year-old who had been in a car accident and couldn’t walk as a result. “Another school told her parents that they could not accommodate their need based on her handicap,” Edwards said. “We welcomed her here. One bad encounter can affect how families feel about the Head Start program as a whole.”

In order to win parents’ trust, engaging them is a priority. “One of the ways to address the enrollment issue is to empower parents, involve them in the process and ask them to spread the world about the program,” says Kaitlin Ferrick, director of the Michigan Head Start Collaboration Office. “The peer to peer review is always effective,” she adds. This is particularly true in Detroit, where many residents have grown to distrust official sources after decades of being underserved.

* * *

In a city where a population of roughly 700,000 is spread out over 140 square miles, geography and transportation form another barrier to access. Until recently children had to be enrolled in a center located in the zip code where they lived, which was not always the closest one to their home. They usually couldn’t switch zip codes unless all of the programs in their own area were full—something that happens very seldom in Detroit. However, new standards implemented earlier last month create more flexibility. While Detroit Head Start operators are still waiting to see if the new standards will help solve their problems, they do allow centers to more frequently enroll children in the zip code where parents work, not live — if center operators can show they’ve made every effort possible to recruit families who reside in their zip code.

Parents often prefer sending their children to centers near where they work, especially those who don’t find a spot in a full-day program. Some travel more than an hour on buses with unreliable schedules to get to their jobs. “You really need to be unemployed, or have someone who helps you, in order to enroll your child for three hours a day” in a half-day program, says Melanie Ford, a 34-year-old mother of two.

After a “challenging” nine months spent trying to enroll her daughter in a quality and convenient Head Start center, she finally settled on one she disliked because it was the only one with an open full-day slot. (Full day programs typically run from 8 a.m. to 3 or 4 p.m.) “There were no many activities, children were not learning as they should,” she said, noting that staff members didn’t interact with the kids as much as she wanted. She was eventually able to move her daughter to another center in the same zip code where she learns a lot more. “She is always smiling now. But I tell you: You gotta be really consistent to enroll your kid in school.”

Even those working families who find “full day” programs may struggle with the limited hours—another deterrent to enrollment. Some may eschew Head Start and opt for private, home-based child care centers as a result.

Nobles has been working in Head Start programs since 1999 and has first-hand experience of how valuable early childhood education can be, having attended a Head Start center herself. She loves her job, yet sometimes she has to confront hard challenges.

According to a 2015 report funded by the Kresge Foundation, Detroit has 6,684 full-day, full-year licensed slots in schools and centers for children ages three to five— a number that meets only 29 percent of the demand. Roughly 16 percent of available child care in the city is comprised of family child care homes, most of it unlicensed. This type of private child care has played a historic role in Detroit communities where families have learned not to rely too heavily on government-run services. But it is not subject to any kind of inspection, even if partially subsidized through publicly funded vouchers.

“The collection of data on early childhood education in Detroit is still challenging, the Head Start program included,” said Kaitlin Ferrick. This can be true in many big cities, but Detroit, according to Ferrick, offers “an extreme example.” Competition among providers doesn’t make the data gathering any easier, with agencies sometimes competing for the same teachers, social workers and facilities.

There is some cause for hope. Ten foundations in the Southeast Michigan Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, which formed in 2010, have invested more than $50 million into the region’s early childhood programs since 2012. The fund has helped spur innovative, collaborative ways to help Detroit’s Head Start program expand its capacity and its reach, building a citywide enrollment system.

But if Detroit’s most vulnerable families miss the message, the new money will have far less impact. The city’s experience shows that the future of early childhood education in America’s low-income communities depends heavily on whether parents have the capacity and knowledge to take advantage of their available options — and, when necessary, clamor for something better.