Chalkbeat

Philadelphia mayor unveils simplified pre-K application, bonuses for early childhood teachers

2024-05-06T18:24:39+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

Applying to Philadelphia’s free preschool options may soon be much easier.

Mayor Cherelle Parker has announced two initiatives designed to get more students enrolled in the city’s free early childhood education programs and help retain teachers in the field.

Starting June 3, parents and caregivers will be able to use one simplified application portal to sign up for the city’s free public preschool programs — a big change from the current process, which families have found to be onerous and confusing.

Parker also announced she’s allocating $3 million for signing and retention bonuses for some early childhood teachers who stay in their jobs for the upcoming school year. Lead teachers will be eligible to get up to $2,000, and assistant teachers will be eligible for up to $1,500.

In a statement following the announcement, Parker said the city will also be offering summer training for teachers “providing them the tools needed to support children facing ongoing trauma, and mental and behavioral challenges.”

These city investments in the childcare sector come at a crucial time. Early childhood providers have said their industry is in crisis with the end of federal COVID aid looming and a worsening teacher shortage.

An estimated 50% of early childhood educators surveyed across the commonwealth said last year they were “unsure” or “intending to not be working in their jobs in five years,” according to a report from Start Strong PA, a statewide early education advocacy group.

Parents and caregivers have told Chalkbeat the city’s free pre-K options are life-changing, offering high-quality childcare and learning opportunities for thousands of 3- and 4-year-olds. But the application process has been a barrier preventing many families from signing up.

“I hate unnecessary bureaucracy,” Parker said at a citywide “playdate” event at Smith Playground on Saturday. “As a mother and a former teacher, I know firsthand why teachers are critical to our communities … we really do care about early childhood education providers, and we’re not just talking about babysitters, we’re talking about true, prepared educators.”

Expanding access to free preschool was former Mayor Jim Kenney’s legacy initiative. However, in Parker’s budget proposal this year, she notably recommended Philly’s pre-k programs to be funded at the same level as last year, with 17,000 seats available across the city.

Creating a teacher retention fund can be more beneficial than expanding the number of pre-K seats alone, said Elizabeth Farwell Ozer, the policy and special projects manager at First Up, an advocacy group that provides training and accreditation assistance to early childhood educators and organizations.

“Until we’ve invested in the workforce and redrafted existing programs, any money towards expansion will be futile, since there aren’t enough staff to care for the existing kids,” she said in an email.

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

Kindergarten registration is now open in Philadelphia

2024-01-22T19:29:27+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system.

Kindergarten registration is now open for the 2024-25 school year in Philadelphia, and the 5-year-old students at Ellwood Elementary School in the Oak Lane neighborhood want their peers to know what they’ve learned.

They can sound out words and explain how birds build their nests. They know how to cut paper and can match superheroes with their super senses. And they know about hammerhead sharks and how to play the “shake and spill” math game.

Ellwood’s 40 students are some of the 9,100 kindergarteners learning crucial early education skills across the city this school year, and district officials want that number to grow.

Kindergarten enrollment took a dip during the pandemic but has come close to recovering to pre-COVID levels: In 2019-2020 there were 9,880 students registered, but in 2020-21 that figure dropped to 7,140.

Superintendent Tony Watlington said Monday he is encouraging families to sign their 5-year-olds up before the May 31 deadline. In addition to helping the district prepare for next year, registering early also gives families a better chance for their students to be placed in seats at their neighborhood schools or schools of their choice.

“Getting registered for kindergarten is so important,” Watlington said at a press conference at Ellwood. “Kids who get an early start get a good foundation in reading and math and do well as they go through school.”

To be eligible, students must be 5 years old on or before Sept. 1, 2024. Parents and caregivers can sign their students up online on the district’s website or in-person by appointment at families’ neighborhood schools.

All 3- and 4-year-old students can enroll in free prekindergarten through the district if they won’t be 5 years old by the next school year.

Diane Castelbuono, the district’s deputy chief for early childhood, said registering as early as possible “gives families a chance to adjust and think about preparing for kindergarten.” It also gives schools the proper time “to get to know who the children are as they come in.”

Kindergarten is not mandatory in Pennsylvania, but Castelbuono said “almost everybody goes” in Philadelphia. She said that’s evidence that families in the city “really understand the importance of full day schooling at the earliest age.”

Watlington said he would “love for there to be compulsory kindergarten” in the state.

“We need more school, more time to learn, not less,” Watlington said. He’s already thrown his support behind new Mayor Cherelle Parker’s year-round-school proposal, promising to pilot the idea in the coming years.

Parker hasn’t revealed any details about what she wants year-round-school to look like, but she told Chalkbeat it won’t be “children sitting in a classroom at a desk” for 365 days.

Over the next few months, the district will be hosting open houses for registered students to come and meet their potential teachers and future classmates. One will be on March 5 and another will be during the week of May 13.

Students who go to Ellwood next year may have Erica Meyers, who has been teaching kindergarten in Philadelphia for eight years.

Meyers said “every day is a big win” in her classroom.

“I see these students come in to me, they don’t know how to sit in chairs. They don’t know how to sit on the carpet or raise their hands,” but they learn quickly, she said. And by the time they move on to first grade, Meyers said they’re adding, subtracting, and spelling their names.

“They’re making sounds, they’re reading and the little light bulbs go on, which is awesome,” Meyers said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How and when did you decide to become a teacher?

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

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

Were you daunted about going into teaching during the pandemic?

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

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

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

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are Philadelphia’s pre-K options?

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

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

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

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

How do I apply?

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

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

The city’s PHLpreK application can be found here.

The district’s application can be found here.

How to apply online

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

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

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

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

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

If applicable, the district will also ask for:

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

The city’s PHLpreK application requires:

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

How to apply in-person

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

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

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

What happens next?

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

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

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

What else do I need to know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Students gravitate to hands-on, interactive learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s Early Childhood Education Guide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philly parents say schools don’t prepare students to thrive, want next mayor to prioritize education

2023-03-29T22:41:55+00:00

A large share of Philadelphia parents say schools are on the wrong track and the next mayor must exert more control over education, says a new report from the nonprofit organization Elevate 215.

The group, which awards grants for school improvement, polled 400 Philadelphia parents and guardians with children in district, charter, and private schools, as well as a handful of home-schoolers. Nine in 10 agreed that “a candidate’s plan for improving the education system in the city is key to earning my support.”

Nearly two-thirds of those polled feel that the city schools are “on the wrong track” — although only 27% feel that way about their own child’s school and just 42% said that Philadelphia high school students are well prepared “to thrive in life.”

The poll comes as the city prepares to elect a new mayor to succeed Jim Kenney, with the party primaries scheduled for May 16. There are 12 Democrats and one Republican running. Because the city has seven times as many Democrats as Republicans, winning the Democratic primary is considered tantamount to winning the election.

In mayoral forums around the city, public safety has emerged as the top concern; the city had 516 homicides in 2022 and already more than 100 this year, including several incidents involving students going to or from school.

Those questioned in the Elevate 215 poll were pessimistic about how well schools prepared students for the next step in their education or career. Just 46% said they thought students were well prepared to enter a four-year college and 44% said they were prepared for a full-time job. Just over half of those surveyed said that students were prepared for a two-year community college or technical school.

The Elevate 215 report emphasized the mayoral role in education, saying the mayor must “set a vision, appoint board members aligned with that vision, and be held accountable for student outcomes.”

Asked to rank their priorities in choosing a school, 91% said safety — both in and on the way to school — was “very important.” Teacher quality and curriculum and instruction followed close behind. Philadelphia parents have a lot of educational options; in addition to the ability to choose charter or private schools, parents can also apply to attend a district-run school outside their neighborhood.

‘We have to go back to listening to our parents and planning for what our students need to thrive in life,” said Stacy Holland, Elevate 215’s executive director, who previously ran the Fund for the School District of Philadelphia, its fundraising arm.

Elevate 215 started out as the Philadelphia School Partnership, which raised money from foundations and philanthropists and promoted charter school growth in the city, although it has distributed grants to schools of all types.

Besides setting a vision for improving schools, the group recommends that the next mayor “increase the number of high quality schools” by improving curriculum and services, developing a plan for modern facilities, improving student safety focusing on teacher recruitment and retention, and advocating for equitable state funding for city schools

A Commonwealth Court judge last month ruled that Pennsylvania’s system for funding education is unconstitutional because it creates wide gaps between wealthy and poor districts and ordered an overhaul.

Unlike every other district in the Commonwealth, the appointed Board of Education cannot raise revenue for the schools, and must rely on the city, state, and federal government for its funding. In Philadelphia, the district must plead its case before City Council every year. The district spends less per student than most surrounding suburban districts despite having students who are primarily Black and brown and come from low-income families.

Currently, about 38% of the district’s revenue comes from city sources, but the survey did not ask whether the respondents would support more local taxes to raise money for the schools. Now, the district gets 55% of the property tax revenue as well as money from the use-and-occupancy and liquor-by-the-drink taxes.

Several of the mayoral candidates said at a forum last week that they would support raising the district’s share of the property tax to 60%.

Holland said she would love to hear the candidates talk about creative ways to “fill the funding gap” for schools.

“Whether that is taxes, or more alignment with the city budget, being creative about filling the gap is something we should look for,” she said.

She said, “We’re educating a population of young people who are living in deep poverty and schools don’t have the resources to meet their needs. If we’re not owning up to that, what are we doing? [Concentrated] poverty changes the game, and we’ve got to rise to that occasion.”

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

Mayoral candidates present their visions for improving Philadelphia education

2023-03-22T20:29:35+00:00

In Philadelphia’s first mayoral forum devoted solely to education issues, eight candidates presented a few bold ideas about funding, facilities, and safety, but avoided talking about whether they would seek major changes in district leadership.

The biggest influence that the mayor has over the schools is the ability to appoint the school board members, who in turn select the superintendent. But with all nine board members sitting in the room – and in fact, sponsoring the forum – discussion of how they would shape the school board was virtually nonexistent.

The terms of the board coincide with the mayor’s, so the new mayor can decide to keep current members or appoint all new ones.

Candidates Warren Bloom, James DeLeon, Derek Green, Helen Gym, Cherelle Parker, Rebecca Rhynhart, and Maria Quiñones Sanchez attended the two-hour forum Tuesday night, half of which featured questions from students. Candidate Amen Brown stayed for one hour.

Jeff Brown and Delscia Gray did not attend. Nor did Allan Domb, who cited the board’s involvement as a deterrent. “I do not believe it is appropriate to participate in a forum held by a group I would have to make decisions about whether to reappoint when I become Mayor,” Domb said in a statement shortly before the forum convened. “There is no other forum I am aware of that is being hosted by mayoral appointees.”

At the forum, candidates made innovative proposals but didn’t fully explain how they would fund, enact, or otherwise see their visions realized.

In general, the candidates said all teachers should be paid more, to bring their salaries up to those in surrounding suburbs. Sanchez said that she would find ways to recruit more Black and brown teachers, including through additional incentive pay. Parker, meanwhile, said she would work toward year-round public schools and a longer school day.

Both these proposals would be costly and require some novel negotiations with the teachers union.

Gym said she wants to restore nurses, counselors, and school psychologists who were cut from schools in 2013 due to budgetary constraints and not replaced. She also promised to guarantee free transportation for students, including those who live less than a mile and a half from school and are currently ineligible for it.

She also proposed unifying the city and school district budget and “stopping the idea that we fund the number of teachers based on the number of students that we have, rather than on the learning environment students deserve to have.”

The current contractual maximum is 33 students per class in grades 4-12 and 30 per class in grades K-3, and teachers are allotted on that basis, although sometimes class sizes can go higher if there are vacancies.

“Every mayor before us has turned their back on our public schools or has failed to fulfill their promise,” Gym said.

The candidates also said they would advocate for more education aid from the state.

Bloom proposed taxing coffee as well as alcohol and tobacco to raise money for the schools. DeLeon called for more transparency in federal COVID relief money spending. And Rhynhart said her experience as city controller, city treasurer and budget director makes her uniquely suited to “get more money from the state” for the district.

She also said she will “appoint a school board that shares my vision for improvement and accountability in our schools.”

“We need a plan. We need goals. And then we need to measure success against those goals,” Rhynhart said

To help raise money for what would be costly proposals, Gym, Parker, and Sanchez said they would devote a higher proportion of city property taxes to public schools. Now, the schools get 55% of local property taxes. Sanchez noted that she had introduced in city council a bill to increase the district’s share to 60%, but it lacked support.

They also talked about redoing the property tax assessment system to ensure that people are paying their fair share; Rhynhart called the system “broken.” Philadelphia’s property tax is the single biggest source of local revenue for the school district.

Redoing that system, however, wouldn’t necessarily yield more tax revenue for schools.

Expressing frustration about the condition of school facilities, Sanchez said, “I am tired of debating the condition of buildings that we just need to knock down.”

Brown said in the first 100 days of his term he would “evaluate each and every school” building “to see what needs to be done, whether it needs to be knocked down, rebuilt, or if it’s a historical building, we’ll keep the building and relocate the school in that same area.”

“We shouldn’t have our students and our children learning in these horrible conditions where you feel like you’re in prison,” Brown said.

Green said he would improve communications between the city and school district. Earlier this month, city and school officials had a testy exchange about whether the district had been appropriately transparent about the safety of school buildings.

“We should not be seeing our tax dollars being used in a fight between two parts of our city government,” Green said.

Bloom’s position was one of delegation: at one point, he suggested he would appoint all of his fellow candidates to his cabinet and “adopt” their ideas.

All the candidates said public safety is a major issue in the campaign, especially for students and young people. They also noted how safe and effective schools are a key factor in determining the city’s quality of life.

DeLeon leaned heavily on his proposal for a Local Incident Management System to coordinate city responses to gun violence. Sanchez, meanwhile, said the city should have “an honest conversation around safety” and rethink the juvenile justice system that sometimes incarcerates children over misbehavior in school.

The system here “removes children from families more than anyplace in the world,” which worsens poverty and destabilizes families, she said.

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

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

Philadelphia’s early childhood education workers ‘on the brink of a breakdown’ advocates say

2023-03-16T18:17:30+00:00

Citing “inadequate” wages and warning of an impending mass exodus from the field, early childhood education advocates in Philadelphia and statewide say their sector is “on the brink of a breakdown.”

Those advocates are urging state lawmakers and Gov. Josh Shapiro to add more funding for childcare and early childhood education in the state budget this year. Without more money, they say employees will leave, programs will close, and children, families, and businesses in Pennsylvania will face “devastating consequences.”

Shapiro’s proposed budget includes $66.7 million in early childhood education funding. But advocates said that’s far from enough. They are calling for $430 million for increasing wages and expanding programs across Pennsylvania.

Roughly 50% of early childhood educators surveyed across the commonwealth said they were “unsure” or “intending to not be working in their jobs in five years,” Start Strong PA, a statewide early education advocacy group, said in a new report.

(The report was funded through a grant from the William Penn Foundation. Chalkbeat receives funding from the William Penn Foundation.)

Losing those workers would mean smaller programs with fewer teachers. That would leave more families in need of child care without an option, and keep more parents — especially women — out of the workforce, advocates say.

Sheila Moses, a former early childhood teacher, said Thursday at the Northeast Philadelphia YMCA, she had to leave her job as an educator because of the low wages.

“The tension I experienced as a single parent was overwhelming,” said Moses, who spoke at an event to promote the report hosted by the Start Strong and Children First advocacy groups. “I worked full-time and still needed welfare to support my family.”

The Start Strong report said that the child care sector in Philadelphia “is in crisis.” Its analysis found that 83% of Philadelphia-area programs have a staffing shortage, with 616 open positions across the city and 2,831 children on waitlists.

Using 2021 earnings data, the most recent available, the report also found that in all of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, early childhood teachers’ earnings “failed to meet the cost-of-living” and were not sufficient to cover “basic necessities like housing, transportation and food.”

Wages varied across the state. The highest earners were in Union County, who make up to $31,320 annually, while teachers in Elk County earned as little as $15,408 per year.

In Philadelphia County, the estimated full-time hourly rate for these teachers was $14.37 for annual earnings of $29,884.

The report’s authors said early childhood workers earned less annually than housekeepers, hair stylists, landscapers, and retail workers.

Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, said at the event Thursday that early childhood programs are losing teachers to businesses like Amazon that can pay higher wages and offer more immediate healthcare benefits.

Milagros Battiti, an early educator at KinderAcademy in Philadelphia, said at the event she’s been “struggling to provide basic necessities for myself” on her current earnings of $30,000 a year.

When her mother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 2022, those struggles multiplied and she fell under the federal poverty line.

“I am not the dream I envisioned or worked hard towards,” Battiti said. “I’m just surviving day by day.”

Chalkbeat Philadelphia Senior Writer Dale Mezzacappa contributed to this story.

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

Philadelphia mayoral hopefuls must prioritize children’s needs and educator pay, coalition says

2023-02-28T23:30:24+00:00

A coalition of 61 groups is trying to focus Philadelphia’s mayoral campaign on issues that impact youth, children, and education.

The coalition, called the Kids Campaign, is prodding the candidates to explain in detail how they would achieve a series of objectives. These include attracting teachers to the city by increasing starting salaries, making summer jobs available for all teens, and providing more affordable, high-quality early childhood education seats.

At its launch event Tuesday, the group released the first six of what will be a dozen policy papers that represent the Kids Campaign’s platform. They have titles like “No child in Philadelphia should go hungry or live in poverty,” and “Philadelphia must contribute to solving the climate crisis to ensure a thriving future for our kids.”

For example: To attract more teachers, the group in its policy papers says the district should increase starting salaries, reduce class sizes, and build affordable housing for teachers, among other actions.

The group has sent its platform — the product of extensive research and filled with facts and policy proposals — to the 10 Democrats and one Republican running for mayor. Eight have responded that they are in agreement with the goals, said Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First, a major organizer of the campaign.

But that initial agreement is just a start. Cooper said the organization will be briefing the candidates on their findings, and is expecting responses by March 20 to a detailed questionnaire asking them to describe their strategies to address problems.

“It’s one thing to support the platform and another to say how you will achieve it,” said Cooper. “And that’s really going to be the test for us, whether candidates are serious about supporting the needs of kids.”

The primary is May 16, and winning the Democratic primary is considered tantamount to winning the general election. Democrats have an eight-to-one registration advantage in the city. There’s no clear front-runner in the crowded field to replace Mayor Jim Kenney, whose term expires at the end of this year.

On early childhood education, the group found that 43% of children in the city don’t have access to any publicly funded pre-K, and only 36% are currently in programs considered high quality.

Among the coalition’s policy proposals to deal with that is to set a minimum wage of $17.53 an hour for people working in PHLPreK, one of four Philadelphai subsidized early childhood programs and the only one fully funded by the city. (The program is funded by a tax on sugary beverages that some candidates oppose.)

The group also wants changes to the juvenile justice system to make it more “restorative” and less punitive. As part of that, it wants the next mayor to “direct school board members” to reform how it deals with truancy, especially by addressing “the reasons youth are failing to attend school.” The mayor appoints all nine board members.

According to the coalition’s research, 64% of youth who are in detention are there for non-felony offenses and 71% for a first offense.

“Placing them in institutions doesn’t deter them, it derails them,” said Sharon Ward of the Education Law Center, a member of the coalition. “They disengage from education, quickly fall behind, and are more likely to drop out.”

Plus, she said, there are widespread racial disparities in how the system treats juveniles who have gotten into trouble. Black students are much more likely to be removed from their homes, and Philadelphia, with about 12% of Pennsylvania’s population, accounts for 41% of the juvenile placements in the state.

Among the Kids Campaign’s recommendations is to direct the Department of Human Services to create alternatives to incarceration that are “rehabilitative and restorative.” The coalition also wants “reduce the presence” of school safety officers “so that youth are not likely to be adjudicated for school infractions.”

In December, Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington announced that the district would pay for an increased presence of city police officers near some school buildings. The move was part of his response to ongoing and acute concerns about student safety, amid a gun-violence crisis afflicting the city’s young people.

Cooper, who served as Ed Rendell’s policy chief when he was Philadelphia’s mayor and Pennsylvania’s governor, added that “every day, more parents are signing up to join” the Kids Campaign, and that she expects the coalition to make a difference.

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

Philadelphia school leaders urge parents to register their children early for kindergarten

2023-01-19T22:22:08+00:00

Tony Watlington still remembers crying on his first day of kindergarten, as he looked out the window of his classroom and watched his mother and uncle drive away after they dropped him off.

His misery “lasted about eight minutes,” he said. “Then I loved school.”

The Philadelphia superintendent told that story Thursday as he and other school officials urged families to enroll their children for kindergarten next year — and to do so early, if possible, so that both parents and the district can plan.

“Kindergarten plays a critical role in setting the foundation for success in school,” Watlington said at the Potter-Thomas Elementary School in Kensington, during a launch event for this year’s Thrive at Five campaign.

Research shows that children who attend kindergarten have better academic skills, better social-emotional and behavioral skills, and higher confidence levels throughout their school careers, he said.

The district would like parents to register their children by May 31, although applications are accepted after that, all the way into the fall after school starts. All children who turn five years old by Sept. 1 are eligible for kindergarten next year.

One major incentive for parents to enroll their children early: Kindergarten seats in a given school might fill up quickly, and those who register later might not get their child a seat at their neighborhood school.

Kindergarten is not mandatory in Pennsylvania, and not fully reimbursed by the state, and many districts still offer only half-day programs. Amid fiscal problems in the district, former Superintendent David Hornbeck in the 1990’s nevertheless worked to make all programs full-day.

Diane Castelbuono, the district’s deputy chief for early childhood, said that kindergarten enrollment declined in district schools from roughly 9,880 students in 2019-20 to 7,140 in 2020-21 — a 28% drop —but then jumped by 9% in 2021-22.

At the same time, kindergarten enrollment lagged behind enrollment in the first grade by about 600 students in 2021-22, which indicates the likelihood that not all eligible children enrolled in kindergarten that year.

Historically, about 35% of parents who enroll their children in kindergarten register in the summer and fall, Castelbuono said, but the district is hoping this year to reduce that percentage.

Public school enrollment is down nationally, especially in the elementary grades, Castelbuono noted, but officials are hoping to buck that trend here. This year, about 9,000 students have enrolled in kindergarten. The district’s goal is for between 10,000 and 11,000 students to enroll in kindergarten for the 2023-24 school year, she added.

Mia DeJesus, a kindergarten student at Potter-Thomas Elementary, helped promote kindergarten’s long-term benefits at a Jan. 19 event with Philadelphia school leaders.

During Thursday’s Thrive by Five event, Watlington and Castelbuono got help from Mia, a kindergarten student at Potter-Thomas Elementary, and her mother Jasmine DeJesus.

“Kindergarten is important on many levels,” DeJesus said. It helps her daughter “think outside the box, with things I can’t teach at home.”

Kindergarten has helped Mia with problem-solving, and she can now count to high numbers, DeJesus added.

“I know sight words and letters from A to Z,” Mia said.

She then climbed on a chair to reach the microphone and added: “If you want to go to kindergarten, you have to be five.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out the stories in the guide below.

Philadelphia invested in early literacy efforts. Is it working?

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

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

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

Read the full story, by Dale Mezzacappa.

Early childhood education programs fight food insecurity in Philadelphia and beyond

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

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

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

Read the full story, by Nora Macaluso.

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full story, by Nora Macaluso.

How this preschool teacher adapted for her COVID-era students

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

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

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

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

Read the full story, by Gabrielle Birkner.

Philadelphia officials optimistic about early literacy efforts despite disappointing test scores

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

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

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

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

“Pizza!” one little boy shouted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early literacy efforts focus on coaches and curriculum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early childhood education programs fight food insecurity in Philadelphia and beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pennsylvania programs aim to ease hunger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forging bonds, finding cultural role models

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to become a preschool teacher?

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

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philadelphia school board approves grant to teach anti-racism in elementary schools

2022-11-18T17:55:17+00:00

The Philadelphia school district will partner with a nonprofit organization to coach teachers in three elementary schools on avoiding racism in their teaching, thanks to an $84,000 initiative the school board approved Thursday.

The money for the Children’s Literacy Initiative will fund an early learning specialist who will coach teachers on techniques including anti-racist early literacy instruction, understanding structural bias, and designing lesson plans that foster diversity, equity, and inclusion, the district said.

The contract provides “embedded coaching” at Mary McLeod Bethune, Dr. Tanner G. Duckrey, and William Cramp schools, and runs through June 30 of next year. School board members approved the contract without comment.

The initiative dovetails with state standards released by the Pennsylvania Department of Education this week that are designed to have teachers address institutional racism and their own biases, and to counter racist practices in schools, the radio station WHYY reported.

The Children’s Literacy Initiative is a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that works with schools around the country to improve literacy rates for early learners in economically disadvantaged schools.

“Teachers will receive side-by-side, job-embedded coaching to ensure quality and successful implementation, and children may see this reflected in the instruction,” a district spokeswoman said in an email to Chalkbeat.

The coach will work directly with teachers in kindergarten through second grade, as well as administrators, making weekly visits to each school, she said.

The program also calls for “teacher professional learning communities,” which are group sessions that focus on literacy objectives and differentiating instruction to meet children’s diverse needs. It also features “school based leadership team meetings” that aim to build principals’ and school leaders’ familiarity with the initiative and ensure they can review progress.

The program will allow teachers to customize lesson plans to class demographics, and will give school leaders the skills to ensure classroom materials are “culturally responsive,” the district said.

While initially limited to three schools, the program may be expanded to others as the district evaluates its success, the spokeswoman said.

The Hamilton Community Foundation and the Neubauer Family Foundation provided funding for the project, according to the district’s description of the initiative.

Correction: An earlier version incorrectly identified the organization receiving the grant. It is the Children’s Literacy Initiative.

Officials celebrate expansion of Philadelphia pre-K program after state budget increase

2022-11-17T22:32:55+00:00

Philadelphia and state officials gathered Thursday morning to celebrate the expansion of a well-established prekindergarten program in the Oxford Circle area, and to highlight the increase in state spending on early childhood programs.

The officials — including Mayor Jim Kenney, Sheriff Rochelle Bilal, and newly elected state representative Anthony Bellmon — toured classrooms at the Amazing Kidz Academy in the 1200 block of East Cheltenham Ave.

This year, Amazing Kidz, which has four locations, was able to add 80 slots through PreK Counts and Head Start following a combined $79 million increase for those programs that lawmakers adopted in Pennsylvania’s current budget. Thursday’s event was the ceremonial opening of new classrooms at Glading Presbyterian Church.

The event was sponsored by Pre-K for PA, a nonpartisan statewide coalition of individuals and organizations campaigning to increase the availability of high-quality and affordable early childhood programs.

Additional state aid for early education is important “because looking at Philadelphia as a whole, we know that 43% of income-eligible 3- and 4-year olds, or 12,000 children, do not have access to publicly funded, high-quality pre-K,” said Lisa Smith, the owner and operator of Amazing Kidz.

“Free, high-quality pre-K is a universal opportunity for society and families of all demographics to level the playing field in kindergarten readiness and developing children into lifetime lovers of learning,” Smith said.

Amazing Kidz has the capacity for 452 children and employs 53 staff members over four locations, Smith said. Smith was able to purchase three buildings at Glading – the gym, the church, and the school.

Carol Austin, the executive director of First Up, a pre-K advocacy group, said that this issue inspires agreement across party lines and across all demographic groups. Austin noted that in a poll last year of registered voters, 90% agreed that early care and education is important to help “set children on a path to healthy and productive lives. Imagine trying to get 90% of people to agree on something. Yet, they did.”

Kenney, who will leave office in January 2024 after serving two terms, regards the city’s early childhood initiative, PHLPre-K, as one of his biggest achievements.

During a tour, Kenney sat with children in two classrooms as they learned about letters and sounds and later made a joke at his own expense.

“People say I don’t smile,” he said later. “If you want to see me happy, take me to a pre-K.”

He recounted a story in which one of his own assistants went to a pre-K with him that she had attended herself as a 4-year-old. He also recalled the SEPTA bus driver, and mother of two, who told him the availability of free, high-quality pre-K allowed her to get a job.

Plus, he said, a lot of child care and early childhood centers are family businesses, and many are run by women, especially women of color.

“These children are perfect,” he remarked. “They don’t see race, they don’t see age, they are who they are. We’ve got to keep them on that path.”

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

Chelsea Clinton in Philadelphia to highlight project tying learning to everyday places

2022-10-27T22:59:17+00:00

Temple University psychology professor Kathy Hirsh-Pasek one day was pondering the fact that only 20% of children’s waking hours are spent in school.

Then she spied a bench.

“Does a bench have to just be a bench?” she asked herself. “Is it just for sitting, or can we do other things with benches?”

She called an architect friend. “We could make a bench into a scale,” she said. “Kids could be doing measurements using the bench.” Benches could add movable parts that create puzzles to promote math skills. A map in front of a bench for students could orient them to their surroundings.

She thought further. Why can’t a bus stop be a place of learning? What about a grocery store? “We could turn the entire city into learning opportunities,” she thought.

And so the playful learning movement was born. It seeks to make public settings – buses, laundromats, public parks, grocery stores, and waiting rooms in health centers and doctors’ offices — places of active learning by including displays that catalyze conversations and activities with children into literacy and knowledge.

“It’s building cognitive science into the architecture of everyday spaces,” Hirsh-Pasek told a group of about 100 people assembled Thursday to tour places in Philadelphia where the approach to learning has taken hold.

Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, participated in the half-day of activities to celebrate the city as the epicenter of the initiative, which is gaining traction around the country. She took the tour, which included a laundromat, park, and health center, all with activities and signs that invite children and their caregivers to talk about their surroundings.

“It’s a joy to feel the passion here in Philadelphia. What is happening here needs to radiate across the state and the country,” said Clinton, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, which funds the Too Small To Fail initiative focused on the needs of young children around the country, including Philadelphia.

Among the tour participants were city and foundation officials and community members who have been enlisted as “reading captains” through the city’s Read by 4th partnership, which aims to have all children reading on grade level by fourth grade. Most participants were transported around the city on two SEPTA buses, which were decorated with signs designed to promote reading and conversation.

One bus sign had a picture of a traffic light and said, “I spy with my little eye something that slows things down.” Another had pictures of meat, fictional character Eeyore, and a meteor, with the prompt to “Shout Out Sound-Outs.”

At the River Alive! Learning Trail in Tacony Creek Park, there were sculptures of different animals with grooves in them to direct the path of water. Big benches had signs asking questions like, “What shapes do you see around the river?”

Part of River Alive! in Tacony Creek park

“Learning can’t and shouldn’t happen only in a classroom,” Clinton said during a stop at the Laundry Café at 4th and Allegheny. Philadelphia is a leader in early literacy and playful learning, Clinton said, because it has the lucky convergence of researchers like Hirsh-Pasek and institutions like the William Penn Foundation, which organized the tour and invests heavily in programs directed at children from birth to age eight. (The William Penn Foundation is a funder of Chalkbeat.)

Clinton noted that city leadership also has a commitment to child welfare and early education. Deputy Mayor for Child Welfare Vanessa Garrett Harley and Commissioner of Parks and Recreation Kathryn Ott Lovell attended Thursday’s event.

“I don’t think there are many other places where all of that is true,” Clinton said of the united front from so many different sectors. Mayor Jim Kenney joined the group in the Laundry Café, reiterating his oft-held position that education is the key function of government, and lamenting that the American system – where wealthier districts have more money to spend than less affluent ones with greater challenges — doesn’t give all children what they need to thrive.

“Almost every other civilized country gets it but us,” he said, praising the effort and the involvement of philanthropic organizations like the Clinton Foundation and William Penn, as well as businessmen like Brian Holland, founder and owner of the Laundry Café.

He opened the laundromat and made it a literacy-rich environment in an effort to bring “meaningful change” to his neighborhood, said Holland, who grew up in impoverished Chester. He added, “It’s going to take a generation to see the results.”

Reading captains Diane Mills, Carlotta Stafford, Denise Henry, and LaShawn Hurst.

Philadelphia’s early literacy rate is still low – fewer than one in five fourth graders met the proficiency benchmark in 2021 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Clinton said that’s a sign that “we haven’t been doing enough ever to really invest in kids, and we haven’t been doing enough recently to recover from the learning loss after Covid.”

Hirsh-Pasek and others stressed that the key to the success of the playful learning movement is to get community buy-in. Several Read by 4th reading captains – who function as block captains for reading – say that they see changes in their neighborhoods.

“Our goal is to get students to read proficiently by fourth grade,” said Diane Mills, who coordinates reading captains in West and Southwest Philadelphia. “We tell parents they can help even if they don’t know how to read themselves. Literacy is a lifestyle, and we want to build it block by block.”

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

Mrs. Dee opened a Philly child care center mid-pandemic. It’s been hard.

2022-07-15T16:06:47+00:00

Last August, Adeola Ileyemi opened a child care center in a former barber shop building she found advertised on Craigslist.

Today, DeeGrace Child Care Center in North Philadelphia enrolls 29 young children and has a staff of seven. In one sense, it’s a success story: a fledgling small business forging ahead at a time when many child care providers have called it quits.

But it hasn’t been easy. Ileyemi, who the children call Mrs. Dee, has lost 10 employees in her first 10 months, and so far hasn’t paid herself a salary. Her husband’s marriage counseling work barely pays the family’s bills.

A month after Ileyemi started her center, Monique Jones closed the original location of her own child care business — Lovie Lee’s Stars of Tomorrow, a longstanding and highly rated child care program about a mile away from DeeGrace.

Jones didn’t exit the sector entirely. Her other child care center four blocks away remains open, and she holds out hope that one day she may reopen the shuttered site.

Ileyemi and Jones provide a snapshot of the child care sector’s difficult comeback after more than two years of COVID safety rules, staff shortages, and financial strain. Ileyemi is among 141 Philadelphia child care providers who opened their doors during the second year of the pandemic — 15 more than than did so the previous year. While that small bump is a good sign, the city still saw a net loss of providers in both years because more closed than opened.

Before the pandemic, child care closures often stemmed from a provider’s changing life circumstances. Perhaps a retirement, the sale of a business, or a new career path, said Diane Getzinger, an assistant director at the Early Learning Resource Center in Philadelphia, which is part of a network of centers across Pennsylvania that helps parents find and pay for child care and helps providers improve their quality.

But in the past two years, more closures are directly related to financial hardship. They feel a lot more personal.

“Now, we’re hearing from people who are struggling to hold on,” Getzinger said.

Jones, 43, is one of them. She shuttered the original Lovie Lee’s site for financial and logistical reasons. The decision was bittersweet.

Although Jones still operates the larger center, she started her career at the original location when she was a teenager and her mother ran the business.

“That is my history. That is the foundation of Lovie Lee,” she said. “That was like closing a chapter in my life.”

Dissatisfaction seeded a dream

Ileyemi, 39, is an upbeat mother of four originally from Nigeria. She immigrated to the United States when she was 26 and earned a culinary arts degree in Ohio. Until last August, she made good money working at a nursing home and delivering groceries through Instacart.

She decided to open DeeGrace because she was dissatisfied with the experience her daughter, now 6, and her son, now 5, had in child care and preschool. She also has 3-year-old twins.

It seemed to her that a lot of programs simply handed out coloring sheets and did little to engage children in early literacy and math activities. She wanted her center to be different.

“It’s all about learning and learning and learning.“ she said. “‘There’s so many ways you can do math with the kids, with toys, simple, simple things.”

After scouring online real estate ads, she found a space she liked on West Nedro Avenue, next to a stone church and across from an apartment complex. An unexpected $50,000 windfall from Ileyemi’s late father’s estate provided the funds she needed to cover start-up costs, including finishing the building’s basement so it could be used for a preschool classroom.

“I was so happy,” she said about receiving the money. “That’s God’s blessing.”

It took months for her to complete all the paperwork, including submitting a second application because she’d indicated incorrectly on the original one that she didn’t plan to use the building’s basement space.

On a recent Friday morning, Ileyemi accompanied a gaggle of 4-year-olds on a walk in the neighborhood. They talked about trees, plants, cars, and why so many trash cans were sitting in the street.

When the garbage truck lumbered by, the mystery was solved. A sanitation worker greeted the children, telling them, “I’m busy working now. I know you guys are working, too,” Ileyemi recalled.

Later that day, she planned to head to Walmart to stock up on supplies for the center, including tissues, paper towels, and picture frames for the 2-year-old class to paint.

“I love it,” she said. “You gotta love it to do it.”

Bouncing back and forth

When Jones closed the original location of Lovie Lee’s Stars of Tomorrow in September, it was more than shuttering a legacy. She was also closing down the kind of small, homey child care setting that appeals to many families.

“I thought it was more intimate for infants and toddlers,” she said. “It brings parents comfort when it’s a smaller program.”

But running two locations in the midst of a pandemic — and constantly covering for absent staff at each — was stressful mentally, physically, and financially, Jones said.

“Me, being one person bouncing back and forth at two locations was difficult, and that’s the moment I couldn’t do it anymore,” she said.

Getzinger, of the Early Learning Resource Center, said among child care programs that have closed recently, there’s a mix of long-established providers like Jones and some that “didn’t realize what they were getting into.”

New providers are also a mixed bag: Some are opening second and third locations, which Getzinger likes to see.

But she wonders about providers who are new to the field, especially because of what she described as lagging demand for care.

“It doesn’t feel like the population is there right now,” she said. “Parents are either making different choices or just not returning to care in the same numbers they did prior to the pandemic,” she said.

A constant headache

Like child care providers in Philadelphia and elsewhere, Ileyemi has struggled to find and keep qualified staff.

“I’ve lost good staff because they want me to pay them what I can’t pay them” she said. “You can only pay what you have.”

A child plays at DeeGrace Child Care Center.

A DeeGrace job posting on Indeed.com currently lists the pay range for a lead infant teacher as $9.21 to $15 an hour and the shift length as 12 hours. The statewide median wage for a child care worker is $10.69, according to a 2020 Stanford University report on the early childhood workforce in each state.

Both experts and providers say job-seekers in today’s labor market can make more doing unskilled labor at retail stores or fast food restaurants than working in child care.

Over the last year, some DeeGrace staff members simply stopped showing up for work. Others “call off all the time,” Ileyemi said.

Staff shortages can have troubling consequences. At least once, too few employees at DeeGrace led to a state violation because the center was out of compliance with required staff-child ratios. Such rules, which limit the number of children one staff member can oversee, are meant to keep children safe.

Ileyemi, who describes herself as someone who rarely sits down to relax, is frustrated by the constant staffing problems.

“It’s making me upset,” she said.

Still, Ileyemi hopes she can make the business work long-term: “I think things [are] going to get better.”

Today, when Jones has to cover teacher absences at Lovie Lee’s, it means she simply runs up or down a few steps, instead of across the neighborhood like she did when she ran two centers.

When she closed the original location, she absorbed the dozen children there into her larger center, converting a room used for staff meetings and training into a new classroom. Although that classroom boosted her total capacity to about 40 children, she can’t find enough staff for that number of kids. Instead, she has about 35 children during the school year and 25 during the summer.

When Jones thinks about closing the site where she got her start more than 20 years ago, she takes solace in the fact that COVID hobbled many providers.

It helps “me not feel I failed at something,” she said. “That’s just where the world is with this pandemic.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Two Philly fathers aim to hook students on reading early

2022-06-17T20:25:13+00:00

Brent Johnstone and Akeiff Staples met at Temple University, where they were both on the football team. Each went on to a career in social work, where they would cross paths from time to time. But as they put it, something else was “meant to be.”

Five years ago, the two started a Philadelphia program to help fathers returning from prison re-engage with their kids through reading. They had seen firsthand how a lack of male role models, combined with frustration stemming from an inability to read, could lead to poverty, violence, substance abuse, and worse.

“You can almost guarantee a positive impact in a child’s life by just reading to your child,” Johnstone told Chalkbeat. “And that’s only at an average of 20 minutes a night.”

Johnstone and Staples decided “to attack early literacy through the vision of fathers engaging” with their kids, Johnstone said. They committed to work full-time for their new venture, FathersRead365, even though they had no funding commitments at the time.

Before long, the project expanded. Staples and Johnstone began holding fun, high-energy reading events for kids in daycare centers, inviting adults — particularly fathers — to join in. FathersRead365 is now in about 150 centers and has received almost $400,000 in funding to date. It’s also given away 100,000 books to Philadelphia schoolchildren.

“One of the main reasons we do this is we just don’t feel like people realize how important children not knowing how to read past a third-grade reading level is, and how that impacts crime and violence,” Johnstone said. A study found that just 33% of Philadelphia third graders were proficient in reading, he noted.

That’s important because “no one’s teaching your kid to read after third grade,” he said. So if children aren’t reading on grade level by then, “there’s a great chance they won’t be on level the rest of their lives.”

When the pandemic hit and in-person events were not an option, the team decided to focus on book distribution. It discovered major discrepancies in the availability of reading materials among kids in different neighborhoods, Johnstone said.

Through their FathersRead365 initiative, Akeiff Staples, left, and Brent Johnstone drive home the importance of reading and parents being involved in their child’s schoolwork.

He pointed to a study from 2001 that found there were about 300 children for every book available in a high-poverty section of Philadelphia, while each child in a middle-class neighborhood had access to about 13 age-appropriate books.

That figure gave the two the idea of putting 13 books in a bookbag and distributing the bundles to kids at their schools. FathersRead365 partnered with 14 city schools and the William Penn Foundation to put together and distribute the parcels. This past school year, they gave 13 books and a bookbag to each of roughly 1,000 students.

“When the pandemic set in, our whole model kind of shut down, because we’re interactive, in your face, inviting a ton of people to engage in these activities,” Johnstone said. “It made us pivot, and it’s probably one of the best things that could have happened to us.”

They have also raised money for a “Book Bus” that will travel to schools and distribute books, he said.

A visit from FathersRead365 helped jump-start the “Lions Roar for Reading” program at T.M. Peirce Elementary School, said Assistant Principal Austin Wallace Jr. “Their program fit perfectly with what I was trying to bring to our school in terms of having male representation in the classrooms to expose students to literature,” he told Chalkbeat.

“Young males aren’t exposed to male voices reading to them, or male figures in front of them reading,” Wallace continued. “We wanted to expose the young men to that,” particularly in the lower grades when “foundational skills are solidified,” he said.

Wallace had drafted every male staff member working at Peirce, from principal to custodian, to spend 10 to 15 minutes each Friday reading to a class within the pre-K-3 range. When Staples and Johnstone came in as part of that effort, “that was pretty much what solidified the program as a recurring thing,” Wallace said.

“I look forward to working with FathersRead for as long as they’re willing to work with me,” said Wallace, who in the fall will be principal of Delaplaine McDaniel, a K-8 school, in South Philadelphia.

Johnstone and Staples have plans to expand, though it takes work. They’re building their YouTube channel so kids can remain engaged, and hope to be able to board the “Book Bus” and distribute those gifts of 13 books and a bookbag around the country.

And the art of fundraising, Staples said, is something they’re learning about constantly.

“When it comes to fundraising for Black-led nonprofit organizations, it can be tough,” he said. “You have to run through hoops.”

Staples and Johnstone connected with their group’s first funder, the William Penn Foundation, at a 2018 literacy event. “Akeiff and I were really into our program, with absolutely no funding in sight. We just went up there and were ourselves and had a heck of a time,” Johnstone recalled. A William Penn program officer reached out to them after the event, and “from there, the relationship has grown,” Johnstone said.

Philadelphia School Board member Reginald Streater said efforts like FathersRead365 are much appreciated.

“As we know, often the first teacher or information leader is a child’s parent,” Streater told Chalkbeat. “Parents are already partners,” he said, but “some parents just don’t know how to be the partners that the school district needs.”

Chalkbeat Philadelphia Bureau Chief Johann Calhoun contributed reporting.

After COVID slowdown, Philly’s free preschool program plans modest expansion

2022-06-03T11:00:00+00:00

Philadelphia’s free preschool program doesn’t offer the 6,500 seats city leaders envisioned when it launched more than five years ago, but a modest expansion planned for the coming school year could bring the number to 4,300.

Slowed initially by litigation over the sugary beverage tax that funds the PHLpreK program, the pandemic also took a toll. Revenues from the beverage tax declined about 15% in the first two years of the pandemic, and stalled a 1,700-seat expansion. This school year, the city did not fill all 4,000 seats funded through the program.

Sean Perkins, Philadelphia’s chief of early childhood education, said city officials try to be strategic in deciding which parts of the city to put PHLpreK seats in, but supply and demand don’t always align.

“We have more families who have completed applications than there are seats … but we still have vacancies, too,” he said.

Mayor Jim Kenney’s proposed budget for the coming year includes about $3.9 million in additional PHLpreK funding, which will help pay for 300 new seats. The City Council is expected to approve that expansion when it votes on the upcoming budget later this month.

Currently, the city spends about $41 million a year on the preschool program. Increasingly, cities and states are offering tuition-free preschool as a way to prepare children for kindergarten and provide key learning experiences during a critical period of development.

PHLpreK, which began in 2017, provides 5.5 hours a day of free preschool to 3- and 4-year-olds in Philadelphia. Although PHLpreK serves children regardless of family income, about 70% come from lower-income families, Perkins said.

Ebony Baggett, who owns the Bright Minds, Bright Beginnings Early Learning Center, is hoping to add six additional PHLpreK slots for the next school year. The 26 slots she has now — some at her Cobbs Creek center and some at her Strawberry Mansion site — always fill up fast.

Compared to Pre-K Counts, the state-funded preschool program for low-income families, she said the city’s program is easier for families because there’s no income verification requirement — just a residency requirement.

“It’s easier for the parents and they’re more likely to enroll,” she said.

Adelaida Gutierrez, a mother of four who works as a home health aide, has a 5-year-old daughter who’s just finishing two years in PHLpreK at Bright Minds, and a 3-year-old daughter, who will start in the fall.

“With the pre-K being free, it is helpful,” she said. “How would I be able to afford full-time child care?”

Gutierrez’s 5-year-old daughter Skyliss has struggled at times with preschool, crying at drop-off and mostly preferring to play alone. Guiterrez suspects she may be on the autism spectrum like her older brother, and has an appointment to have Skyliss evaluated in August.

But Gutierrez has also seen signs of progress for Skyliss at Bright Minds. Skyliss has learned to write her name, doesn’t “baby talk” as much as she used to, and cries less often since she began carrying a photo of her parents to preschool.

Finding solutions for initiative’s roadblocks

City officials say PHLpreK’s biggest challenge is the chronic shortage of qualified preschool staff. Part of the problem is the industry’s low pay, but the job also entails long hours and, at times, stressful conditions.

“Philadelphians have an increased level of poverty and have experienced various traumas … and that costs a lot and it actually takes a lot of energy and training for the teachers and the support staff,” Perkins said.

Naimah Humpert, a preschool teacher at Bright Minds, Bright Beginnings, works with children on a coloring sheet.

To help address such challenges, the city last year launched the SPARK Quality Support Center, an effort that provides free training, coaching, and support to PHLpreK providers. While most PHLpreK providers already have one of the top two ratings in the state’s four-star quality rating system, SPARK staff also work with lower-rated providers to help them improve.

“All of the work that they do with providers is 100% catered to what the provider needs,” said PHLpreK Director Denise Bermudez. “It’s an amazing opportunity for them.”

Jessica Munoz works at Bright Minds and sends her 5-year-old son Damir there through PHLpreK. Damir, who enjoys dancing, playing with Transformers, and watching Paw Patrol, suffers from anxiety. But Munoz said he’s learned a lot during his two years in the program, including how to identify his name, letters, and numbers.

In the fall, he’ll head to kindergarten at a charter school in the Juniata section of lower Northeast Philadelphia. Although PHLpreK doesn’t run in the summer, Damir will get a little more time at Bright Minds if Munoz, who earns $15 an hour, is granted child care subsidies to cover summer tuition there.

Baggett wishes the city’s preschool program ran year-round so all participants would have a safe place to go in the summer.

“Ten months is a huge challenge,” she said. “Our program is in a high-need area so … a lot of times there’s violence happening outside our four walls. As a provider, it gives me anxiety.”

Baggett said a full-year schedule would also help financially and prevent reduced staff hours in the summer.

But it’s not clear if PHLpreK will ever grow to a full-year program, or when it will reach the mayor’s goal of serving 5,500 children annually — a number revised down from the original 6,500 estimate.

While revenues from Philadelphia’s sweetened beverage tax have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels — the tax brought in about $77 million this year — city officials estimate proceeds from the tax will peak at $79 million in 2024 and then fall back to about $77 million by 2027.

City officials say such a decline wouldn’t negatively affect the program.

“Overall, these fluctuations are minimal and will not hinder the administration’s plans to expand PHLpreK nor the other core programs funded by the tax,” city spokesman Mike Dunn said in an email.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Prekindergarten enrollment tumbles in Pennsylvania

2022-04-26T22:55:26+00:00

The pandemic led to a sharp decline in Pennsylvania’s prekindergarten enrollment, with more than 8,000 fewer children participating in 2020-21 compared to 2019-20 in programs for three- and four-year olds, a new report shows.

The drop from approximately 48,750 children to 40,560 amounts to a decline of nearly 17%, raising concerns that fewer children will be able to reach the goal of reading proficiently by the end of grade three – a crucial benchmark for future literacy and the likelihood of graduating from high school with the skills necessary for college and career.

“That’s a pretty big decline,” said Steven Barnett, director and founder of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), which issued the report Tuesday. Some other states, he said, were down by only 5%.

Barnett said preliminary surveys show that the numbers have rebounded some this year, “but are not back to pre-pandemic levels yet.”

This dip has happened despite efforts by the state as well as the federal government to underwrite programs so they could weather the pandemic’s impact on enrollment. For instance, last year the state funded its biggest prekindergarten program, Pre-K Counts, based on pre-pandemic numbers, and not the actual number of students enrolled.

Pennsylvania and other states “did a pretty good job of stepping up,” said Barnett.

Even so, Pennsylvania’s overall funding for pre-kindergarten programs between 2020 and 2021 declined by about $22 million to $318 million, as smaller state-supported programs, including school-based pre-K and Head Start, adjusted for the lower enrollments.

In 2020-2021, state-funded Pennsylvania pre-K programs served 8% of all three-year olds and 19% of four-year-olds, Barnett said. The national average was 5% of three-year-olds and 29% of four-year-olds.

“Pennsylvania still has a long way to go,” he said.

In his budget for fiscal 2023, Gov. Tom Wolf has proposed a $70 million increase in early childhood spending, including $60 million more for Pre-K Counts. But Barnett said in order to serve all the three- and four-year-olds eligible for Pre-K Counts – all those living under 200% of the federal poverty threshold – the state would have to spend at least $500 million more next year.

“That would cost about a billion dollars,” Barnett said. “It means the state almost needs to triple its spending.”

He said that half of Pennsylvania’s children under 5 fall below the federal poverty threshold, which is now $26,500 for a family of four. Barnett pointed out that neighboring New Jersey spends $815 million on pre-K, even though Pennsylvania is a bigger state in terms of population.

Barnett noted that all of Pennsylvania’s pre-K population could be served if President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better budget plan were enacted. Biden has proposed sending $100 billion to states over three years to help create universal pre-K across the country. Among other things, Biden’s plan would allow pre-K programs to raise standards and wages for their teachers. But for months, lawmakers have failed to reach a breakthrough in negotiations over Build Back Better.

Carol Austin, executive director of First Up, a southeast Pennsylvania lobbying group for early education, said that in the Philadelphia region, enrollment has declined and programs are still having a hard time staffing child care centers.

At the state level, “What we’re fighting for is an increase in base [pay] rates to hire better qualified teachers,” she said. In terms of supply and demand, she said, “We’re in a very challenging time right now. … Maybe in September, we’ll see [an upswing] in preschool again as COVID becomes the new normal. It’s all hard to predict.”

Right now, she said, many low-income families are keeping their children home. “There’s a lot of fear”of the virus and of vaccinations or lack of them for the youngest children, Austin said. Many families also have moved their schedules around so their need for child care is reduced, she added.

She said she is advocating for the state to do more messaging, through public service announcements and publicity campaigns, to stress the importance of preschool as part of a child’s education, and not simply child care.

Early education “is important for getting a child ready for kindergarten so they can move through a process of reading by fourth grade,” she said.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in the city. She is a former president of the Education Writers Association. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Black children hurt by structure of Pa. preschool programs, study says

2022-04-19T15:34:12+00:00

Pre-pandemic, Black children in Pennsylvania had less access to high-quality preschool than white children, according to a new report.

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that this disparity was due primarily to the way the state funds its two main preschool programs, Child Care Works and Pre-K Counts, and the different standards policymakers have set for them. As overall enrollment in the program grew from 2014 to 2019, Black children’s enrollment in Pre-K Counts declined slightly, before the pandemic put unprecedented stress on early childhood education.

Child Care Works is the state’s subsidized child care program, while Pre-K Counts is its largest pre-kindergarten program. Together they served over 53,000 children as of 2019, with roughly 36,700 in Child Care Works, and 17,000 in Pre-K Counts.

Child Care Works is targeted toward low-income working families, those making under 200% of the federal poverty line, which was just above $25,000 for a family of four in 2019. Pre-K Counts has higher income eligibility – 300% of poverty – and does not require a parent to be working. Child Care Works is year-round, while Pre-K Counts tracks the academic year of 180 days.

The state pays more per child for Pre-K Counts, and overall funding for that program has nearly doubled between 2014 and 2019, while Child Care Works funding dropped by about 2%. While Pre-K Counts provides a standard amount of funding per child, funding for Child Care Works varies. In addition, the state rewards higher quality providers in Child Care Works with more money as an incentive to improve, she said.

More white children proportionally are enrolled in Pre-K Counts, which has more rigorous standards for teachers and overall programs, while more Black children are in Child Care Works, where standards exist but aren’t as stringent.

In both programs, white children are more likely to be in classrooms that have earned four stars – the highest level – on the state’s rating system, the report found. Besides teacher qualifications, these ratings take into account factors including space conditions, outreach to families, financial stability, and whether a center offers professional development for staff.

While 50.2% of white Pre-K Counts participants were enrolled with a four-star provider in 2019, for example, only 38.1% of Black participants were.

On the state’s four-star rating system, Pre-K Counts must earn a rating of three or four, while Child Care Works can include one and two.

“The disparities for Black children were stunning in terms of the lack of access to the providers that were going to be getting more support from the state of Pennsylvania,” said Erica Frankenberg, a Penn State professor of education and one of the report’s authors, in an interview.

The report recommends that “any policy aimed at improving quality, such as funding for higher teacher wages, should be applied to all providers serving young children of any age, not just those who teach in designated pre-k programs.”

The study did not include 2020 and 2021 because child care was disrupted for so many different reasons – fear of the virus, no vaccine availability for children under 5, more parents working from home – due to the pandemic. The researchers have a grant to do a follow-up study on what happened during those years.

“We are looking at that, that study is to come. It’s complicated,” said Frankenberg, who is director of Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights.

The two programs are regarded differently by policymakers, she said, which partly accounts for the differences in funding and quality.

Pre-K Counts “is conceived of as preschool to benefit children, academically and socially, and Child Care Works is thought of as child care,” Frankenberg said. “One of the eligibility criteria is to have a parent who is working or is in an undergraduate program. It’s more about preserving the economic contribution of the parents rather than the social and academic enrichment of the child. So there are two different constructions and funding.”

The report recommends that the state “invest in broader policies that unify child care and pre-K.”

Even though enrollment in Pre-K Counts has been steadily growing, the number and percentage of Black students has dropped in recent years.

While white enrollment in Pre-K Counts grew by 53% and Latinx enrollment by 66% between 2014 and 2019, “the number of Black children participating … actually dropped by nearly 2%,” the report said. And overall enrollment growth in Pre-K Counts over those five years was 37%, compared to a slight decline in Child Care Works enrollment.

The report recommends finding a way to provide incentives for high-quality providers to locate in underserved areas, perhaps through grants. Frankenberg also said that both programs should provide more days and hours of care.

Early childhood education in Pennsylvania is a mix of programs and funding streams – state, federal and local – with varying requirements. In addition to these two state-funded programs, there is the federal Head Start program, and in Philadelphia, PHLPre-K, all with their own requirements. This can all be confusing for parents, Frankenberg said.

While Frankenberg does not support making early childhood options in the state “one size fits all,” she said: “We need to unify these funding streams.”

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

Philadelphia pushes kindergarten registration for the coming school year

2022-02-24T20:41:40+00:00

Luke Julien and Gael Carmona-Meneses know exactly what kindergarten is for.

“Literacy, reading, even science, stuff like that,” Luke said. “I know a lot about it.”

Gael added another cool activity: “I like to paint right now.”

The two 5-year-olds at Kirkbride Elementary School in Queen Village on Thursday helped district leaders launch a key moment in the school calendar: the first day of kindergarten registration.

Kindergarten is not mandatory in Pennsylvania, so some families think it is not important. Not so, said Superintendent William Hite and Deputy Chief for Early Education Diane Castelbuono. Kindergarten “puts students on the path to long-term success,” she said.

The district’s registration initiative is called “Thrive at Five.”

“I know next fall seems like a long time away,” said Castelbuono. But the district would like families to register by the end of May, although it will not turn students away after that – although, because it is not mandatory, some schools may not have room. The early deadline is for planning purposes and because “it helps families make the psychological transition and spend the summer thinking about kindergarten readiness” through reading and other activities, Castelbuono said. All children who will be 5 years old by Sept. 1 are eligible.

Kindergarten registration plummeted during the 2020-2021 school year, which was mostly virtual, and it has been slow to rebound. Castelbuono said that for this year it is back up to about 90% of eligible children – close to the pre-pandemic norm.

Philadelphia was the first district in the state to offer universal full-day kindergarten. Many suburban and rural districts continue to just offer half-day programs.

But with more research showing the importance of early childhood education, that is starting to change. (Although there is no organized movement in Harrisburg to make it mandatory and have the state help districts pay for it.)

Luke is the son of Kirkbride Principal Rebecca Julien, who said she was proud to lead a school that her own child attends. Kirkbride, in Queen Village, is a “neighborhood school with resources and a diversity of learners,” she said, who speak many languages and come from many different cultures. This helps students “build empathy at a young age. Kindergarten is one of the most effective ways to help children understand the academic and social lessons that will help them become contributing members of society.”

Gael’s mom Leticia Meneses, who spoke in Spanish through an interpreter, said her son “has made new friends and is exploring a new world.” The teachers help students feel confident they can do homework by themselves. “Kindergarten is a good option for children…a first step for their future,” she said.

Parents can register their children online or in person at their neighborhood school. If they are not certain which catchment they are in, they can find their school on the district’s website. Instructions are in several languages.

The district will also be having a kindergarten registration day on March 1, and there is also a mobile truck making the rounds to city neighborhoods that has a QR code on its side that opens the registration website.

Luke and Gael – who are members of the graduating class of 2034 – were asked if there was anything they would tell students who would be entering kindergarten in September.

“Don’t be shy, you have to be nice to people,” Luke said. Make sure “you don’t hurt people,” said Gael.

Philadelphia elementary adjusts to a new normal in its second COVID winter

2022-02-24T17:14:13+00:00

Nearly two years into the pandemic, COVID often blends into the background at Cayuga Elementary School in North Philadelphia. In Ruth Llorens’ kindergarten classroom, 20 kids chatter about pets and birthdays, read books like “Sneezy the Snowman,” and follow along when she reviews how to write a lower-case Z.

Other times, COVID is painfully obvious. In January, a little boy told Llorens he missed his uncle, who’d died from the virus over winter break.

“I just kind of listened to him more than anything else,” she said. “Really, he just wanted to talk about his uncle and what they used to do.”

Such is the year so far. Routine classroom moments are punctuated by reminders of COVID’s fallout, ranging from sadness and fatigue to the recognition that some students missed out on lots of learning over the past two years. That includes academics, of course, but also classroom routines. Principal Jason Carrion said after many months of sitting face-forward in carefully spaced rows, students are relearning the art of sitting together in pods and working in groups.

While kindergarteners and older elementary students at Cayuga have been hitting academic milestones, first- and second-graders are struggling from their lack of exposure to classroom routines, norms, and face-to-face interaction.

Cayuga serves 361 students, about three-quarters of them Latino, in a three-story brown brick building in the Hunting Park neighborhood. All students are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals.

Carrion, a former high school math teacher who leads a staff of more than 60, said Cayuga’s teachers have been operating at a “heightened level,” this year, whether coping with pandemic stress or managing the trauma that students bring into the classroom.

”Children have lost loved ones and family members. It’s been not only COVID but it’s been gun violence,” he said. “With all that, teachers come in and give their all.”

Like schools nationwide, Cayuga has struggled to find subs to cover staff absences this year. Carrion often leads classrooms for half an hour here or 45 minutes there, or helps out in the cafeteria. Some students call him Mr. C. or Mr. Principal. A few think he’s the school counselor.

Once this year, Carrion led a first grade class all day.

“I was exhausted at the end of the day, but it was great,” he said. “We have to do it for the team.”

Principal Jason Carrion has stepped into many different roles due to staff shortages, covering classes or helping in the cafeteria.

Carrion said kindergarteners are meeting key academic targets this year, and generally upper elementary students are, too. But many first- and second-graders are struggling. They didn’t get enough exposure to foundational skills or classroom norms last year during virtual and hybrid learning, he said.

Glynnis Gradwell, a retired classroom teacher who works with small groups of struggling second and third grade readers and helps with one kindergarten class, said, missing out on face-to-face learning in kindergarten and first grade set kids back.

“Even if they had the online academics, they did not have that piece, that we’re getting along, we’re cooperating, we’re listening, we’re a group,” she said.

There were other kinds of gaps.

“Teachers couldn’t reach through the screen and show them how to hold a pencil,” she said.

Retired teacher Glynnis Gradwell works with groups of struggling second and third grade students at the school, who missed out on in-person learning when they were in kindergarten and first grade.

But Gradwell, whose groups of four allow her to give children lots of personal attention and “get as many books in their hands as possible,” has seen bright spots, too.

During one reading group as the students tackled a fourth story, a boy exclaimed, “Oh, this is fun,” she recalled. “Like he was suddenly surprised it was fun.”

Another time, a student noticed a boy’s emotional struggle before she did and spoke up for him. Gradwell wanted the boy to pull his hood down so he’d be sure to hear the lesson, but he stubbornly refused. Eventually, the classmate explained: “He got a new haircut and he doesn’t want anyone to comment.”

Gradwell waited two weeks before returning in-person to Cayuga in January.

“I promised my husband, who’s older, and we also have a disabled son, that I would not bring COVID back,” she said. “But I haven’t and I feel very safe here.”

Llorens said other than a districtwide week of virtual learning at the beginning of January, her kindergarten class has been in-person this winter and most students are exactly where they should be at this point in the year. Since the holiday break, she’s seen them become more adept at working in pairs, whereas previously they defaulted to working individually.

Teacher Ruth Llorens has seen improvement in her students’ ability to work in pairs, and most of her students are where they should be at this point in the school year.

“Sometimes you’ve got to explain that trying to help somebody is not doing the work for them,” she said, adding that it’s nice to see them helping each other complete a task.

Llorens, who de-stresses after a long day by exercising or playing the video game Halo, said for many of her students, the pandemic has been part of life since they can remember and is now mostly “background noise.”

“I might hear every now and then, someone is sick in a house and I [say] ‘I’m sorry, I hope they feel better,’ and then they’re off on another topic,” she said.
Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat, covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

In his final budget, Wolf proposes huge hike in education spending, including for early childhood

2022-02-08T23:52:51+00:00

In his final budget address, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf on Tuesday proposed a “generational” investment in state K-12 schools with what would be an historic 21% or $1.8 billion increase in education funding.

“Refusing to fund education equitably does not save us money,” said Wolf, who is finishing his second and last four-year term. “It just means we wind up spending more on social services, remedial programs, even prisons. And that calculation doesn’t even take into account the opportunity costs of failing to invest in our kids: the skills our workforce doesn’t develop, the products and services that never become reality, the business growth and tax revenues that vanish.”

The budget still must go through the Republican-dominated legislature, and early reaction has been negative, calling it unrealistic and overreaching.

“For the eighth straight year, it falls on the Legislature to rein in calls to dramatically increase state spending,” said House Speaker Bryan Cutler, a Republican from Lancaster.

Wolf laid out a total state budget plan with spending of $43.7 billion, up from $41 billion this year. He said that the state could afford such an increase without raising the state income or sales taxes. The state is projected to end this fiscal year with a $12 billion surplus, although Wolf also is projecting a 2% decrease in revenue collection this year.

His proposal includes a $70 million increase in early childhood education funding – $60 million into Pre-K Counts, which his office said would allow 2,300 additional children to attend preschool. The plan would put another $10 million into the Head Start Supplemental Assistance Program, but that mostly would cover rising costs.

Wolf’s budget also would standardize tuition at cyber charter schools at $9,800 per student, which he said would save districts $199 million. Now, each district pays a different amount per student in charter school tuition based on a complicated formula dependent on its own level of spending; by moving to this one figure, most districts would pay less.

It would also change the reimbursements for special education students at charter schools to conform more closely to their actual needs and the cost of educating them. Now, the formula sets each district’s special education fees for charters at one level – often three times the amount for a regular education student – regardless of the severity of the student’s disability. He said that change would save districts $174 million.

Philadelphia school officials said that the proposal, if adopted, would mean $410 million in new money for the district, in addition to bringing $145 million in savings due to the charter funding reforms.

In an emailed statement, Superintendent William Hite called Wolf’s proposal “bold” and said that “new, recurring funding paired with much-needed charter school funding reforms will significantly improve the District’s long-term financial outlook, allowing us to make new investments our students and schools deserve.”

Pennsylvania ranks 47th among the states in the percentage of K-12 education dollars that comes from the state as opposed to local districts, resulting in some of the widest spending gaps between rich and poor districts in the country.

In the past, Wolf has sought historic increases in education spending in an effort to close that gap, and has urged that the entire basic education subsidy money be funneled through a fair funding formula adopted by the legislature in 2016. In distributing funds to districts, that formula assesses need by assigning weights to students based on such factors as poverty and English language status, as well as looking at the concentration of poverty and a district’s wealth, taxing capacity, and tax effort.

But he was repeatedly stymied by the Republican-led legislature, which approved smaller increases than he sought and chose to allocate only new dollars through the formula and guarantee that no district, even those losing students, would receive less money than they got the year before.

While proposing the historic $1.25 billion increase in basic education aid, the largest single conduit of state money to districts, Wolf did not repeat his call for allocating all of it through the fair funding formula since that has been a non-starter with the legislature. In fiscal year 2021-22, basic education aid to the state’s 500 districts is about $7.1 billion.

But last year, in an effort to target more funds to the poorest districts, the legislature did approve a budget that included $100 million in so-called “level up” funding for the 100 poorest districts. For the 2022-23 school year, Wolf is proposing that $300 million be put in the “level up” pot.

“We can afford to invest a whole lot more in the fair funding formula without raising one penny in state taxes,” Wolf said in his budget address. “And we can afford to do it without asking any school district…to sacrifice one penny in state funding.”

Wolf also wants to improve college affordability by putting $200 million more into the Nelly Bly Scholarship funds to help students attend community colleges and schools in the state university system. Pennsylvania currently ranks among the bottom states in its overall support of higher education.

Lessons in the laundromat: Philly initiative promotes literacy in everyday spaces

2022-02-08T19:31:49+00:00

On a recent cold Saturday afternoon, Iris Hernandez and Carmen Colon were helping six Morales children through the letters, sounds, and words in the book “DJ’s Busy Day” about a bunny and his fun-filled adventures in ordinary places – the grocery store, on the bus, in his home.

“This is fun,” said Jeremiah Morales, 8, as he paged through the book, which is in both English and Spanish.

The group was ensconced in a cozy reading nook, with round yellow tables, child-sized chairs, and a fireplace, surrounded by colorful pictures and alphabet posters on the wall.

And washing machines. And dryers.

They were in a laundromat.

Hernandez and Colon are reading captains working with Global Citizen, which has been leading a community mobilization in partnership with the Philadelphia Public Library’s Read by 4th initiative, a citywide drive to help all children read proficiently by the end of third grade. Some research shows that early reading proficiency is linked to high school graduation.

The city still has a long way to go toward its goal. Before the pandemic, standardized tests showed that only about a third of children in district schools read at grade level by fourth grade.

The goal of Read by 4th is to help children reach reading proficiency by the end of third grade.

And the Laundry Cafe, at 4th St. and Allegheny Ave. in Kensington, one of four in Philadelphia owned by entrepreneur Brian Holland, has been enlisted in a nationwide effort to promote early literacy by harnessing the time that families, especially those in low-income neighborhoods, spend on workaday tasks.

Jenny Bogoni, the executive director of Read by 4th, said that she fears the already low rate of fourth graders reading at grade level has declined from its peak of 41% before the pandemic.

“We assume that the number has fallen,” she said. “I think the story here is that we are trying to physically transform everyday spaces in Philadelphia and families’ experience of raising a reader. To do that requires more than just changing teaching in the classroom, although that is critical. It’s doing things like this.”

Brian Holland has worked to make his laundromats as welcoming as possible for families.

Holland is from Chester, one of Pennsylvania’s poorest cities. He opened his laundromats after a long, successful career in the pharmaceutical industry.

For his “second act,” as he put it, he was looking for an interesting business opportunity that had the potential to have an impact on families in the kind of hardscrabble neighborhood that he grew up in.

And he landed on laundry. For many families, it is a weekly if not daily routine, with hours spent washing and drying their clothes in these community mainstays. Often, they bring their children with them, who either help out or must otherwise keep themselves occupied.

From the start, Holland worked to make the laundromat as welcoming as possible, with massage chairs and other amenities. He would give away diapers and men’s clothing to people in need, and occasionally hold seminars that helped people enroll in insurance programs.

He also put out a few children’s books, and he noticed that sometimes they would disappear. “I thought that was a good thing,” he said, “that the children wanted the books.”

He understood the impulse, and he wanted to do more. “I remember growing up, I had pride in my first book, it was mine,” he said. “The younger the better, the earlier you can get kids’ attention, the better off they are.”

Then, through the Coin Laundry Association, a nationwide industry group, he became aware of Too Small To Fail, an initiative of the Clinton Foundation that is focused on the well-being of young children.

The program was launched in 2015 with the realization that “more than half the kids in the country are unprepared for kindergarten, are lagging behind in critical language and literacy skills needed for school and for life,” said Jane Park, the director of Too Small To Fail.

At the same time, she said, since there were already a lot of organizations focused on early literacy by working with educators, the foundation looked for “a unique role we can play in supporting families.”

Children spend 80% of their waking hours outside school environments, so we “talked to parents, partners and others about the places they are going on a daily basis,” Park said. “The mission is to surround families with learning opportunities in the everyday places they go together.”

With children spending the majority of their time outside of school environments, reimagining spaces like the Laundry Cafe provide an extra learning space for children.

The laundromat was one. With willing participants like Holland, they went about thinking “how we could reimagine the space.”

They found out that, among other things, the typical laundromat had a lot of “no” signs around, a turnoff for children, she said.

“We talked to owners, we asked what their challenges are when it comes to kids and families in the stores,” said Park. They talked about “kids running around, slipping and falling, playing with laundry carts.”

So they created a “Family Read, Play & Learn” space with comfortable chairs and couches, tables, a box of manipulatives, and many books. The publisher Scholastic donated books, and KABOOM, a national organization concerned with playspace inequity, provides manipulatives and other materials and helped with design.

They festooned walls with posters in English and Spanish. “Let’s Use Our Imagination!” proclaims one poster that has pictures of animals in their natural habitats. Multicolored letters and numbers cover the sides of some washing machines, and a hopscotch grid is in one aisle. Small footprints on the floor urge children to explore.

The William Penn Foundation, which invests heavily in early literacy, helps underwrite the program. (William Penn is a funder of Chalkbeat.)

Reading captain Iris Hernandez helps 5-year-old Avianna read “DJ’s Busy Day”.

“We underestimate the power and potential of informal learning spaces, especially in environments where school systems have trouble getting resources,” Holland said.

In addition to creating a congenial space that encourages reading and other learning activities, once or twice a month, they also bring in reading captains from the citywide Read by 4th campaign, like Hernandez and Colon, for more formal activities.

Kyshia Roberto and Tyrece Morales are the parents of Jeremiah and his siblings, who range in age from 5-year-old twins to 12 years old.

“This is great for the kids,” said Roberto, who comes to the laundromat every week.

Margarita Davila was there with her daughter Aishah, 7, who was also sitting in the reading nook with her own book.

“This is pretty cool,” she said of the idea that her daughter, who attends Esperanza Cyber Charter School, could be encouraged to read even at the laundromat. “I never knew they had this.”

Family members and reading captains speak at a Read by 4th event at the Laundry Cafe.

Colon, who works as a paraprofessional in several schools in the district, said she became a reading captain because she came to recognize the urgency of getting children to read early. “I’m a community person,” she said. “I could see how children became more engaged because of reading.”

Hernandez, who works with Philadelphia Virtual Academy, the district’s cyber school, agreed. She has four children who either graduated from or currently attend schools in the city. “It is so important for parents to be involved and do volunteer work,” she said.

Holland said he would host these events several times a week if families would come.

“You do as much as you can,” he said. “If you can help one kid in 10, you can change the slope of their lives. The goal is to have impact.”

Importance of pre-K takes center stage at Pennsylvania fair funding trial

2021-12-15T00:20:48+00:00

Testimony in Pennsylvania’s landmark school funding trial turned to the effect of high-quality preschool as advocates descended on Harrisburg to press their case that the Commonwealth’s current system for allocating and distributing state education aid to districts perpetuates inequity and harms its neediest students.

“We are here to say we’ve heard enough. It is time to fund our schools,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of the Philadelphia-based Children First, formerly Public Citizens for Children and Youth. The rally drew more than 100 people to the Capitol steps Tuesday. The trial, which started more than a month ago, has been punctuated by several demonstrations, as organizations like Education Voters PA and Children First draw attention to the huge stakes they attach to the outcome.

“This court case is our Brown v. Board,” said Cooper, referring to the historic 1954 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws mandating racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. “It’s about whether every child in this state gets an equal and equitable education.”

Most states fund schools primarily through local property taxes, which gives an advantage to richer districts. State dollars, and some federal aid through programs like Title I, which provides funding for low-income students, are meant to compensate for inequities. But these dollars rarely make up all the difference.

In Pennsylvania, the per-pupil gaps in spending among the richest and poorest districts, some of which abut each other, are among the widest in the country. And a study commissioned by the legislature showed that the state needs to invest $4.6 billion more to assure that each district has enough money to provide an adequate education to all its students, based on their needs.

This case is the latest of several seeking funding reform in Pennsylvania filed over the last 30 years and the first to go to trial. Six school districts, three families and two civil rights groups sued the state in 2014, arguing that the state’s school funding — both the amount it allocates and the way it is distributed — violates the state’s constitutional mandate to maintain a “thorough and efficient system” of education, as well as violating students’ equal protection rights.

The trial, before Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Jubelirer, is expected to last 8 to ten weeks.

In 2017, the state Supreme Court reversed prior rulings that school funding was a matter for legislative policymaking, not judicial review, and allowed it to go to trial.

Plaintiffs have so far called witnesses from three of the suing districts, Panther Valley, Shenandoah Valley, and Greater Johnstown. They all said that their students need more academic support than they can afford to provide and described poor building conditions, such as moldy walls and ceilings.

Panther Valley Superintendent David McAndrew said his elementary school has only one toilet for 75 students; a few days later, Johnstown first grade teacher Stephanie Kobal said that in one wing of her school, there is one toilet per 125 students.

Demonstrators, whom organizers said came from 24 school districts in 13 counties, brought a toilet to the protest to dramatize that testimony.

As the demonstrators gathered on the Capitol steps, lawyers representing Republican legislative leaders cross-examined Steven Barnett, an economist who is the founder and co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, based at Rutgers University.

Barnett was called to the stand by the plaintiffs to underscore the importance of preschool to child development and school readiness. He presented testimony that “high-quality” preschool can produce lasting academic benefits for students, especially those who have grown up in poverty.

During the trial last week, Johnstown Superintendent Amy Arcurio had said that her district is unable to afford pre-K for all of its students, although 70% of them enter kindergarten without some basic skills. By first grade, 80% need intensive intervention, she said, which the district also cannot afford.

In their cross examination of witnesses, attorneys for Republican legislative leaders have sought to highlight any extra programs the districts have or any fund balance they might show at the end of their budget year as evidence that they don’t need additional money.

They also argued that the “thorough and efficient” standard in the Constitution is minimal; for instance, they tried to limit testimony about preschool as “irrelevant” to the case.

In his testimony, Barnett highlighted student gains in 24 of the poorest New Jersey school districts in which its state Supreme Court, as part of a similar lawsuit, ordered the establishment of preschool. One of the benefits includes helping students with social and emotional skills, such as resilience, as well as academics, Barnett said.

Barnett said during his testimony that in some of these studies, it was shown that the gains afforded by preschool are sometimes not sustained over time if students’ subsequent educational experience is subpar. Attorneys for the legislative leaders jumped on that to question the value of having preschool at all.

“Preschool programs are effective; they’re not magic,” Barnett said.

Prior expert witnesses called by the plaintiffs sought to establish that Pennsylvania both doesn’t provide enough revenue to make up for disparities among districts, and that it unfairly distributes the money it does provide.

Former top Pennsylvania Department of Education official Matt Stem said there are many interventions that the department believes can improve student learning, such as extra counselors, more Advanced Placement courses, extracurricular activities, and behavioral support, but they cost money that many districts don’t have.

He tied the gap in achievement between students of different demographic groups to lack of sufficient funding. For instance, 37% of Black students score proficient on state tests in English compared to 71% of white students, Stem said.

“The department believes that one of the primary reasons we see these gaps is that the resources aren’t there,” he said. “I think it’s very, very unlikely that Pennsylvania will be able to close the achievement gaps that we’ve seen for decades without additional funding, particularly for schools with high percentages of students in poverty.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosario spoke recently with Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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

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

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

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

Describe what makes your teaching experience unique.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her success rate is about 50%.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good news, bad news

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New policies raise questions about quality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That is still a huge gap,” she said.

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

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

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

Finding solutions to a tricky problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pennsylvania could get universal preschool. Here’s how.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a critical moment for early childhood education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out the stories in the guide below.

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

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

Read the full story.

Pennsylvania could get universal preschool. Here’s how.

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

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

Read the full story.

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

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

Read the full story.

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

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

Read the full story.

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

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

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

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

Read the full story.

‘We are worried’: Only 9% of Philadelphia youth ages 5 to 11 have received COVID vaccine

2021-12-03T23:17:20+00:00

Editor’s note: This article was updated to properly attribute material that appeared in a City of Philadelphia press release.

City officials are concerned about the low vaccination rate among children ages 5 to 11, particularly as Philadelphia has identified its first case of the omicron variant of the coronavirus.

Only 9% of children in that age range in Philadelphia have received one dose of the vaccine since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended last month that 5- to 11-year-olds be vaccinated against COVID.

“We are worried and really trying hard to increase the number currently,” said Dr. Cheryl Bettigole, the city’s health commissioner.

City officials announced Friday that a Philadelphia resident tested positive for the omicron variant, a new strain of the coronavirus. The health department warned Philadelphia residents to take precautions in light of a new, more transmissible strain.

“Since the discovery of this new variant, we have been preparing for the likelihood of an omicron case in Philadelphia,” said Mayor Jim Kenney. “A new variant, especially one that may be more transmissible, means that we have to stay vigilant about taking steps to protect ourselves and everyone around us.”

Kenney said the news was “especially discouraging” during the holiday season, and urged people to be vigilant. “Now is the time to get your vaccine or booster, mask up, and take extra precautions when you are going out in public or getting together with other households.”

Families with young children haven’t had much time to get the vaccine, which requires two doses spaced three weeks apart, and rates of vaccination still are low in nearby cities and states. (Children under age 5 still aren’t eligible for the vaccine.)

In New Jersey, 1.1% of the eligible population has had at least one dose. Less than 10% of children in New York City within the 5-11 age group have received the first dose.

The low numbers for young children are in contrast to older groups in Philadelphia, who have had more time to get the vaccine. More than 93.2% of adults in Philadelphia have had at least one dose of vaccine, and Bettigole expects the city to have at least 75% of adults fully vaccinated within the next few days. She said 74.8% of adults are fully vaccinated, and more than 140,000 Philadelphians have had a booster dose so far.

Forty one percent of residents between ages 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated, and at least 51% have received one dose. “Those numbers are great, but they aren’t high enough,” Bettigole said.

According to the World Health Organization, omicron may cause more reinfections than previous COVID variants, which means people who have had an infection and have not yet been vaccinated may be at higher risk.

Like Kenney, Bettigole also urged Philadelphians to take precautions.

“The best thing we can do in the meantime, is to keep doing the things that have protected us for the last two years. Get vaccinated, wear a mask, avoid crowded indoor spaces, and stay home if you’re sick,” Bettigole said.

She noted evidence so far also points toward this winter being a severe flu season, particularly for children and young adults, and encouraged people to get flu shots too.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Nov. 29 issued guidance to Head Starts requiring universal masking for everyone 2 and older. Additionally, the department requires full vaccination for staff, some contractors, and volunteers by Jan. 31, 2022.

Head Start offers free, full-day preschool that serves more than 9,500 children in the city.

The school district already has vaccine mandates in place for its staff and some students. Its 20,000 employees were mandated to get vaccinated for COVID-19 by Sept. 30. Students participating in interscholastic sports in the winter need to be fully vaccinated by Dec. 18, while those playing in the spring have until March 1 to get vaccinated.

“We are reviewing data now and planning information events, but we don’t anticipate any new issues with this federal announcement,” said district spokesperson Monica Lewis. “We will continue to encourage all those who are eligible to get vaccinated. We are working with public health agencies to offer information on and access to vaccines and we hope that those in our school communities take advantage of such opportunities.”

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan, who has been supportive of a negotiated mandate for district workers, has stressed that another aspect of the district’s COVID mitigation strategy falls short. Jordan has urged the district to test all students regularly for COVID whether or not they show symptoms. Right now, the district only tests symptomatic students or those participating in sports or performing arts activities.

Philly school enrollment continues decline, while cyber charters see surge

2021-11-24T15:52:36+00:00

Philadelphia’s overall public school enrollment has dipped by about 4,300 students compared to the 2020-21 school year, falling from 202,944 last school year to 198,645 this year.

This amounts to an overall drop of 2% as district-run schools, brick-and-mortar charters and alternative schools all saw declines. But enrollment in online options has surged as families remain wary of sending their students back into buildings after nearly a full year of virtual learning due to the pandemic.

According to a Chalkbeat analysis of preliminary data provided by the district, enrollment in district-run schools declined by 4%, from 119,492 to 114,902; in charter schools by 2%, from 68,364 to 66,890; and in alternative schools, which mostly enroll those in danger of not finishing high school, by 6% — from 2,925 to 2,750.

Enrollment in the district’s small virtual academy, however, has tripled since last year, from 637 students to 1,925. The category that includes cyber charter enrollment rose by 16%, from 12,132 to 14,087. (Special education students attending approved private schools at district expense are counted in the same category as cyber charters.)

Virtual schools account for only a small fraction of the district’s total enrollment, and their gains weren’t enough to offset the district’s enrollment declines in nearly every grade. Pennsylvania’s cyber charters, which have low overall records of student achievement, are chartered by the state; the district has no control over them but must pay for any city students who enroll.

Earlier grades were the hardest hit, with elementary schools accounting for more than 80% of the drop. Every grade from first through fifth lost more than 700 students compared to last year.

The biggest enrollment decrease during the pandemic was in kindergarten, which saw a 30% drop last year compared with the 2019-2020 school year — three times the nation’s average decline in kindergarten enrollment. A Chalkbeat analysis of the data shows that kindergarten enrollment went up by about 1,100 students for the 2021-22 school year, but it is still below pre-pandemic numbers and district projections.

Diane Castelbuono, the district’s deputy chief for early learning, said she was encouraged by the increase and said kindergarten is now at 91% of capacity.

“I think we’re bouncing back,” Castelbuono said. Pre-pandemic, she said that between 95% and 96% of available kindergarten seats were normally filled.

She added that while the district is still doing outreach, “most of the families that want to send their kids back have sent their kids back” by this time in the school year.

At a Board of Education meeting last week, Superintendent William Hite said that this year’s kindergarten enrollment “is still lower, not as much as a year ago, but still lower than what has been anticipated.”

The only other grade where enrollment increased this year over last year is ninth grade.

Hite also said that school officials are working on a plan to find any missing students — those who were enrolled last year but can’t be accounted for this year.

The district has been going through a series of engagement and re-engagement activities with city agencies like the Department of Human Services, or DHS. While it is possible to track students who move from district to charter schools, or vice versa, those who move to other districts or enroll in non-public schools are harder to trace.

Johann Calhoun contributed reporting

Navigating the return of early learners in Philadelphia’s 19140

2021-11-11T11:00:00+00:00

Leer en español.

North Philadelphia resident Tisha Sanabria fears she’s reached a breaking point.

The single mother has found it difficult to enroll her 4-year-old son in Head Start, a free, full-day preschool that serves more than 9,500 children in Philadelphia.

It is one of several programs offered to parents and families of early learners in low-income areas. But, as with Sanabria, parents often lack information and access to services. Sometimes, they don’t know where to start.

Sanabria, who is a resident in Philadelphia’s second poorest ZIP code, 19140, said she’s faced too many hurdles getting her son in school and simply needs help.

“It’s really hard because I don’t drive and it’s hard for me to go down there [the district] with no transportation and when they just tell you to go online and register him. I just want to get him in school ASAP,” Sanabria said.

Starting today, Chalkbeat will explore how pandemic schooling has affected the youngest learners in the 19140 ZIP code, from students whose education was interrupted by closures and remote learning to youngsters who have never been in a classroom.

The 19140 ZIP code is situated in North Philadelphia and surrounds the Temple University Hospital area. It’s racial demographic mirrors that of the school district with a growing Latino population.

19140 snakes across Philadelphia from North Front Street to Wayne Junction, bordered on the south by Allegheny Avenue and the north by Wyoming Avenue, encompassing neighborhoods in North Philadelphia and Kensington. Its population closely resembles the racial makeup of the Philadelphia school district: 54% Black and 40% Latino. According to census data, it is the second poorest ZIP code in the city.

There are about 20 elementary schools in the area — district, charter, and private, with more than two dozen early learning centers dotted across its landscape.

The bureau’s coverage will reflect concerns families and educators have about early learners in 19140. What percentage of students remained remote after the Philadelphia school district offered a hybrid option? Have they regressed academically and socially since their return to school? Is there enough support to help with the technological and language barriers that may exist for early learners? What programs are needed most for early learners in 19140 to succeed?

The best way to support families is to ask them what they need and provide it, says Aliyah Catanch-Bradley, principal of Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School,

Aliyah Catanch-Bradley, principal of Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School, which sits in the heart of the ZIP code, said “it’s been a journey for families” coming from all-virtual learning.

“It’s a very daunting time. We are not post pandemic, we are still in a pandemic. It’s just getting everyone back to the structure of school. The best way to support families is to ask them what it is that they need and then provide it. And make sure that you have an open door policy where they can come speak to you openly about what support they need.”

Students in 19140 are struggling in the classroom. Chalkbeat compiled test scores from the 2019-2020 school year for the seven district schools in the area. Only 10% of the ZIP code’s third graders were proficient in math compared to 56% from across Pennsylvania, while just 18.4% were proficient in English compared to 32% across the district, according to data from the school district. (More recent data were not available because of the pandemic.)

Tomea A. Sippio-Smith, K-12 education policy director at Children First, a nonprofit that advocates for equity and quality in public education in Southeastern Pennsylvania, said it’s important to track students’ academic progress because educators may not know where they were in terms of their learning before the pandemic.

“If we didn’t know that information prior, how will we know what services we need to put in place in order to ensure that they are able to meet grade-level standards and learning requirements? So if we don’t know where they are or we don’t know if they’ve returned to school, we can’t provide the services or resources to fill in any gaps they may have or to address any learning loss they may have,” Sippio-Smith said.

Chalkbeat Philadelphia wants to hear from families and educators in 19140. Take our survey below or go here if you are on a mobile device. Your responses will really help our journalism.

‘Alarming’ shortage of child care workers in Philadelphia prompts recruitment event

2021-10-05T13:52:36+00:00

Early childhood education providers are holding a site-by-site job fair on Thursday in a concerted attempt to counteract a staffing shortage that one state child care advocate has called “alarming.”

More than 300 child care programs in Philadelphia signed up as of Monday for the event, called “ECE Day of Hire.”

“Basically, for lack of better words, we’re not getting the response and we’re not getting qualified candidates,” said Kelli Jackson, head of human resources at Porter’s Child Care Center in North Philadelphia.

Porter’s, which has been in the neighborhood for 40 years, is trying to hire at least three classroom aides so it can open two more classrooms. With a capacity of 230 children, it now has 150 and a waiting list, Jackson said.

The shortage of child care workers is so stark that directors could not leave for a centralized hiring event because they are needed to help staff classrooms, said Jackie Groetsch, the public policy field organizer for the early childhood advocacy group First Up.

“That’s the severity of the problem, the directors, the owners, they don’t have the ability to leave their programs,” Groetsch said, because of the ratio of adults to children required by state standards. “They’ve been covering in classrooms.”

According to a July survey by the advocacy organization Start Strong PA, 93% of Philadelphia child care providers said they had lost workers since the pandemic started. The 147 centers that responded said they closed 322 classrooms total, but had more than 1,800 children on a waiting list. If they were fully staffed, they could accommodate nearly 4,800 more children.

The picture is similarly bleak statewide, with 92% of providers reporting an inability to hire enough workers, according to the survey.

“They have lost staff. Child care workers have chosen to leave the industry at alarming rates and chosen to work for other sectors that are offering higher pay,” Groetsch said. Employers like Amazon, Walmart, Target, even McDonald’s, have increased wages to $15 and, in some cases, as much as $20 an hour, while the average hourly wage in the child care industry in Pennsylvania is about $11.

“Right now we have families ready to go back to work, but the programs have to say no, we don’t have enough staff,” Groetsch said.

The participating centers in the daylong event will decorate their entrances with something yellow — balloons or ribbons, most likely — because that is the color used by the state’s Keystone Stars rating system for early childhood education. To earn up to four stars, centers must meet standards for staffing, operations and curriculum.

Child care centers can’t afford to increase wages for workers due to what Groetsch called a “broken” funding system. The sector “is underfunded by state and local governments,” she said, resulting in a situation where costs for parents are high at the same time that pay for workers is relatively low.

That could change if President Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act is enacted with the $450 billion he proposes to include for child care over 10 years. First Up is among the advocacy organizations saying this could enable programs to raise salaries to levels that are more competitive with other industries.

Passage of the legislation would be a “game changer,” Groetsch said. A federal investment could “ensure that parents are paying less for child care but that programs are receiving funding to cover the full cost of providing care,” Groetsch said.

The child care industry in Philadelphia and around the region is sprawling and diverse, run by a mix of government entities and private businesses. It is paid for by a combination of private tuition payments and public subsidies, many of which target the neediest families.

Even before the pandemic, the industry was struggling. When schools and child care programs were forced to shut down in March 2020 due to the pandemic, the state used federal rescue funds to continue to pay subsidies to the centers based on their enrollment. This allowed them to pay employees, even though the centers were closed.

But state aid was gradually cut back starting in September 2020, and staffers began looking for other employment.

Without the ability to raise wages, competing in this job market is daunting, and Groetsch and others aren’t sure who will show up at the recruiting event for the wages being offered.

She said possible recruits would include mothers with young children who want to return to the workforce, and would accept the wage because it would save them as much as $300 a week in their own child care costs. Another source of labor, she suggested, could be people who “may have had a past career and are looking to make a difference and have work to do that is rewarding and joyful.”

“Don’t get me wrong, it is hard work, but you can help shape young brains and interact with children,” she said. “If you want to work where you can get hugs and have little people happy to see you and who don’t want to leave, that’s the child care industry.”

Jackson said that the minimum requirement for her center to keep its top rating from Keystone Stars is a high school diploma with two years of experience or a child development associate credential, or CDA, which can be obtained online and is the equivalent of nine college credits toward an early education degree.

“Our qualifications are somewhat higher than some other centers in the city,” she said.

Porter’s houses a Head Start program and a Pre-K Counts program in partnership with the city and school district. She hopes there will be a good turnout on Thursday to fill their open slots with qualified people. They have tried to increase the hourly wage to make the positions more attractive, she said, but still can’t compete with companies like Target and Walmart.

Plus, she said, a lot of people found employment during the pandemic that allowed them to work from home. Child care doesn’t provide that option.

”In some ways, the pandemic brought to the forefront issues of work-life balance,” she said. “If you can stay home and get paid, you can work from home two or three days a week; with those scenarios, the need for child care is a little less as well,” she said.

Jackson hopes that the Day of Hire brings some serious candidates. She intends to advertise it on social media and update the website and the entry on Indeed, a jobs website, to emphasize that “there is no appointment needed, just come.” Given the need for workers, she said. “We’ll give it a shot.”

Parents, here’s how you can help your kids in math — without worksheets

2021-09-27T17:21:09+00:00

Math resources for parents

Ideas at Work from the Erikson Institute’s Early Math Collaborative

A series of short articles about easy math activities and games for children in preschool through third grade. Most are also available in Spanish.

Learning Trajectories from the Marsico Institute at the University of Denver A series of playful math activities for children 0-8, organized by topic (E.g. counting, patterns, or measurement), The sequence of activities follow children’s development of mathematical thinking. Activities are also available in Spanish. Registration is free.

Dinner Table Math Hacks

A series of YouTube videos with examples of family math activities, created by Angela McIver

DREME Family Math from a national network of early math experts based at Stanford University

Fun math activities that parents can do with their children, divided by activity type (E.g. Cooking, Daily Routines, or Reading Together). Many include downloadable guides and some are available in Spanish.

Parents of early learners prepare for first day of school in Philadelphia

2021-08-30T19:37:27+00:00

Following more than a year of disrupted learning, parents of early learners across the city say that preparing for back to school this year has meant a combination of ordinary and extraordinary tasks, from getting backpacks to taking on the role of pseudo public health official.

“Besides buying extra antibacterial products like sanitizer, wipes, and face masks, I have been having multiple talks about the social distancing and making sure they fully understand how important cleanliness and staying safe is,” said Joy DiCastelnuovo, mom of a second grader at F. Amadee Bregy Elementary School in South Philadelphia. “I don’t want them to take it lightly. We have two immunocompromised in our household so getting sick is a rough thing for us.”

As the Philadelphia school district prepares to welcome back about 125,000 students Tuesday, DiCastelnuovo and other parents said this year’s return to school feels normal, in many ways, save for the added worry of COVID.

But the stress of returning this fall is, in some ways, worse for the parents of younger students. Many early learners are unsure how to properly wear a mask and keep their distance from classmates, and all children under age 12 still are ineligible for the COVID vaccine.

“I’m making sure I tell mine, ‘Keep your mask on all day; if you have to sneeze, sneeze in your elbow, if you sneeze into your mask, ask for another mask.’ The younger kids sometimes, because they are not used to it, they end up opening their mouths so the moisture from their mouth wets their masks,” said Maritza Guridy, who has a son and two nieces she cares for at Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School in North Philadelphia.

Katrina Houston had to enroll her second grade son in a new school after the family moved. She said she would have preferred to enroll him in an online school, but she can’t afford a laptop. Instead, he will attend a neighborhood school.

“When it comes to my son’s health, I will be his teacher. I prefer him to stay home but they are making all kids go back. I found two online schools, I just don’t have a laptop and they don’t provide one. My son has a [district] laptop but if I take him out, he has to turn the laptop back in,” said Houston. “I’m stuck in between a rock and a hard place.”

Houston said her focus now is on making sure her son is prepared academically.

Christal Turner has students in high school, middle school and second grade. She said while the eldest has been vaccinated, the younger ones have not. Her primary back-to-school preparations have included talks about mask wearing.

“We’ve been enforcing, ‘Make sure you put your mask on.’ He is a second grader, so sometimes it will fall below his nose. I have to remind him to keep pulling it up. It’s a continuation of me saying, once in a while, ‘Hey pull it up,’” Turner said.

Sheila Tepper, a parent of a second grader at Bregy Elementary School, said she and her family had COVID last Thanksgiving, and this year ‘s back-to-school preparations haven’t been that different except that she bought masks to match her children’s uniforms.

“We do have our talks - ‘Just because you’re going to have to wear masks, still keep distance but don’t hang around [people] like you used to,” Tepper explained. “I have three age groups - second, sixth, seventh - they all know it’s not going to be like it was before, but they are all excited to start a new year. They need to go back, they need to feel a part of their peers.”

Parents were mixed about whether students should return to in-person learning under the district’s current COVID safety plan. Some wanted all students to be tested regularly, while others wanted all of the adults in schools to be vaccinated.

“I prefer them to go, but I prefer them to go vaccinated,” said Turner, whose younger children aren’t old enough to get vaccinated. “[But] until that’s approved, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Guridy said all students should be tested weekly. The district has committed to testing only students who show symptoms and those who are participating in athletics and band and choir. Students can opt out if they provide proof of vaccination.

“I [would] feel safer sending my kids, knowing all the children are being tested weekly,” she said.

DiCastelnuovo expressed excitement, with a bit of hesitancy.

“I’m excited because my children love school, in person more so than virtual. I feel virtual took a lot of the joy of school from them,” she said. “I am also nervous. We don’t do well with germs. I’m just praying the students do all they can to keep everyone protected. I have faith in the school, but you know how can kids can be.”

Renee Brown, a parent and elementary staffer who co-hosts an education-centered podcast, said a lot of parents she’s heard from are uncertain about this school year.

“The general feedback is that a lot of parents are not knowing what to do, what to expect, they’re scared. If they haven’t met a good administrator, they don’t know which way to turn or how to be,” she said.

Brown said she recommends that parents talk to their children and prepare them for how different in-person school is from home.

“Your child has to be mentally ready to be okay. That’s one of the biggest things they need. They’ve been home for a year and a half and now they have to be ready to go back to school. They can’t get up and go to the bathroom when they want, get up and get a snack when they want. The school is more structured,” she said.

Just 32% of Philadelphia third graders read on grade level. Freedom Schools Literacy Academy could be a model to change that.

2021-08-05T14:16:37+00:00

Editor’s note: This article was updated to properly attribute material that appeared in a Johns Hopkins University press release and to remove language that appeared in a Temple News article.

Philadelphia Councilman Isaiah Thomas was a prolific reader as a kid.

Reading became routine for the councilman growing up in Northwest Philadelphia, mostly because his father was a teacher. It was also at Philadelphia Freedom Schools where Thomas enhanced his ability to read — noting authors such as Bob Moses, who wrote “Radical Equations” and Randall Robinson of “The Debt.” He read both books at Freedom Schools.

Thomas visited the Freedom Schools Literacy Academy, or FSLA, at Mastery Harrity Elementary School in West Philadelphia on Tuesday to engage with students on the importance of reading.

The councilman, who was a Freedom Schools student in the 1990s, believes the literacy program can be a model that could help the city with its youth literacy numbers — and its lack of Black teachers.

“When you’re talking about learning and content, the foundation of that is reading,” Thomas said. “It’s tough to be a good math student, if you don’t read; it’s tough to be a good science student, if you can’t read. So the foundation is reading.”

A report this year revealed only 32% of Philadelphia third graders read on grade level, a number that angered members of Philadelphia’s Board of Education.

“These trends are not surprising to any of us, now we have to talk about what we can do about it,” said school board member Mallory Fix-Lopez.

The report showed gaps among racial groups and low scores for students with disabilities and English language learners. It also showed that regardless of overall achievement at all schools, there were racial achievement gaps, with Black and Latino students scoring below whites and Asians.

Black and Latino students in the top-tier schools are on track to reach the goal of 62% proficiency by 2026, with about half reaching the mark now. But two-thirds of white and Asian students in those schools are already there.

“We definitely find that about 60 to 70% of the students who come to our program are not reading on grade level,” said Erika Asikoye, director of FSLA. “We know that we’re going to get a range of children who just finished kindergarten, first grade or second grade who could benefit from our help.”

The literacy program focuses on “phonemic awareness, reading comprehension and positive racial identity” and spends a lot of time on letter sounds, Asikoye said . This awareness is a critical development skill for children and is linked to early reading success through its association with phonics.

In its success, the academy links reading with cultural awareness.

The Freedom Schools movement began during the civil rights movement and Freedom Summer of 1964. The original Freedom Schools were proposed by Charlie Cobb, a member of the Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to focus on literacy, positive racial identity, political education, and empowerment of Mississippi children who were suffering from “sharecropper” and “Jim Crow education.” SNCC recognized that the oppressive state of education in Mississippi was “geared to squash intellectual curiosity and different thinking” of Black children – the children and grandchildren of the adults SNCC was there to help.

City Councilman Isaiah Thomas listens attentively during a third-grade reading class at Freedom Schools Literacy Academy.

SNCC leaders envisioned Freedom Schools as a model that could support Black children “to articulate their own desires, demands, and questions” and “to find alternative and ultimately new directions for action.”

In the late 1980s, civil rights attorney Marian Wright Edelman, who founded the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), rebooted Freedom Schools through community-based organizations across the country. Philadelphia’s Freedom Schools can trace its roots to the CDF model.

Philadelphia Freedom Schools was founded in the 1990s by a coalition of Black educational leaders; Dr. Greg Carr, Erika Asikoye, and Dr. Ayesha Imani, who worked in the School District of Philadelphia, found support from David Hornbeck, former superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia. They would later form their own version of Freedom Schools, Philadelphia Freedom Schools (PFS), adding a high school component to bolster the inter-generational model.

Sharif El-Mekki, former teacher, principal, and founder of The Fellowship: Black Male Educators for Social Justice, draws much of his educational framework from his elementary school, Nidhamu Sasa, a small African Freedom School in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, started 50 years ago by Black activists and parents. His experiences at Nidhamu Sasa and in literacy classes as one of the many Black 4-year-old children who learned phonics on the indoor porch of his cousin, Dr. Suzette Abdul-Hakim of West Philadelphia, continue to inspire El-Mekki decades later.

These informed El-Mekki’s desire to use the Freedom Schools model to develop a national Black teacher pipeline – a model that provides Black high school and college students the opportunity to teach literacy and positive racial identity to first-third graders.

El-Mekki, founder of the Center for Black Educator Development, told Chalkbeat that using a community-based approach, one that involves an intergenerational model, adds capacity and strength in teaching youth how to read. It’s also linked to recruiting more Black teachers through the Black Teacher Pipeline.

“We need to double down on these efforts to use the science of reading and youth leadership to solve the complex issues that we face as a city and country,” El-Mekki said. “We’ll know we’re serious about the success of our future as a city when we hold ourselves accountable for the literacy rates of our youth. You can’t have a world class city without a highly literate citizenry - and all really does mean all.”

A group of third-grade students patiently wait for their turn to speak during reading class at Freedom Schools Literacy Academy in West Philadelphia.

According to studies like those led by Constance Lindsey of the University of North Carolina, Black students do better when they have Black teachers.

A separate study from John Hopkins University found that Black students with at least one Black teacher are more likely to graduate high school and enroll in college, and if they have one Black teacher by the third grade, they are 13 % more likely to go to college. The percentage increases to 32% if they have two Black teachers.

“I think of literacy in terms of a human right - something that warrants our best efforts, investments and commitments,” El-Mekki said. “When we see countries that America loves to disparage, Cuba and Iran for example, but see how they prioritize literacy amongst their children and citizens we have to wonder, who actually has it backwards and is Third World?”

Though school board members vowed to make improvements to students’ reading skills, Thomas thinks the government should contribute in some form.

“Spend the money on programs that work,” Thomas said. “Even in the case of the school district, the federal government has allocated a significant amount of money to address the learning gap. So it’s up to the school district and the city to spend money on quality programs that do just that.”

Kristina Wilkerson, a parent of an academy student, said she’s pleased with the progress her son Dominic has made.

“Dominic loves to read. During the pandemic school year he would get off his regular school work to read books. So this program has helped to elevate that. He also gets to see teachers who look like him and says,. ‘Mom I can be whatever I want to be.’”

Would-be teachers of color pass Pennsylvania licensing exams at lower-than-average rates

2021-08-03T18:04:03+00:00

While 62% of Pennsylvania’s elementary teacher candidates pass the state licensing test on the first try, teacher candidates of color at all but a few of the state’s teacher preparation programs have lower pass rates.
At some schools, two of three prospective teachers of color fail the licensing test the first time around — setting them up for pricey and time-consuming retakes.

The data from a recent 38-state report on licensing exam pass rates comes as some state leaders and advocates push to increase teacher diversity in Pennsylvania. These efforts include a proposal to bulk up support for students of color in the teacher pipeline and boost data transparency. But the report, from the National Council on Teacher Quality, also points to formidable challenges, ranging from wide variation between teacher prep program results to uncertainty about how many teacher candidates walk away from the profession after failing the exam.

Only 6% of Pennsylvania teachers are people of color, compared to about 35% of students — one of the nation’s largest “teacher-student diversity gaps,” according to the Pennsylvania Educator Diversity Consortium.

Mimi Woldeyohannes, director of strategic partnerships at the Center for Black Educator Development, said it’s important to shift the narrative from blaming teacher candidates for licensing exam failures.

“It’s actually the system that has failed them through and through, whether it was from the K through 12 [system] or their teacher prep programs,” she said. “That’s something that we need to be honest about and talk about how we can rectify that.”

The Council’s report, which includes licensing exam pass rates from 2015 to 2018, argues that such exam results matter to student outcomes. But David Lapp, director of policy research at the education research group Research For Action, said he worries that people may conflate a teacher prep program’s quality with its licensure pass rate.

“These kinds of measures are more reflective of the selectivity of a program rather than the quality of their instruction,” he said.

The report’s authors acknowledge that more selective schools generally produce higher pass rates on the exams but show through detailed graphics that some less selective programs have first-time pass rates higher than the state average. In Pennsylvania, those include Clarion University of Pennsylvania and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, among others.

Sharif El-Mekki, CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development and a former teacher, said he appreciates the report for highlighting teacher prep programs that are beating the odds by some measures.

“I walked away curious,” he said. “What are the levers they’re using to push ahead of the pack?”

In addition to showing pass rates by school selectivity, the Council’s report highlights colleges where teacher candidates of color pass the licensing test on the first try at higher rates than the state average. Among those schools are the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Community College of Allegheny County.

The report also cites programs with higher-than-average percentages of low-income college students who received a federal Pell Grant and higher first-time pass rates than the state average. Those schools include Clarks Summit University, University of Valley Forge, and Thiel College.

“There are outliers that we can learn from. I hope this drives peoples’ curiosity and commitment to outcomes,” said El-Mekki. “If that is how this is used, it can be a true game-changer.”

El-Mekki said the report also made him wonder what the state’s two historically Black colleges and universities — Cheyney University and Lincoln University — could do “radically differently.” At Cheyney, only 31% of first-time test-takers passed the licensure test — the lowest rate in the state. At Lincoln, the rate was 38%.

Pennsylvania is among 30 states categorized in the Council report as having “weaker testing systems” — in other words, inconsistent or lower expectations for test-takers. That’s partly because its elementary licensure test doesn’t include separate subtests for each core subject.

In addition, the state doesn’t hold all test-takers to the same passing score. The required score depends on their college grade point average. For example, a candidate with a 4.0 GPA could get an elementary teaching license with a 167 on the math, science, and health subtest, while a candidate with a 2.9 GPA would need a score of 219. The spread is the same for the language arts and social studies subtest and even bigger for the child development subtest.

Kendall Alexander, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, said via email that the state’s considerations of a teacher candidate’s academic performance in addition to their licensing exam score, “is in step with not relying solely on high-stakes testing results as a single factor in determining eligibility.”

Generally, teacher candidates in states with weaker testing systems pass licensure exams more easily than in states with stronger testing systems. The council found that first-time pass rates were 76% in “weaker” states, compared to 45% in “stronger” states. Best-attempt pass rates — the share of candidates who passed after any number of tries — were 89% in “weaker states” and 79% in “stronger states.”

Unlike some “weaker system” states, Pennsylvania required all elementary teachers to pass the licensing test, had lower first-time pass rates — 62% — and lower best-attempt pass rates — 79% — than other states with weaker systems.

Recess should be a priority when Philadelphia’s early learners return, advocates say

2021-06-29T21:26:43+00:00

For a year of remote learning, Marjorie Boone made sure that each of the seven grandchildren living with her took a break from their virtual classes to go outside and play.

Not only was it a needed break for Boone and the children, but it was also the closest approximation of recess that she could provide within the context of their in-home virtual learning environment.

“I felt they needed fresh air to rejuvenate their mind - sometimes I let them go in the back and play for a little bit to refresh the mind as long as weather permitted. As the weather got cold, I still made them go out back to run just to refresh their mind because that’s what they make them do at school, so it seemed to work,” said Boone.

With the abrupt closure of schools in the spring of 2020, recess in Philadelphia’s public schools consisted of “time away from the screen” and “brain breaks,” according to the district. That’s not the kind of free play through which young students often learn problem-solving skills, socialization and teamwork. Now, as schools prepare to reopen for full-time, in-person instruction in the fall, some educators say that recess could be just as important as other subjects for early learners.

“Informal play is something that is critical to child development. We know from research that [they] need to have play that isn’t prescriptive, that we aren’t telling them what to do so they can break things and explore and skin their knees, so they can know ‘I shouldn’t do that again.’ Informal recess allows children in early childhood years to really understand the whole world around them,” said Amy Giddings, an associate professor and academic director of the master of science in sport business program at Temple University.

Boone’s granddaughter, fourth grader Brooklyn Mills, who attends Edmonds Elementary, said she missed recess when schools were closed. Although she had several other siblings to play with at home, she said it wasn’t the same.

“I felt really sad because I couldn’t run around with my friends. In my school [recess], I had all my friends to talk to and play around with. It was hard not to be in the school because you couldn’t talk to other people that you know,” she said.

Brooklyn had recess again after she returned for two days a week of in-person learning starting in March. “My teachers let me go outside because they thought it was a good idea and it was really sunny out,” she said.

Even before the pandemic, students in the city’s public schools weren’t guaranteed recess. A survey done by the School District of Philadelphia, conducted in 2018 and released in July 2019, found that 84% of the 51 elementary schools in its sample “were fully or partially” meeting a recommendation that students get 20 minutes of recess every day.

Other schools reported that students received fewer minutes per day or provided recess on some days but not all days.

Monica Lewis, a spokesperson for the school district, said that when schools started offering hybrid learning in the spring, in-person learners got some recess. She said the district has “not been made aware of any impact” that virtual learners had from not doing traditional recess.

In her work with a program that provides sports instruction to middle schoolers and some fourth graders, Giddings said she has observed the pandemic’s effects on play, including the “loss of interaction with peers” and the “informal element,” which she said can also be applied to the experience of early childhood learners.

“The pandemic has hurt that opportunity because they no longer have that opportunity for exploration with their peers. That really is a critical piece with childhood development. It’s even stronger with younger kids,” she said.

At Sheridan, an elementary school in Kensington, school leaders said recess was a pre-pandemic necessity for their students because of the lack of nearby green space and the prevalence of drugs and violence in the community.

“We saw that as a priority prior to the pandemic,” said Assistant Principal Julio Nuñez. “Our neighborhood kids lack access to green parks and recreation areas. The lack of access to green spaces is a big deal, so we see that as a need. When kids come in for socio-emotional learning, that recess takes the same level of importance as reading, math, social studies, science and all other subject areas.”

Nuñez said the school sees recess as an “oasis” for students.

Playworks, a national nonprofit with a local office in the city, served in 15 Philadelphia public schools this year to facilitate recess, in addition to providing digital resources to 150 elementary schools. Vice President of Field Operations Ivy Olesh said recess has looked different this year for students, and schools approached it in whatever way made the “most sense for them.”

When Sheridan started hybrid learning, a Playworks coach came in to lead recess. Nuñez said in-person students wore masks and followed social distancing guidelines, including avoiding games that required contact, and washing hands and using hand sanitizer before recess. Pre-recorded recess sessions were available for students who were not in person.

Nuñez said he does not know what the effects of an altered recess are for Sheridan’s students, most of whom are early childhood learners.

“Those executive functions of being able to be responsible for homework, those are the things you develop at school, being able to work with another individual who may have different views of you - that’s the part I think it’s too early to tell what the pandemic’s impact has been but at same time that’s going to be the priority for us - we know it’s impacted but we don’t know how far,” he said.

Local early childhood and health experts shared similar views.

“I would say it could affect their socialization skills, especially for young children who may have spent the end of pre-K and kindergarten in a computer setting, in terms knowing how to engage in face-to-face interaction,” said Tomea Sippio-Smith, K-12 education policy director for Public Citizens for Children and Youth, or PCCY.

“For many kids who have been learning only for the past couple of years, it may have affected their ability to interact with non-relatives or their ability to work as part of a larger group of students. Those are all possible impacts of students who were learning online. I don’t know of any studies off hand [but] one would expect that if you’ve never been in a setting and you’re a young student that has never had an opportunity to interact with other kids face to face, it will probably take an adjustment to learn those skills.”

Giddings agreed.

“Research shows the more opportunity children have for informal play, the greater they develop their creativity, their ability to problem solve, their ability to pay attention to details, so it really sets them up to be successful in school. It’s much more critical in the early ages than it is in middle school,” she said.

“It makes me so mad. I just feel for them. My recommendation for parents and educators would be to say it won’t be completely normal when kids go back, they won’t be completely normal. They could be nervous. I think we’re going to need to be really patient with these kids.”

Education advocates celebrate fifth anniversary of Philly pre-K

2021-06-16T23:34:41+00:00

Ingrid Caitlin has been teaching young students for more than 50 years.

Now the lead pre-kindergarten teacher at Little Einsteins Early Learning Center, she joined parents, principals, and education advocates Wednesday to celebrate the five-year anniversary of the Philly pre-K program, which provides free pre-K to thousands of students across Philadelphia.

“I think pre-K helps kids to be more productive in life,” Caitlin said as she ushered a group of young students onto Einsteins’ playground.

The PHLpreK program currently funds 3,300 slots for 3- and 4-year-old students in Philadelphia. The program started in 2017 with about 1,000 students and has served 6,000 students since its launch. Donna Cooper, executive director for Public Citizens for Children and Youth, said the program hopes to enroll 4,100 students in September and up to 5,000 next school year. When the program launched, it aimed to serve up to 6,500 students.

Efforts to increase enrollment in the program have slowed, in part, due to a lack of funding. PHLpreK is funded by the city’s beverage tax, which imposes a 1.5 cents-per-ounce fee on sodas and other sugary drinks bought within city limits. Revenue from the beverage tax declined about 15% during the pandemic.

The tax was the first of its kind in a major U.S. city, and it has remained controversial since passing five years ago. The tax was slammed by beverage companies and faced a challenge in the state supreme court, but it was lauded by some elected officials, such as Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House.

“Over the last five years, thousands of children have gotten ready for school and a lifetime of success, and we’re here today to mark that,” Cooper said.

Access to early childhood programs is also an issue of racial equity, Cooper said. Far more white and wealthy families have access to pre-K than low-income Black and brown families, and the city’s introduction of free pre-K programs can help level the playing field, she said.

“If we want Black and Hispanic children in this city to have a shot at the equal future of their white peers, we need pre-K,” Cooper said. “Philly pre-K is not just an investment in early childhood, but it is an investment in civil rights.”

Caitlin said one of her favorite parts of teaching pre-K over the years has been watching her former students — many of them from disadvantaged backgrounds — grow up and succeed.

“I’m just really proud to work here at Einstein,” Caitlin said.

Pennsylvania used to reward child care workers for furthering their education. The pandemic changed that.

2021-06-15T21:33:31+00:00

For years, around 9,000 Pennsylvania child care workers received money from the state in recognition that they’d earned additional credentials. The award — the median amount was $1,500 — was a bonus of sorts, meant to keep qualified early childhood workers in a field marked by low pay and high turnover.

But during the pandemic, the “education and retention awards” disappeared when the state reallocated the funds to give $600 relief payments to a much larger pool of child care workers.

Some early childhood leaders and former award recipients are frustrated by the move, saying the shift hurt child care teachers and directors who worked hard to further their education and marks a retreat in the state’s efforts to boost child care quality. While state officials argue that the $600 relief award benefited many more workers during a time of great need, advocates say the amount was meager — in some cases amounting to only $320 after taxes.

Now, as Pennsylvania officials decide how to divvy up more than a billion in federal aid for early childhood efforts, many in the field want the education and retention awards restored. A new report by a coalition of early childhood groups notes that providers at all 12 of the group’s recent public forums spoke about wanting the awards to continue.

“It just goes to show this is an issue that’s really important to the workforce right now, at a time when labor shortage is the main story on every newspaper page,” said Mai Miksic, early childhood policy director for Public Citizens for Children and Youth, a coalition member.

Samantha Rodriguez, originally a teacher and now the director at The Children’s Playhouse Early Learning Center in Philadelphia’s Newbold neighborhood, first got the education and retention award after earning her bachelor’s degree in 2019. She said the switch from awards based on education to awards that went to almost everyone felt unfair.

“So many years of schooling and this is what I get?” said Rodriquez, a single mom who attended classes at night to earn her degree.

In fiscal year 2019-20, about 9,200 child care teachers and directors across Pennsylvania received education and retention awards, in amounts ranging from $290 to $4,120. Recipients could apply for the awards annually for earning certain kinds of credentials, such as an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree in early childhood education.

The amount of the award depended on their role, hours, level of education, and their facility’s state rating. Employees were eligible if they worked for child care providers with one of the top three state ratings — Star 2, Star 3 or Star 4. They also had to have worked at their child care job for 12 consecutive months and couldn’t earn more than $40,000 a year as teachers or $50,000 as directors.

Diane Barber, executive director of the Pennsylvania Child Care Association, said the awards — often called ERA — have been tweaked over their 17-year-history, but “were always there to help acknowledge people staying in a field that was underpaid but also for achieving educational milestones.”

She called the elimination of the awards during the pandemic “demoralizing” and said by taking money from one group of workers to spread more thinly among a larger group, “it pitted the industry against itself.”

Officials from the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services declined an interview request from Chalkbeat to discuss the education and retention award program, but provided written answers to some questions.

They said they haven’t analyzed whether the program helped stabilize the early childhood workforce and reduce staff turnover, but have heard anecdotally from providers that those goals were met.

Asked if the program will be reinstated, they wrote “Plans for next year have not been finalized” and that efforts to recruit and retain child care workers will be priorities as the state spends $1.2 billion in early childhood funding from the federal American Rescue Plan pot.

While it’s clear that the $600 relief payments helped more child care workers — about 38,000 — compared with the education and retention awards, what’s fuzzier is whether those smaller payments made a difference in recipients’ lives.

Barber said after taxes, the relief payments may not have even covered a month of auto insurance in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, she estimated that some child care employees lost 9% to 14% of their annual income by not receiving their usual education and retention awards.

Both education and retention awards and the $600 relief payments are considered taxable income, according to state officials.

Asked if the $600 awards had the desired impact, state officials wrote, “We are grateful to have had the funding available to distribute to all eligible child care workers who, while experiencing a pandemic and its economic impacts, showed up daily to provide care for children.”

Mary Graham, executive director of the top-rated Children’s Village in Philadelphia, said typically, more than half of her 44 staff members qualified for the education and retention awards.

She said the program was an incentive for staff to seek more training: “Hey, go back to school. You’ll get a raise here and you’ll be eligible for the ERA award.”

Graham believes the awards reduced turnover at Children’s Village, where some staff members have stayed on for decades. Teachers there were “very disappointed” when the awards were eliminated this year, she said.

“If your goal in the state is to have high quality, why would you take away the supports for high quality?” she said.

A year into the pandemic, there’s good news and bad news about child care closures in Philadelphia

2021-05-18T16:17:29+00:00

Fewer Philadelphia child care providers closed permanently during the pandemic than some early childhood groups predicted last year. But when considered alongside the unusually small number of new openings, the city’s net loss in providers is much larger than in previous years.

The numbers paint a preliminary picture of what’s happened to Philadelphia’s child care ecosystem since the pandemic hit, illustrating bright spots and pain points within a fragile sector. Advocates say an influx of federal stimulus money likely staved off more catastrophic closure rates among Philadelphia child care providers, but that it will be important to track the trend long term.

In total, 183 licensed child care providers — about 11% of the city’s pre-COVID total — closed permanently between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2021, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services. There were about 200 permanent closures during the same 12-month period each of the previous two years.

But the coronavirus crisis also meant fewer new providers opened, with Philadelphia going from a net loss of 17 providers in both years prior to the pandemic to a net loss of 57 during the pandemic year. In short, that jump means dozens more defunct businesses and hundreds of lost child care slots.

Things could have been far worse.

Last summer, national early childhood groups sounded the alarm about the potential for widespread permanent child care closures all over the country as providers grappled with sudden enrollment declines and increased payroll and cleaning costs. In many states, stay-at-home orders meant child care businesses closed too, unless they were serving essential workers. But even when providers began to open back up in the summer, many families stayed away, fearful about their kids catching COVID-19 or unable to cover tuition costs because of lost jobs.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children reported that up to 40% of providers responding to the organization’s nationwide survey in June said they would close permanently without further government assistance. Child Care Aware of America pegged the number at 46%.

Closure estimates were somewhat lower in a Penn State University study released in August. It said about 4% of providers statewide would close permanently without immediate financial help, with another 14% at risk of closing.

But more government help did arrive — with the first two federal stimulus packages sending a half billion dollars to Pennsylvania’s early childhood sector. In addition, some providers received forgivable federal loans that allowed them to continue paying their staff and state officials temporarily relaxed reimbursement policies for providers participating in the child care subsidy program.

“I think this is a really good example of how government can really try to help programs during a time of great need,” said Mai Miksic, early childhood policy director for the advocacy group Public Citizens for Children and Youth.

“There were a lot of resources that were poured into the child care sector in the past year and without those resources it would have been much worse,” Miksic said. Still, she said, “I don’t want this news to undersell how difficult this past year has been on child care providers.”

The Penn State University study found that during the first few months of the pandemic, 83% of providers statewide reported losing more than a quarter of their revenue, with one-third reporting losing half. For many providers, tuition makes up much of their revenue, and when the kids don’t come, the money doesn’t either.

Around the time that study was conducted, the state began sending grants to child care providers from the first federal stimulus package, called the CARES Act.

Tyrone Scott II, director of governmental and external affairs at First Up, an early childhood advocacy group in Philadelphia, said, “There are definitely providers who are living on that CARES money and said, ‘If I didn’t get this check, I would have shut down’”

Even if Philadelphia avoided the worst-case scenario, Scott said there are still reasons for concern. Those include the loss of highly rated providers, which are hard to replace because it takes time for new providers to move up the state ratings ladder. He also worries about the loss of nearly 90 home-based providers — a group that often provides hard-to-find care for babies and toddlers, and sometimes accommodates non-traditional work hours.

Such providers “tend to be the most flexible and responsive to family needs,” he said. Plus, amid COVID, many parents likely feel safer sending their kids to a setting with only a handful of other children.

Scott said as child care slots disappear, “We’re going to see kids going into less safe environments.”

He also worries the pandemic has chased veteran early childhood teachers out of the field, exacerbating the pre-pandemic staffing crisis.

“We probably lost a good amount of experienced teachers to Costco, Walmart, and Chick-fil-A,” all of which offer similar or better pay than child care, he said.

Of course, some providers would have closed their doors in 2020 with or without the pandemic.

Cynthia MB Robinson, a highly rated home-based provider, closed permanently in March 2020 after 24 years in the business. She’d planned to retire in late summer anyway, but decided to shutter early so the six children in her care wouldn’t face the disruption of returning after a temporary pandemic closure only to leave again soon after.

Plus, she worried about how the daily comings and goings of the children would affect her husband, a cancer survivor.

“I didn’t want to put him in jeopardy,” she said.

Leslie Spina, the executive director of five Kinder Academy child care centers in Philadelphia, opened one center and closed another over the past year. Just before the pandemic hit, she signed loan paperwork for a new location on Rising Sun Road. It was February and she’d heard about the coronavirus outbreak in China but it felt like a far-away problem, not something she needed to worry about.

“Had I known, we wouldn’t have been signing on that day,” she said.

She went forward with building renovations, albeit more slowly than she’d planned, and the new center opened this March. It wasn’t her sixth center as she’d planned though. Instead, it replaced one in the Mayfair neighborhood, which closed in November because the Presbyterian church that housed it shuttered after a long financial struggle.

Spina said several factors, including having multiple sites, receiving federal stimulus money, and drawing on the organization’s rainy day fund, helped Kinder Academy survive the pandemic mostly intact.

“But we know we’re one banana peel away from bad things happening,” she said. “Life is still precarious.”

Like many providers that managed to stay afloat during the pandemic, enrollment is lower than usual at Kinder Academy’s highly rated centers. One of the five is still temporarily closed because too few families opted to come back.

“People were afraid and because they could make other arrangements, they did,” Spina said.

She expects enrollment to rebound enough at that site that she can reopen in the fall.

Advocates hope the third federal stimulus package — the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan the president signed into law in March — will help providers continue to recover and strengthen the industry as a whole.

Pennsylvania is set to get $1.2 billion for early childhood efforts — about double what it received from the first two federal stimulus packages combined. State officials are still deciding how to allocate the new funds.

“Now is a really prime time to not only account for the effects of the pandemic, but also build the sector back better,” said Miksic, of Public Citizens for Children and Youth.

Philadelphia pre-Ks could see millions in federal dollars. Parents and providers weigh in on how to spend it.

2021-05-14T20:14:17+00:00

Child care providers have long struggled to stay afloat, amid narrow margins and a lack of teachers who are willing to work for low pay. Now early childhood advocates are hoping that an influx of funding could stabilize an industry hard hit during the pandemic, when many families pulled their children from community day cares.

With three federal relief bills signed and a White House proposal to provide free preschool for 3- and 4-year olds, the sector will see a significant boost, and that money could prove transformative.

“This is more than we’ve ever gotten,” said Mai Miksic, director of early childhood education policy for Public Citizens for Children and Youth, or PCCY. The funding, Miksic said, can help child care workers and allows the community “to think creatively about how to improve the child care system.” Advocates such as Miksic, along with parents and providers, are developing proposals for how the money should be spent.

Philadelphia has so far received about $86.8 million in federal coronavirus relief earmarked for licensed child care providers. The state got $1.2 billion more for child care as part of the most recent federal stimulus package, or the American Rescue Plan, and is tasked with determining how and where that money should go. Additionally, the School District of Philadelphia received $1.3 billion in COVID-19 relief, and some of that will be used for the district’s early childhood programming, officials said.

Biden’s latest proposal, outlined in the American Families Plan, unveiled during the president’s April 28 address to Congress, could shift the landscape even further. The White House says the proposal will benefit 5 million children and could save families thousands a year.

That federal plan reflects the same priorities the city “has been implementing through Philadelphia’s free PHLpreK program,” Heather Keafer, a spokesperson for the city’s Office of Children and Families, said in a statement. The PHLpreK program, launched in 2017, funds five and a half hours of free prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year olds, mostly through a tax on sugary beverages. To grow that program, “federal investment is critical,” Keafer said.

State officials have so far allocated funding that helped providers purchase materials to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and to mitigate losses suffered because of declines in enrollment and staffing, said Tracey Campanini, deputy secretary of the state Office of Child Development and Early Learning. Providers could use the funds for expenses, including rent, mortgage payments, insurance, and health care.

In making decisions about forthcoming American Rescue Plan funding, officials “want to be thoughtful not knowing how long the impact of COVID will last,” and consider immediate versus long-term needs over the three-year period that the funds can be used, Campanini said.

Even before the pandemic, the city’s early childhood education infrastrastructure was “rife for improvement,” said Jen DeBell, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association for the Education of Young Children. The coronavirus crisis exacerbated the system’s weaknesses, with some centers forced to close permanently, DeBell said.

Carol Austin, executive director of First Up, formerly the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children, said the infusion of federal funding could mean big and positive changes for the industry. Austin is calling for more investment in teacher and child care worker training.

For her part, Latonta Goldboldt, owner of Small Wonders Family Child Care Home in Logan, wants to see the money used to revise government reimbursement formulas for subsidized care, which she said always come up short. Goldboldt spends much of her time hunting for grants to balance the budget, she said.

That’s because it’s costlier to provide care than one might think, said Carol Wong, the executive director of the Chinatown Learning Center, which received about $49,000 in the early rounds of federal funding — using it mostly for payroll, health insurance, and rent.

People think that’s a lot of money, Wong said, “but they have no idea about [the cost of] payroll and health insurances, and rent. They think we’re good, but we’re not.”

For her part, Wong would like to see funding support salary increases for center staff.

The median salary of a child care worker in Pennsylvania is $10.69 an hour, according to the Early Childhood Workforce Index. About 93% are women; 45% are Black, Asian American or Latino; and people of color own 50% of the centers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Retaining certified teachers is difficult because providers can’t afford to pay them a living wage, Wong said.

Rebecca Bohey, director of Kinder Academy in Northeast Philadelphia, faces a similar issue, often losing certified teachers to school districts that pay more. “We shouldn’t be underpaying our educators,” Bohey said, noting that she knows her staffers could earn more money at a big box store.

Wong and Bohey shared their concerns Friday during a brainstorming session hosted by First Up and Start Strong PA, a coalition of advocacy organizations. The Zoom meeting was one of four scheduled for providers, parents, and others to share suggestions about how government funding should be spent.

Evelyn Stevens and Megan Cerebe argued for increased support for parents. Families often struggle with copays if they qualify for subsidized care, rising costs or loss of subsidized care when they obtain a higher-paying job, and difficulty paying child care costs when they don’t qualify.

Stevens and her husband, whose family income is too high to qualify for subsidized care, delayed having a second child because they couldn’t afford to have two children in child care at the same time.

Cerebe suggested that copays be reduced or eliminated.

“I’m a mother of three and a deli clerk, she said. “It’s a struggle in every way.”

Food insecurity seems to have risen during the pandemic. Why that’s critical for Philadelphia’s early learners.

2021-05-04T21:45:08+00:00

One year before the pandemic, Camille Bell, a North Philadelphia mother of two, applied for food stamps and was denied because she was making more than the household limit.

A veteran on disability and a fixed income, Bell said she could have used the extra benefits to support her and the family’s two children, now ages 2 and 8. Their situation got worse during the pandemic, especially when the father of her second child was cut from his job.

“I basically have to really budget the money that I do have left over after paying bills to really manage us having food in the house or I’m very open to being able to receive food through community programs to carry us through the month because it’s not that we are having to go completely without, but there are times that I have to stretch the food out,” she said. “I probably can see it coming, kind of planning in a way where maybe over that week I see the need to make more of a budget meal that’s going to last for a few days.”

Bell is one of thousands of parents in Philadelphia with early learners who are dealing with some degree of food insecurity, especially as the pandemic has left people without regular work and a steady flow of income.

Felice Le-Scherban, assistant professor of epidemiology at Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health and the principal investigator for the Philadelphia site of Children’s Healthwatch, said higher levels of food insecurity can affect early learners’ development.

“Food insecurity among young children is associated with poor overall health, putting them at developmental risk. It’s also associated with more hospitalizations, and also, this may seem counterintuitive, but with a higher risk of obesity,” said Le-Scherban. “And this can be because sometimes food insecurity can lead to needing to prioritize just having enough calories and purchasing less nutritionally dense food with fewer vitamins and nutrients, which can be more expensive, as opposed to less expensive food that may be higher in calories but don’t provide as many nutrients.”

Local health and hunger experts say that while exact numbers have yet to be reported, the pandemic has most likely worsened what was already one of the highest child food insecurity rates in the country. According to Feeding America, Philadelphia’s 2018 child food insecurity rate was 24.2% and the projected 2021 rate is 28.6%.

Le-Scherban said their preliminary research shows a growing pattern. A network of pediatricians and researchers, Children’s Healthwatch (Philadelphia) surveys the caregivers of young children under the age of 4 while they are in medical center waiting areas, waiting for pediatric care.

In 2016, among families surveyed at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, 11.8% reported that their children were food insecure. Now preliminary research, which is still ongoing, shows a sharp shift.

Recent surveys of families that Children’s HealthWatch (Philadelphia) previously spoke to between 2018 and 2020 indicate “striking increases in food insecurity,” said Le-Scherban. She added that although the research is “preliminary” and was conducted mainly on North Philadelphia families, it can be applied generally.

“We do have information on child food insecurity in our COVID survey but have not analyzed it yet. However, based on the preliminary numbers that we have already seen with pretty dramatic increases in household food insecurity, I think it is very likely that child food insecurity is at least as high or higher than it was before the pandemic,” she said. “What we can absolutely say is we have seen increases in household food insecurity.”

The School District of Philadelphia hasn’t surveyed families about how food insecurity is affecting them during the pandemic, but in the 2018-19 school year, 22% of parents responded to a districtwide survey, “Understanding Food Insecurity in the School District of Philadelphia.”

Of parents who responded, 13% said they worried about having enough food for their family in the past 30 days. Of the principals who responded, 32% said food insecurity was a “moderate” or “great” challenge to learning in their school.

“Most people, whether they are children or adults, if they are hungry, it’s going to be hard for them to focus,” said Principal Shakeera Warthen of Bregy Elementary School. “It is important for our students to be fed so they can participate in learning. What’s going on with the pandemic and everything else in the world has been hard for us as adults to deal with, it’s very hard for little people to deal with. Even if they don’t know everything that’s going on, they see how it’s impacting people around them, so they have to take on that stress.”

Monica Lewis, a district spokeswoman, said an assessment might be conducted after the end of this school year to measure how issues during the pandemic affected early childhood learning.

“When school starts next year, we’ll figure out a way to see where our students are and what needs to be done to make sure that they have what they need to continue to thrive and that goes well beyond access to food but to make sure they are supported as best as possible,” she said.

Bell said in her experience, it may have affected her son’s attitude at home.

“I can’t say for sure. It would be like us experiencing issues at home because I have, for a long time, had issues with my oldest son at school. He is diagnosed with ADHD, I don’t completely subscribe to that. I just think he is a busy 8-year-old, but he’s definitely been detached from school. It does in some way have something to do with what we experience in the house. I try to have conversations with him about his feelings and emotions,” she said.

“He’s constantly asking for food - being at home, it’s a real strange area where I noticed I wasn’t having to go out so much compared to now during the pandemic. I will give him a morning snack just to kind of stretch things out and then I would give him a bigger lunch meal but he’s like disconnected in between that time. He might still be asking me for something else to eat.”

Malika King, a single mother of eight children, said access to food has been a struggle, especially during the pandemic when her food stamps were taken away.

“I’m a single mom, I don’t have the help from my children’s father. So, it’s been a little struggle. I do stretch my food…I have to make sure I have enough to go day by day and I have to be specific. [But] I make sure they have food on the table,” said King.

“No one is going starving, but we are not rich. I make sure they have a three-course meal, if they like it or not. We can’t say ‘I want this, I want that.’ We have to eat whatever I cook. They recognize I’m trying really hard to provide food and we shouldn’t waste food because there are people out there that have less than we have.”

Since last March, when schools shut down, the school district has given out more than 8 million meals through their Grab-N-Go Meals program. They started distributing meals five days a week at schools, but now give out seven-day meal kits on Fridays.

Wayne Grasela, senior vice president of Food Services, said the program is the only one of its magnitude that he’s seen in his 34 years with the district.

“We knew from the very beginning that we were going to be front-lined, we feed the children day in, day out, every day, summers, sometimes on Saturdays, after school...We knew we needed to step up right from the very beginning,” he said.

Many organizations in Philadelphia also give out food boxes and or meals. Philabundance and Share, two large-scale food programs, both reported a 60% increase in the food they’ve distributed during the pandemic.

Le-Scherban believes that the country needs to address some of the systemic roots to food insecurity. She noted that the child tax credit, which passed as part of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan, is estimated to temporarily cut child poverty in half.

She would like to see that kind of change made permanently.

“When the same population and the same families are encountering hardships like food insecurity over and over again, generation after generation. At that point, we really need to start to think about what are the large systems that we have that are creating those inequities over time, over generations,” she said.

Bell, the North Philadelphia mother of two, has accessed the North Philly Peace Park, which offers free access to a garden of fresh produce and teaches her family how to grow their own food.

After the public school nearest her stopped giving out food during the pandemic, it became a key part of helping feed her children.

“They were one of the first organizations I know that started going hard — like giving out food at the onset of the pandemic,” she said. “Once the pandemic started, wanting to give my child balanced meals [and] really trying to make sure we include vegetables and especially to have locally grown vegetables - [being] able to access that garden definitely helped for me not to put thought into where I was going to get these things from.”

King has gotten some food for her family from local food programs and a community organizer she used to work for, but she said those aren’t sustainable. She observed that the increased pressure from the pandemic has made her look inward.

“I think that it’s a push for me not to rely on others and a push for me to do for myself. It’s been quite a struggle,” she said. “But I have no other choice but for it to be okay. It’s a push for me to make it my own way.”

City officials expand free internet access to Philadelphia prekindergarten students

2021-04-26T21:31:06+00:00

Editor’s note: This article was updated to properly attribute phrases that appeared verbatim in a press release from the City of Philadelphia.

Families with students in prekindergarten now are eligible for PHLConnectED, a program that provides students with free internet access during remote learning, city officials announced Monday.

Mayor Jim Kenney called the expansion an “important step to continue to help Philadelphia’s youngest learners grow and be successful over the long term.”

Philadelphia unveiled the program last year, and estimated that about 18,000 families needed internet access to participate in remote learning after the city’s public schools closed during the pandemic. Students in pre-K were among the first to return to in-person learning in early March, but some families have continued to learn remotely.

Households with students in grades prekindergarten through 12 qualify if they meet certain criteria, including no home internet access or housing insecurity among others, according to city officials.

Families who have internet in their homes can qualify if they receive income-based public benefits such as Medicaid or if students are learning English or receive special education services, city officials said.

The hotline, operated by United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey, is available around the clock, with information provided in up to 150 languages. Families can get information on referrals to resources and a phone number to call to set up service if they qualify.

Since the program began, local officials have found that some families are reluctant to sign up because they are suspicious of the offer. Some households started the process to receive wired access or a mobile hotspot and then didn’t complete it. A large proportion of families failed to take the next step, said Otis Hackney, the city’s chief education officer.

Hackney said many families don’t believe that they won’t get a bill, or are reluctant to divulge personal information to another entity. “There is a lack of trust some people have,” he said.

City officials said they have reached about 12,000 families, including more than 7,000 who had signed up for a Comcast promotion before the official launch of PHLConnectED.

The program, which is financed through a mix of public dollars and private giving plans to provide free internet access through early summer 2022.

“The pandemic has continued to show us that internet access is an essential service for all—regardless of age, and I’m glad that more families will be connected by the time they start kindergarten,” Kenney said.

The school district’s pre-K and kindergarten registration processes are now open.

“This resource will be valuable to our students and their families as we register more students for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, invite them to attend the virtual open house and encourage them to participate in this year’s summer programming to help them transition and feel confident about starting school in the fall,” Superintendent William Hite said Monday.

Pennsylvania should increase early childhood investment by $250 million, national report says

2021-04-21T15:28:33+00:00

Pennsylvania would need to increase its spending on preschool by $250 million per year to assure all eligible children have access to a high quality program, according to the annual report by the National Institute of Early Education Research.

It would take another $57 million to fully fund the state’s Head Start program, which serves the poorest children, the NIEER analysis shows.

In the report, the NIEER, based at Rutgers University, recommends a significant new investment in early childhood education for 3- and 4-year-olds nationally — paid for by both the federal government and the states — with a goal of making preschool free to all low-income children by 2040 and all children by 2050.

“Congress has increased federal support for child care in recent years,” said Steve Barnett, NIERR’s founder and co-director. “We’re at historic levels. But we’re far from having enough money to fund even half the eligible kids.”

Tracy Campanini, Pennsylvania’s deputy secretary in the Office of Child Development and Early Learning, said that by her department’s own accounting, 60% of children eligible for the array of state and federal programs — Child Care Works, Pre-K Counts, and Head Start — are not served. Her estimate counts all families under 300% of the federal poverty level, which is $26,500 for a family of four.

“We recognize there are unmet needs,” she said. “We are trying to take an equitable approach to meet our goals.”

Harrisburg has increased spending on early childhood, with an emphasis on expanding access in the most vulnerable communities. Last year, the state spent $334 million for early childhood education, an increase of $36 million from the year before.

The number of children funded by Pre-K Counts has more than doubled, to nearly 30,000 students, compared to 2015. Head Start, which serves families under 100% of the federal poverty level, also has seen significant growth, Campanini said.

But even with these investments, Pennsylvania is nowhere near the level of funding that NIEER recommends. The report calls for $12,000 per student, compared to the $6,850 per student the state spends now.

And while Pennsylvania has increased overall spending on early childhood, it has not increased the basic rate of reimbursement for child care services since 2007.

Quality or access?

Maintaining quality and standards is a tall order in the state’s complex public-private system of child care and early childhood education. The state measures quality through its Keystone Stars rating system, established in 2003, which sets standards for teacher training and credentials, classroom practices, and financial soundness, among other benchmarks. Child care centers are rated from one star through four, and the lower quality centers are helped to improve.

Most care is offered by private centers that get subsidies through several different state programs for students, depending on need, including Child Care Works, Pre-K Counts, and Head Start. Many centers serve a combination of subsidized children and families who pay the full cost.

“There are many more children eligible than there are subsidy dollars to go around for them,” Barnett said.

In some ways, that can lead to a difficult choice: To serve more children or improve the quality of programs for the children who are already enrolled. It can be hard to do both.

Pennsylvania’s child care system also took a hit in the pandemic, according to the NIEER report. As costs soared to implement COVID-19 safety measures, enrollment decreased, leading to the loss of per-student subsidies and tuition payments.

Providers like Leslie Spina, whose Kinder Academy has five centers in Philadelphia, have been struggling not just to maintain their pre-pandemic quality, but to simply stay in business.

Overall, her enrollment has gone down from 500 to 270; about 85 of those students are learning virtually.

Spina said since the pandemic she had to close one center permanently in Mayfair. But she was able to open another in which she had invested more than $3 million before the pandemic by dipping into emergency funds, although its opening was postponed from June to September.

Many of her families are immigrants “who live in multi-generational families, and they are afraid that the children will bring it home to grandparents,” she said. “And lots of people have not gone back to work...while people are keeping in touch with us, they don’t have the funds or ability to be back in a face-to-face environment.”

Overall, said Spina, the pandemic has changed the industry permanently.

Since September, state subsidies have been based on actual enrollment rather than pre-pandemic numbers, a decision that many providers fought and that has hurt many centers’ bottom line, including Kinder Care.

“I can see how it looks crazy to people outside the industry who would ask, ‘Why pay for kids if they aren’t there,’” said Spina. “But we’re still doing the work as if the children are still there.”

Campanini said the state understands the dilemma of providers, but “we cannot pay for children who are no longer enrolled.”

Barnett said Pennsylvania’s experience shows how the chronic underfunding of early childhood leads to tensions over whether to invest more in increasing access or in maintaining and improving quality.

But the way the state has distributed the money from federal stimulus programs since the pandemic has not taken into account the considerably higher cost of maintaining high quality programs, those that have earned three or four Keystone Stars, said Donna Cooper of the advocacy group Public Citizens for Children and Youth.

At the high-rated centers, lead teachers have degrees in early childhood education, at least half the staff are enrolled in or have completed a child development program, and they use developmentally and culturally appropriate curricula and instructional methods, among other standards. Centers must undergo visits and observations to earn these stars, not just fill out paperwork.

The state’s rationale is that it wants to invest more heavily in centers that serve low-income families, Campanini said. A statewide equity report earlier this year found “overwhelmingly” that Black, Latino, and biracial children were being served in low-quality centers, those with one or two stars.

But that strategy means that centers like Spina’s, which are already high quality and serve a largely low-income population, are suffering, Cooper said.

Current state policy, “offers no incentives to cause providers to move up the quality ladder,” Cooper said. “The amount of money going to higher quality centers is not enough, and there is no risk in staying low quality.”

Campanini disagrees with that assessment. “We want to stabilize providers so they are able to move to high quality,” she said.

Public Citizens for Children and Youth is holding virtual forums in Philadelphia and the four surrounding counties starting this week to solicit feedback about how the state should spend the nearly $1.2 billion in additional funding it will get from the American Rescue Plan for early childhood education. They are: April 23 for Delaware/Chester County; April 29 for Montgomery County; April 30 for Philadelphia, and May 7 for Bucks County. All sessions are between 1:30 p.m. and 3 p.m.

The national picture

Students do better, on average, when they attend early childhood programs — with some caveats — and some states have expanded preschool programs as a result. The investments have transcended party lines in many cases, with support from both Democratic and Republican governors.

After a 2018 study by the University of Alabama showed that students who participate are more likely to be proficient in math and reading, Alabama set a goal of serving 70% of its 4-year-olds, said Governor Kay Ivey on a call with reporters. “The academic benefit persisted through the middle school years,” she said. “We are making good, steady progress.”

“Because we took the time to do it right, we’re seeing the impact later,” said W. Clayton Birch, West Virginia’s superintendent of education. Investing in “birth through kindergarten makes a difference.”

Nationwide, adequate and universally available early childhood would cost an additional $10 billion a year, Barnett said, a cost he said should be shared by the federal government and the states.

While pandemic stimulus funds to states are crucial for immediate survival, “the bigger question is now to sustain this over the long term,” Barnett said.

NIEER is recommending a federal-state partnership to ramp up support for preschool, with an expenditure of $91 billion annually once fully funded in 30 years.

In his public statements, President Biden says he wants to start the journey toward that goal by endorsing universal preschool. The second phase of his infrastructure plan, expected to be unveiled before the end of the month, is expected to include at least $225 billion for child care and preschool, according to the Washington Post. The first part of his plan proposed $25 billion to upgrade and expand facilities.

Pandemic creates new hurdles for educators and families of Philadelphia’s youngest English language learners

2021-04-16T16:48:58+00:00

Even virtually, Dina Palermo looks like she is playing charades when she is teaching.

One minute she is pointing to her ears, showing that it is time for listening. The next she is miming emotions to explain a read-aloud book. Teaching in her English as a second language classroom of first graders at Southwark School has always been physical, but for a year her body language has been confined to the boundaries of a small screen.

“When it is two numbers being put together, I’ll emphasize my two hands coming together. The numbers get bigger, I make a big wide circle. The kids start to follow that routine,” she said. “So I model all these things, literally physically, and I have the kids do it too, looking at me through the Zoom and, you know, then they kind of start to get it.”

Teaching young learners in the pandemic has been challenging for many educators, but those instructing English language learners virtually face even steeper obstacles. These students may struggle with remote learning due to lack of access to technology, language barriers, and the inability to practice their language skills with classmates.

In Philadelphia, where about 13% of the district’s nearly 120,000 students are learning English, some teachers say these students feel more isolated than their peers and often struggle with less support from parents who, despite their best efforts, are not necessarily equipped to help with school, either because of language barriers or having to work outside the home during a pandemic. And even as elementary schools began welcoming back younger grade students, some immigrant families remain hesitant to return.

A Philadelphia School District report released in January showed that students learning English saw slightly smaller declines than their peers on a math and reading assessment comparing winter to fall 2020. But the overall gap between the groups remained stubborn — English language learners scored on average about 15 percentile points lower than their peers, largely consistent with the achievement gap before the shift to virtual learning.

Parents who speak a language other than English at home point to numerous aspects of remote learning as being difficult, from trouble-shooting technology to making sure a student is in the right virtual classroom to voicing concerns over their children’s performance.

But despite these added challenges, some teachers told Chalkbeat that their English language learners have been less likely than other students to return to the classroom as in-person learning resumes. (Officials said the district did not yet have specific data about English language learners and in-person learning).

Guiling Huang, whose family runs a beer distributor, says that it has been hard to oversee her children’s virtual education because she did not understand the online programs. Huang’s primary language is Chinese. The mother of a kindergartener and a third grader at McCall Elementary School, Huang left her job with the family business to help support her children’s learning, but she feels limited in how much she can do given the language barrier.

A mural at Southwark School, where Dina Palermo teaches young English language learners.

Still, she did not choose to immediately send her children back to the classroom when the school shifted to a hybrid model in late March, in part because of fears about the virus but also reports of anti-Asian violence across the nation.

Teaching English language learners also became more challenging with virtual learning, as common strategies to bridge the language gaps can be difficult to translate to a screen. “They cannot use body language as a cue to interpret the language that I’m trying to teach them,” said Shuxin Chen, who teachers English language learners at McCall. “I use a lot of physical responses, a lot of games or actions to show them the content, I teach language through activities, but now, I’m limited with that,” she said.

Before the pandemic, students learning English in Philadelphia were found to be more proficient in listening and speaking English than literacy and writing. A 2017 study of Philadelphia kindergarteners learning English showed that within four years 81% of the cohort was proficient in oral language, while only 63% were proficient in English language literacy and 48% proficient in writing.

Students often get more practice in oral language skills just by being social and physically in the same space as English-speakers, in addition to the opportunities for “productive talk” in the classroom. By contrast, reading and writing instruction happens more formally. Chen fears that the solitary nature of virtual instruction will not only leave students emotionally isolated, but without the sustained exposure to oral English skills that her students would normally get in school naturally.

Miulcaeli Batista, the Philadelphia School District’s Executive Director of Multilingual Curriculum and Programs, agreed that virtual learning was particularly challenging for district students learning English. “The district recognizes that this segment of our student body and their families is very diverse, and that their access to and level of comfort with technology varies depending on many factors, such as reliable connection to internet service, experience with virtual platforms, and English fluency,” she said.

Batista said that there has been a significant effort to provide information and other resources such as a multilingual hotline in nine of the languages most commonly spoken by Philadelphia families. They are also working on voice overs in languages other than English for “how-to” videos focused on skills like how to use Google Meet, Google Classroom, or Zoom. Batista said that her office has also worked to strengthen ties with community groups such as the Philadelphia Refugee Education Collaborative to reach immigrant and refugee families.

The younger the student, Chen says, the more challenging it is. The kindergarteners she teaches have what she calls a “double burden” when learning phonics, as they both try to learn sounds but also vocabulary to contextualize those sounds.

“If the teacher says to look at the picture of the apple and tell me, what’s the beginning sound, every other kid will know that that object is an apple and they will make an ‘Aaa’ sound for the letter A,” Chen said. “The ELL student doesn’t know what that thing is called in English. They have to learn the name of the object at the same time as they have to learn the letter sound. It is a significant mental burden.”

Teaching the youngest students to write is also more complicated online, teachers said. Palermo says she generally likes to teach writing as a mini-lesson to a whole group then work with students individually. “You can see their work, you can make changes, you can edit with them. That is something that is so hard virtually because all I can do is ask them to hold up your paper. Then you have the issue of ‘Oh, I can’t see your paper. Can you hold a little closer? Nope that is too close, it’s blurry’” she explained.

While teachers have come up with workarounds for computer-based instruction, typing is tricky with kindergarteners or first graders learning letters. Meanwhile, drawing on a screen with a cursor does not provide the same fine motor skills as writing with a pencil.

And it is a process that happens at different speeds for different students — but remote learning makes differentiation a challenge. Normally there are times of the day that a teacher can check in with a student who may not understand what is going on, or a student who might be advancing more quickly can be given variations of activities that are more challenging. But in virtual learning, teachers are limited in their one-on-one contact with students and the variations they can provide.

Palermo also tries to create consistency for her students learning English, but maintaining routine has been hard in a year of unforeseen issues and last-minute changes to schedules. Philadelphia elementary schools tried multiple times to reopen before finally allowing some early grade students to return last month.

Even with the challenges faced by these students with remote learning, the teachers that Chalkbeat interviewed said that families of students learning English have been more hesitant to return their youngest children to the classroom than families of students in general classrooms. In the first opt-in period for hybrid learning, none of Palermo’s students at Southwark were enrolled to go back to the classroom. Similarly, Chen and her team lead, Iwa Cliggett, said that only one of the English language learners at McCall opted-in to the hybrid model in the first round. Both have started to see this change with more rounds and increased vaccinations, but still not at the same rate as English-speaking families.

Huang was one of the parents who said she wanted to wait to send her children back to the classroom. She cited three reasons: concerns about the virus, the difficulty of having different hybrid schedules for her children in different grades, and fear of rising anti-Asian violence across the country.

Both Chen and Huang said that they had spoken to other Asian families across the city who have concerns about their children being subject to bullying given the recent rise in violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Chen and Huang are both originally from China.

Palermo, whose students mostly come from Spanish-speaking families, said that these families have also been more hesitant, but mostly because they live in multigenerational homes where family members might be more vulnerable to the virus. Additionally, most of the families she works with are essential workers and already worry that their risk of exposure is higher.

“People are fearful for a lot of reasons,” said Palermo. “America has been a scary place for immigrant families over the past few years, and the pandemic has made it even scarier”

Educators and advocates fear pandemic will widen Philadelphia’s literacy gaps

2021-03-31T19:23:48+00:00

In Valerie Haley’s kindergarten class at Rowen Elementary in West Oak Lane, the shift to virtual learning affected students differently: The students who have parents at home, have materials at their disposal, those are the ones who seem to be more engaged than others.

Across the city, at McCall Elementary, Iwa Cliggett and her team of English as a second language teachers noticed that students who already struggled in the classroom were the ones most affected by remote learning. Students with attention issues had a harder time focusing. Students who were easily frustrated became more so, and students who were just beginning to learn English were increasingly isolated.

Educators and literacy specialists have been worried that the pandemic and the resulting shift to virtual learning could exacerbate existing gaps in literacy rates, largely along socioeconomic and racial lines. That’s one reason Superintendent William Hite wanted to get the district’s youngest students, most of whom are learning to read, back in school buildings this spring.

“We know that children, especially our youngest learners, and those with complex needs, learn best in person,” Hite said earlier this year, noting particular concern about children learning to read.

The abrupt shift to remote learning a year ago has raised concerns about the long-term effects on early childhood literacy rates, particularly in a city where only 17% of public school fourth graders read at or above “proficient” standards, according to 2019 test data from the National Association of Educational Progress, or NAEP.

“Our students were already being underserved in their literacy instruction. And so now with the pandemic, it’s only gotten worse for many students,” said Sharif El-Mekki, CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development.

Data on the effects of the pandemic still are limited, but there is some evidence that the pandemic has not yet had the disproportionate effect on already disadvantaged students that many fear.

District officials released a report in January that found a significant decline in internal reading assessments for grades one to five between the winter before the pandemic began and the fall of 2020. (No tests were given last spring.) Students who were in kindergarten last year and first grade in the fall had the most dramatic drop, of 15 percentiles.

Most racial groups, however, were affected about the same: Black, white and Asian students all saw scores decline by about 6 percentiles, while Latino students dropped by about 5 percentiles.

Similarly, students considered “economically disadvantaged” dropped about the same as their wealthier peers. The testing, which was done on the same group of students from one academic year to the next, provides a small window into the pandemic’s effects.

Nyshawana Francis-Thompson, executive director of the district’s Office of Curriculum and Instruction, said the limited data the district has so far has not seemed to show that disparities among groups have worsened, but they also haven’t improved. Wide pre-pandemic disparities in early literacy rates across these groups combined with across-the-board learning loss is a significant cause for concern, she said.

“The achievement gap is not new during the pandemic,” said Francis-Thompson, adding that early literacy has become an area of particular focus for her office beyond the immediate effects of the pandemic.

Board members discussed literacy rates at a meeting on Jan. 28 in which district officials noted that nearly 72% of first graders scored either “below average” or “well-below average” on the district’s reading assessments this fall. Additionally, only 32% of third graders were reading at grade level.

The report, prepared for the Philadelphia Board of Education’s “goals and guardrails” initiative, starkly outlined how the largest disparities in early literacy break down on racial and socioeconomic lines, though all students were far from the district’s final literacy goal. The few schools where most students are at grade level enroll fewer students and are disproportionately white.

“I think it’s those who work in literacy and education are pretty certain that children, while they’ve been given education this year, it’s different,” said Jenny Bogoni, executive director of Read by 4th, a coalition working to ensure that Philadelphia students are reading on grade level by fourth grade. ”They’ve likely not absorbed the same level of instruction as they would have in a normal year.”

Bogoni noted that the toll the pandemic has taken on literacy is expected to affect communities experiencing poverty “at a much higher rate or in a much more negative way” than others.

Students living in poverty are more likely to have parents who had to juggle jobs while finding child care, lack internet connectivity in their households, or may not have materials in the home to promote reading. They are also more likely to live in communities that lack resources and experience instability.

“You’re talking about the racial stress, the racial injustice, the educational injustice that’s been heaped on these communities for generations,” said El-Mekki.

Even before the pandemic, a recent Temple University study showed that 72% of teachers felt unprepared to work in urban classrooms, while 62% felt unprepared to teach “culturally diverse” students.

“Now we’re talking about literacy on top of that?” said El-Mekki. “This is a double whammy that is very hard for children to just ‘overcome’.”

Both the district and Read By 4th believe that more data is necessary to fully understand the ways in which student learning has been affected by the pandemic.

According to district data, Black, Latino and Native American students are the racial groups farthest from the district’s literacy targets. Only 31% of Black students, 23.5% of Latinos, and 22% of Native American students in kindergarten through third grade are at or above grade level in reading. Similarly the report found that only 20% of English learners, 26% of students in special education, and 30% of economically disadvantaged students were on grade level in reading.

Failing to reverse this trend can have lifelong consequences.

“There’s tons of data and research that supports that early literacy is connected to students’ outcome with graduating. And post-secondary,” said Francis-Thompson. “So we need to get our youngest people back in front of us so that we are addressing their needs.”

Beyond the pandemic, she said that her office is looking at several strategies. First they are transitioning early literacy instruction to be more focused on the “science of reading.” But Francis-Thompson said that is not enough to address the disparities.

The district also is writing new curriculum units designed for early grades that center the experiences of students of color. The Philadelphia school district is predominantly Black and Latino.

“There is a need to look at the identity of Black and brown children,” she said.

By fourth grade, students are less likely to get targeted reading instruction and instead start to be given material to read for learning.

“Not only is your reading skill going to be behind and you’ve got less of a chance to make it up,” said Bogoni, “but it means when you’re sitting in science class and asked to read a paragraph about whatever the science lesson is, or reading a math problem or reading your social studies material, you get behind in all these other subjects because you’re behind in reading.”

For El-Mekki, the solution is multi-faceted. Not only does he think there needs to be a shift in the way teachers are trained to teach reading, they also need to know better how to engage students of color. And there needs to be more funding for districts like Philadelphia.

Francis-Thompson said that the district is trying to do just that over the long term. More immediately, for students most affected by the pandemic, officials are discussing a wide range of options, including more one-on-one instruction and an extended school year.

Cliggett agrees that more individualized support is necessary. “Even in small groups, sometimes it is not enough,” said Cliggett, “not when students can be so far apart.”

Bogoni also agrees. For her son, who was a struggling reader, one-on-one tutoring was the only intervention that worked. She sees this as a crucial strategy for lagging readers.

The concern with one-on-one tutoring is cost and scalability. The district already has a pilot program that matches high school students who fail English or math courses in the first semester with one-on-one tutors. Francis-Thompson believes that if that program shows meaningful results it could be expanded to lower grades. On the question of scale, she thinks that expanded partnerships with tutoring services and programs could make it work.

Read by 4th is currently doing research into this area. “I think we do have to look at how to scale tutoring in a way that makes it accessible to all families,” Bogoni said. Even having more trained adults in the classroom would make a difference. “If I’m thinking about policy and how to use the stimulus dollars that are going to be flowing, I think we probably need more adults trained around supporting teaching and reading in classrooms in the coming years.”

Another option is more effectively using the summer as an extension of the academic year. The summer break often results in what’s known as the “summer slide,” in which a student’s skills regress after a summer off. After the past year, educating students throughout the summer has taken on particular significance (with some wondering whether it is time to rethink the academic calendar entirely).

El-Mekki’s Center for Black Educator Development runs the Freedom School Literacy Academy, a program that trains high school and college students in proven literacy teaching strategies and in ways to more effectively reach Black students. Not only does this set up a pipeline for Black educators to enter the profession, but it more effectively reaches some of the communities most affected by the city’s gloomy literacy rates.

The Academy, focused on kindergarten through second grade, combines a strong emphasis on phonics and phonemic awareness and fluency with culturally specific instruction that targets Black students. This will be the fifth year of the summer program and the center believes it is more important than ever.

El-Mekki said the summer academies are in high demand and the hope is to double their capacity to reach 200 students. But even then El-Mekki said they expect there will be a waitlist. They also hope to run an extended program throughout the year starting this fall.

Francis-Thompson said that the district is also looking seriously at more options to extend instruction into the summer as a way to get students most significantly impacted by the pandemic additional help, although the details have not been released yet.

One thing everyone is clear about: making sure the youngest students have the building blocks to literacy has become a top priority.

“Anytime we are talking about being a world-class city and we have a populace this high that can’t read on grade level, we’re lying to ourselves,” said El-Mekki. “Being able to read is a human right.”

Philadelphia’s in-person learning expands to 22 more schools

2021-03-23T19:24:48+00:00

The School District of Philadelphia has announced 22 additional schools that are expected to open April 5 for prekindergarten to second grade.

Teachers at the schools are scheduled to return Wednesday.

The district’s announcement this week comes after scores of speakers urged the Philadelphia Board of Education at a public hearing last Thursday to open schools as quickly and as completely as possible. It also comes after Mayfair Elementary in the Northeast closed temporarily last Wednesday because of COVID-19 cases at the school.

“We are neither for opening schools at all costs, nor are we for keeping schools closed at all costs,” said Thomas Novak, a father of four students, who spoke at last week’s hearing. “But now it can be said that in-person schooling provides only a small health risk.”

This is the fourth set of schools announced since the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers and the district agreed on a phased-in reopening process, which allowed the union to review ventilation documents in all schools before bringing students and staff back for in-person instruction. The agreement was reached following a mediation process led by a city-appointed third party.

The first 53 schools reopened on March 8, followed by 45 more schools on March 15. And 35 more elementary schools reopened Monday for in-person education.

Families with students in prekindergarten to second grade have until Tuesday to opt in to hybrid learning, if they want.

According to the district, families who select hybrid learning will be contacted by their child’s school later this week regarding next steps. They will be scheduled to start hybrid learning the week of April 5. The early learners whose families do not complete the survey will remain in all-digital learning. Families choosing hybrid learning for their child can return to all-digital learning at any time.

Mayor Jim Kenney has been vocal about returning as many early learners back to school as possible over concerns of learning loss and revving the local economy.

“We’re proud of everything the district did for our students and families during this very difficult period,” Kenney said. “There is no playbook for this pandemic, we did the best we could to meet the needs of our children.”

Students participating in hybrid learning will attend school in person two days per week and engage in digital learning three days each week, based on an assigned schedule designed to safely limit the number of students in schools and help maintain social distancing in all school spaces throughout the day.

Since returning to schools, teachers have been cataloguing what they say are unsanitary conditions, despite promises from the district that buildings had been thoroughly cleaned and made safe. The website #phled reopening tracker, started by members of the Caucus of Working Educators, urges teachers to post pictures and descriptions of conditions they find as they re-enter school buildings for the first time since the shutdown last March. In less than a week, the site received more than 30 testimonials.

‘It’s like a dystopian version of school’: A day at Philadelphia’s Richard Wright Elementary

2021-03-13T01:10:23+00:00

When Richard Wright Elementary School welcomed students back on Thursday, these were the adults in the building: the principal and assistant principal, the secretary, the nurse, the climate manager, the climate specialist, the safety officer, a kindergarten teacher, two first grade teachers, two second grade teachers, three special education teachers, the emotional support liaison, the Spanish teacher, the art teacher, five paraprofessionals, two food service workers, one technology specialist, an occupational therapist, a physical therapist, and two bus aides.

There were 30 adults and just five students.

Wright, which enrolls 306 students in kindergarten through fifth grade, was one of 53 schools to open this week for some in-person learning as part of the School District of Philadelphia’s phased-in reopening for the early grades. Principal Jeannine Payne and the teachers and other staff who returned to their building for the first time in almost a year desperately crave normal school experiences. A hug. A high five. Holding a young student’s hand on the way into the building. But, based on their experiences so far, the road to normal seems impossibly steep.

Laura Nicholas, who teaches Spanish, said she felt more effective teaching from home, where she can teach without a mask and use props. Here she must wear a mask and most of the time has no students in person. Those who do attend sit behind plastic barriers and can’t go near their classmates, if there are any in the room.

“This is like a dystopian version of school,” she said.

For the students who came on Thursday, all in kindergarten, it was their first day ever of in-person school, and the only normal they know.

Sydnee and Andre in Ellen Jenkin’s kindergarten class.

Two of them were in teacher Ellen Jenkin’s room. They sat behind plexiglass barriers, carefully spaced six feet apart. Andre Baker, 6, knew one piece of normal school he could look forward to: recess. But when Charles Brown, the school’s climate specialist, summoned him and Sydnee Tucker, 6, from class mid-morning, it was to take them for their rapid COVID-19 tests in the nurse’s office. Fifteen minutes later, they returned wearing Groucho Marx masks that Brown discovered as he took the two on a tour of the mostly empty building while awaiting their (negative) results.

Philadelphia, in its fourth attempt at reopening, is bringing back students in prekindergarten to second grade, with a new set of schools announced each week. At Wright, about 130 students in the early grades were eligible for the hybrid model — 56 were expected to return, but 18 have been in class so far.

Most students are split into two cohorts and attend two days a week, either Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday. Special education students with complex needs, such as autism and physical disabilities, can attend all four days.

Wright has a high percentage of special education students, about 34%, because it volunteered to be a center for high-needs students in North Philadelphia. That’s one reason the school has so many adults on staff.

Of the regular education students and special education students without complex needs, 37 said they wanted hybrid learning, but so far, just 14 have shown up. One of them is Payne’s son, a first grader.

The district automatically enrolled 19 eligible students with complex needs in hybrid learning, but so far only four have attended.

Payne did say that 15 additional all-virtual families have contacted her to get on the list for hybrid learning when the district again offers the opportunity.

In Jenkin’s kindergarten, five students were expected, but just Andre and Sydnee came to school. On Thursday morning, the teacher worked hard to help them while 15 virtual students stared back from her laptop’s screen and a large smartboard, which dominates the front of the classroom.

“I love to see the kids,” said Jenkin, a 20-year teaching veteran, as she struggled to master the interaction between her laptop, her document camera, and smartboard, all while teaching the in-person kids. “But this is a little trickier.”

As the morning progressed, she seemed to become more adept at making it all work. After helping Sydnee and Andre fire up their own laptops, Jenkin led all the students in an exercise matching uppercase letters with their lowercase counterparts. Then she had students circle words with similar sounds, like “tax” and “fix.” She enunciated the consonant sounds, “tuh, tuh, fuh, fuh.”

Richard Wright Elementary School Principal Jeannine Payne.

“This is so hard with a mask,” she said.

Still, most of the students completed the exercises correctly, and Jenkin said she believes that they are making progress under the virtual model. But once the students left for lunch and recess, Jenkin said she was frustrated by all the things she didn’t do or couldn’t do.

First, she pointed out that the bookshelves in her room were turned backwards to the wall. “I have a classroom library, but I can’t use the books,” she said. She would usually teach math using manipulatives, but she can’t do that either.

Before the pandemic, the district began investing millions in revamping kindergarten classrooms with brightly colored tables, reading and writing nooks full of books, LEGO stations, Play-Doh, distinctive cubbies, bins with blocks and math manipulatives. While Wright has not yet had the makeover, the teachers adopted most of the educational philosophy behind it: that much of the learning in kindergarten should be through play and social interaction.

This iteration of kindergarten is not that.

“I use virtual manipulatives, but it’s obviously better for the children to touch them and move them,” Jenkin said. “And I would be doing a lot more writing with them, physically holding a pencil and writing on paper.”

Other teachers in the building spent most of Thursday with no in-person students at all.

Nicholas, who teaches Spanish, and Maya Culbertson, who teaches art, are specialty teachers, which means they take over a class during the regular teachers’ preparation periods.

They typically do so virtually from empty classrooms, and they wonder if putting themselves at risk of catching COVID-19 is worth it.

“I only feel safe because there are so few students,” Nicholas said. “I don’t understand the push to get back before we are all fully vaccinated.”

City officials say they are on track to have all willing school staff fully vaccinated in April. Nicholas said she has received her first vaccine shot.

Andre wearing a Groucho face mask after coming back from a COVID-19 test.

Both she and Culbertson said they doubt that parents understand their students’ actual experience under the hybrid model. One of the touted benefits is socialization, but there is very little of that going on, they said. At one point, Culbertson had a single student in the classroom. “I’m doing a Zoom lesson for one kid sitting at his desk with shields,” she said. “It was lonely.”

What’s happening in Philadelphia, seems to Nicholas “a step forward in getting back to buildings, but not progress.”

Payne did not argue much with Nicholas’ description of the experience as “dystopian.”

“We work so hard to make school a welcoming and nurturing place, where we shake students’ hands and hug them and put a hand on their shoulder when they need it.” But this, however, “is very much the opposite of everything you work toward a school being.”

The public needs to see teachers back in buildings with their students to combat the painful narrative that somehow they are not doing their jobs when they are working harder than ever, Payne said. They need to see the glimmer of normalcy. All she and her teachers can do now is try to make it work.

But, she added, “People don’t understand that what you’re fighting to get back to is not what you had.”

After nearly a year at home, some early-grade students return to Philadelphia schools

2021-03-08T13:10:25+00:00

Naila Baho and her sons arrived at school 45 minutes early Monday, making them among the first students to return to Philadelphia’s public schools after nearly a year of remote learning.

Shoalb and Sudais Khan, in kindergarten and first grade, stood patiently in the cold at 7:30 a.m. with their older brother, Zohaib, a fifth grader who was not going back but came along to translate.

The family, who emigrated from Pakistan in 2019, hadn’t expected to start their new life in America during a pandemic. Baho said Sudais and Shoalb were excited to go to school so they can make new friends and speak English more often. And not spend all day at the computer.

The first family to enter Juniata Park Academy Monday. Naila Baho (top left) mother, Zohaib Khan (top right), Shoalb Khan (bottom right) and Sudais Khan.

“Today [they are] very happy,” she said.

Nearly a year after public schools abruptly closed in Philadelphia, some students in prekindergarten to second grade returned to their classrooms Monday. Students at Juniata Park, a kindergarten to eighth grade school in North Philadelphia, were greeted by Mayor Jim Kenney and Superintendent William Hite on their first day of in-person instruction.

Both Hite and Kenney characterized the day as a milestone — a step toward normalcy, if a small one. Neither would say when more students would be invited to return. Hite said he is hoping by the end of the month the district can open the hybrid model to more early-grade students and perhaps add students in some higher grades as well.

“Although the pandemic is far from over, beginning to welcome some of our students back is a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel,” Hite said. “So we are thrilled to begin doing that.”

The students are returning in three phases beginning with 2,650 students and 53 schools. When all 152 buildings with pre-K through second grade are open — possibly by March 22 — about 9,000 students are expected to attend in-person school two days a week.

The district announced Monday that an additional 45 schools will open for the youngest learners March 15. More schools will be announced on March 15 with their reopening set for March 22.

Teachers, parents, and students at Juniata Park were both excited and a bit apprehensive.

“I’m nervous,” said Jenna Silverman, Juniata Park’s early literacy lead teacher, as she checked in students to make sure they entered through the correct door. But she said she is also ready.

“The teachers here are fabulous, and we did a lot of planning for this,” she said.

Parents also had mixed feelings.

“Obviously I want them to keep them safe, but I don’t want them to fall back when school gets started up again. So I made a personal choice,” said Delaine Martinez, who works in health care, as she dropped off second grader Adriani and kindergartner Cristina. She watched a video of what the socially distanced classroom will look like, which “put my mind at ease. What can I say, it’s part of the new norm.”

Monica Gonzalez said there were “pros and cons” in deciding to have kindergartner Elias and second grader Ethan Cardona go to school in person, but she ultimately decided the pros outweigh the cons.

“Especially Elias, he doesn’t understand the circumstance of sitting in a classroom,” she said.

Silverman said about 60 of the estimated 2,650 students who are returning to district schools this week are at Juniata Park, meaning that 30 or so came Monday. All students are returning in two groups — one on Monday and Tuesday, the other on Thursday and Friday, with Wednesday a virtual day for all.

Jessica Qualtiere, who teaches kindergarten to second grade autism support at Chester Arthur Elementary School in the Graduate Hospital area of South Philadelphia, said much of the assistance in her return to school came from outsiders.

Dennis McVeigh, (left) teacher, with the principal of Chester Arthur Elementary School Mary Libby Monday.

“A lot of the things that you will see in our classrooms were not provided by the district,” she said. “They were from family and community support groups. It’s not a perfect situation. We are trying to flip the positive.”

Philadelphia students are entering a learning environment quite different than the one they left last year. As Chester Arthur students walked from room to room in their first day back, they wore masks and were lined up in the hallway with significant space in-between. Then they sat in classrooms with plexiglass shields attached to their desks.

“My hope for the students in this new learning space is that they feel even more connected to the school and the community,” Mary Libby, the principal of Chester Arthur, said. “I hope they feel loved and supported and understand that we are here going through this new space with them.”

Only one Chester Arthur student who registered to return did not show, Libby said. She noted that all of the school’s teachers returned Monday. “All of the teachers came back,” she said. “Everyone is not vaccinated, but every teacher has had the opportunity to be vaccinated.”

As for when full-time in-person learning might resume for all students districtwide and under what conditions, that is still a huge question mark, dependent on the availability of vaccines and the spread of COVID-19.

Still, “This is truly a great morning,” Kenney said, noting that this time last year the city was taking the unprecedented step of shutting schools down.

Superintendent William Hite, left, and Mayor Jim Kenney at Juniata Park Academy Monday.

Since then, “We’re proud of everything the district did for our students and families during this very difficult period,” Kenney said. “There is no playbook for this pandemic, we did the best we could to meet the needs of our children.”

Hite said teachers did a great job of pivoting from in person to virtual and now to hybrid learning.

“These professionals have been creative, flexible and resilient...and have engaged our students,” he said, also thanking other staff who worked to prepare the buildings.

Kenney said the year has also been hard on parents “and for these reasons and more, I’m so grateful we are able to begin welcoming students back.”

The shift to remote learning for early-grade students has exacerbated concerns across the city about long-term effects on academic achievement, especially for the youngest learners. Kenney said he would favor extending the school year to help students catch up with experiences and learning that they might have missed.

Monday’s reopening is the fourth time since September that the district has attempted to return to some in-person learning. After two false starts in September and November, due to opposition from parents and teachers and a surge in cases of the coronavirus, Hite set a timetable in January for teachers to return on Feb. 8 and students on Feb. 22. That reopening was scrapped after the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers called for third-party mediation over safety issues. The two sides reached an agreement last week.

Many teachers who have been back in their classrooms since last week, however, are complaining on social media of unsanitary conditions and schools that are unprepared and still unsafe for in-person learning.

"We feel lied to & betrayed seeing the condition of our school. Went in today & furniture was not cleaned, mouse droppings are everywhere. How are teachers supposed to have their rooms cleaned & rearranged to be ready to admit students on Mon?" #phled #onlywhenitssafe pic.twitter.com/8y9UlqbI6Q
— Caucus of Working Educators (@CaucusofWE) March 3, 2021

No widespread problems with ventilation systems at 53 Philadelphia schools reopening Monday, data show

2021-03-07T01:02:04+00:00

None of the 53 elementary schools slated to reopen Monday in Philadelphia have widespread problems with air flow or with asbestos contaminating their ventilation systems, according to data released by the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.

The union’s review found some schools still have many classrooms that are unfit for occupancy, but those rooms won’t be used in the reopening.

On Friday, the teachers union quietly released its analysis of classrooms, administrative offices and common rooms in each school building involved in Monday’s reopening for students in prekindergarten through second grade. More than 2,600 students have elected to participate in hybrid learning in these schools.

Union environmental scientist Jerry Roseman evaluated district reports on ventilation adequacy and potential asbestos contamination of 3,062 rooms and cleared 2,358, or 77%, of them for occupancy. He deemed 576 rooms unfit for use due to a lack of adequate ventilation and 176 more unfit because the district has not yet measured the safe occupancy of those rooms using social distancing guidelines, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of his findings.

The union hasn’t drawn attention to the report, which was uploaded to its website Friday. PFT spokeswoman Hillary Linardopoulos said Saturday that the information was meant for members to make sure that the spaces they were using had been cleared by Roseman.

“So we wouldn’t have announced an agreement with the school district last Monday if we didn’t feel that schools would be safe for occupancy by students and staff this coming Monday,” she said. “This data gives our members a way for them to double check what they’re seeing and hearing within their school buildings.”

Concerns about school ventilation systems have been a major point of controversy in the school district’s efforts to reopen for some in-person learning. Roseman’s detailed review was the outcome of a third-party mediation demanded by the union to determine whether buildings were safe before teachers and students returned. Philadelphia’s public schools abruptly closed on March 13 of last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. This is the district’s fourth attempt at reopening.

The district has been measuring the ventilation and square footage of its school buildings for five months, hoping to have that process completed for all schools before students set foot in classrooms. The district has been releasing updated reports on school conditions on the Reopening Readiness Dashboard almost daily.

A small number of rooms that the union evaluated had issues with ventilation and lacked square footage measurements. One room — the gym in Shawmont Elementary School — had asbestos in its ventilation system, and the system has been shut off. No other rooms in the 53 schools showed signs of asbestos contamination, though the union said that it only checked for asbestos in ventilation systems, not in other areas, such as ceiling tiles, where asbestos also can be present.

Under the district’s reopening plan announced in January, students in pre-K through second grade were supposed to return to buildings on Feb. 22, with teachers returning on Feb. 8. But the union scuttled that plan by invoking a clause in a memorandum of agreement reached with the district last fall, arguing that significant safety issues remained.

The 152 schools with early grades are now scheduled to reopen in three phases this month, starting with 53 on Monday. More schools are slated to open on March 15 and March 22, pending Roseman’s safety review. Altogether, about 9,000 of 32,000 eligible students chose to return to buildings.

The district and union plan to announce Monday which additional schools will reopen on March 15.

In some schools, ventilation systems have been switched off because of asbestos contamination, a longstanding problem in Philadelphia’s school buildings. The district’s ventilation reports show that up to 14 schools in the district, including Shawmont in its gym, had or currently have asbestos contaminating their ventilation systems in various parts of the buildings.

Superintendent William Hite has said several times that the district has invested more than $250 million in building improvements since the pandemic started, which includes the removal of “hundreds of thousands of feet” of asbestos. But the district has not discussed the work done in individual schools. Hite has continued to insist that the buildings are safe.

In doing these school-by-school, room-by-room analyses to determine safety, the district and the union are drawing from a wealth of information about building conditions that the public can’t access. Roseman is reviewing Testing, Adjusting and Balancing, or TAB, reports, which pertain to ventilation systems; Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act, or AHERA, reports, which spell out asbestos issues; as well as publicly available air balancing reports on the district’s Reopening Readiness Dashboard.

The union’s ventilation numbers for some schools appear to be more recent than in the air balancing reports still on the district’s website. Based on reports publicly available a month ago, Chalkbeat identified eight elementary school buildings as having no classrooms suitable for occupancy. Three of those schools — Shawmont, Fitler Academics Plus, and Steel — are scheduled to reopen on Monday, with the PFT’s okay.

The union’s report does not say how the district remediated ventilation issues at these schools. In many buildings, the district has retooled long-neglected mechanical ventilation systems. In others, officials decided to install window fans, but that idea was scrapped after an uproar from parents, teachers and students that the 3,000 fans purchased were meant for residential use and not for school buildings.

Instead, district officials said they will purchase air purifiers and install them in classrooms with little to no mechanical ventilation. The timeline for installation remains unclear.

How to address the COVID-19 slide in early literacy? Philadelphia teachers, experts talk effective reading strategies

2021-03-03T19:48:06+00:00

When kindergarten teacher Alyxe Fields was a young student, she had trouble reading.

Decoding words was tough for her. Though she grew up to be a successful teacher at William Rowen School in West Oak Lane, the experience of struggling to read as a child has influenced how she approaches her 5-year-old students.

“It’s important for reading skills to be addressed early on so it doesn’t get passed over and then they just move on next year,” Fields said.

Remote learning has made a difficult task - teaching young children how to read - even harder.

As schools approach the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus pandemic, educators, parents and policymakers in Philadelphia are increasingly concerned about how the youngest students are learning to read. The shift to remote learning has exacerbated existing concerns in the city about early childhood literacy and the long-term effects on achievement.

Teachers and reading specialists report that students who regularly attend their virtual classes are indeed learning – a testament to both the remarkable ways teachers have been able to quickly adapt to their new teaching environment and the resilience of students – but educators fear that their students are not nearly as far along as they would have been in a normal school year.

“We are looking at significant regression in terms of students’ learning,” said Dawn Brookhart, associate director of the AIM Institute for Learning and Research in Conshohocken, which focuses on reading research and how to train teachers in evidence-based instruction through professional development and continuing education.

Literacy has been a longstanding concern in the Philadelphia school district. According to a district report presented at a Board of Education meeting in January, only 32% of third graders read on grade level. As part of its “goals and guardrails” initiative, the school board has taken up early literacy as a particular point of focus, aiming for 62% of students to be proficient in English language arts by 2026. In response to the report, Superintendent William Hite announced that the district would move away from a “balanced literacy” approach, which incorporates elements of whole language instruction, toward a model that is more focused on phonics and phonemic awareness.

Whole language instruction focuses on teaching reading by inferring information about a word from the larger context. Proponents of the “science of reading” point to research studies showing that children need direct instruction, with a particular focus on phonics, to learn how to decode words. Balanced literacy is an attempt to combine the two approaches.

Hite also said teachers need more long-term professional development for reading instruction. This is in line with advocates who argue many elementary teachers also aren’t trained in the science of reading. For them, sustained professional development is necessary so that teachers stay up to date on the research.

Brookhart said that many classrooms are still using a “broken model,” that uses strategies like the three cueing system where students are meant to draw information about a word from three contextual sources: visual (like an illustration), syntax (the role of the word in the sentence), and graphic (recognizing the letters themselves). Brookhart said that contrary to popular belief, learning to read is “not a natural process.”

“It’s not like language. It takes a very skilled practitioner to be able to understand how to truly teach reading,” she said.

Jen Lutz, a reading specialist at Community Partnership School in North Philadelphia, taught first grade before becoming a reading specialist. She said she was not armed with the knowledge she needed to most effectively reach students.

“Initially I didn’t really learn how to teach reading. I took one class and it showed me how to read picture books to kids,” she said.

It wasn’t until she earned her masters degree and a reading specialist certification — largely sparked by asking questions about why certain kids were learning to read while others weren’t — that she learned proven techniques.

While the mechanics of how we teach reading has been debated among researchers and educators for decades, the question has taken on new urgency for reading specialists, elementary school teachers, and school administrators alike during the pandemic. In many ways, the success of remote learning has been dependent on children’s individual situations – the ability to focus, whether they have a parent or guardian to help oversee school, the amount of distractions, inconsistent internet connection — so it’s likely that students in the same grade will come out of the pandemic with wildly varying reading levels.

For Lutz, the question has become about solutions: “Ok so what is going to be the most effective way to get kids back on track?” she said.

In that answer, she sees room for improvement beyond the pandemic. “The research is there. I think there is a lot of opportunity here for people to look at the way things were done and what can we do to accelerate how we fill in these gaps?”

Brookhart objects to the idea that this year of upheaval will lead to a generation of early learners with lower literacy outcomes. Instead, this may be an opportunity for the district to rethink how it teaches reading as it moves towards a more effective model.

“In all other industries, they’ve been forced to pivot, they’ve been forced to change. Unfortunately, education still, even as we look at schools that have gone back to in-person instruction, they’re still very much committed to that old traditional model.”

For Brookhart, Lutz, and a growing number of elementary teachers and reading specialists, a “new model” doesn’t necessarily mean shiny new hardware or buying fancy software. It means relying on and adopting the “science of reading” to guide which teaching techniques work best for the largest number of children.

Many reading specialists interviewed pointed to research that shows that while 40% of students will learn to read regardless of the kind of reading instruction they receive, the other 60% need a “structured literacy” approach. That means “explicit, systematic teaching that focuses on phonological awareness, word recognition, phonics and decoding, spelling, and syntax at the sentence and paragraph levels,” according to the Iowa Reading Research Center. These techniques have more often been used to target struggling students, but have been shown to be valuable and effective for all early readers.

At Rowen, where Fields teaches kindergarten, the school has been part of a partnership with Wilson Language Training to use the Wilson Fundations program, which is based on the kind of research that Brookhart and Lutz advocate using. The program originally developed strategies for students struggling to read, but has since developed a reading curriculum for the general classroom based on the same principles. Community Partnership School, the independent school targeting traditionally underserved communities in North Philadelphia where Lutz teaches, also uses Wilson Fundations.

Access to the program, which has been implemented at Rowen for a few years now, has been especially crucial during the pandemic, Fields said.

“I will sing the praises of the program in person — the way that they break down individual letters, letter sounds, and then the way that they slowly transition into blending them together,” she said.

But since the shift to virtual learning, it has become “our lifesaver,” giving teachers specific sequential lessons and materials that have been adapted for virtual learning including instructional videos, letter and sound flashcards, and tiles that students can use to build sounds, words, and eventually sentences.

Without it, Fields said, her students would be much farther behind.

Not all schools in Philadelphia have access to programs like these, virtually or even before the coronavirus. The pandemic has only thrown the need for more effective strategies to teach reading into even sharper focus.

Brookhart said teachers with the best of intentions try “a lot of interventions without really understanding what our students need.”

After the pandemic ends, schools across Philadelphia also may have to contend with teachers who are exhausted and demoralized from the extra work that comes with the remote teaching, shifting their pedagogy to react to a new virtual classroom experience, and ongoing stress about reopening.

Still, Brookhart sees the change already starting to happen. Throughout the pandemic she has seen an increase in the appetite for AIM’s evidence-based literacy course platforms and has been struck by the requests for more resources. “We are seeing now that more teachers and administrators are recognizing that they need to approach this differently,” she said.

The Institute also has a partnership with the Philadelphia school district to provide professional development and implementation, a relationship that Brookhart hopes will grow coming out of the pandemic, especially given the renewed emphasis the district is putting on early literacy.

“I think the opportunity is now for us to really reimagine education.”

Philadelphia school reopening delayed again — this time until March 1

2021-02-17T15:44:40+00:00

The Philadelphia school district has pushed back reopening of schools for a third time, with a new target date for early grades set for March 1, Superintendent William Hite announced Wednesday.

The one-week delay for prekindergarten to second grade is the latest twist in the district’s third attempt to reopen school buildings, which have been closed since last March. Hite said he was “deeply disappointed” to make the decision, which was due to the ongoing mediation between the district and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.

“I believe we all agree on reopening schools,” Hite said. “The dispute has been how can we do that safely and the district needs to address that.”

About 9,000 students were slated to return to classrooms on Feb. 22, but teachers and some parents have been questioning the safety of school buildings for months. Some 2,000 early-grade teachers were supposed to return to classes last week ahead of the reopening, but union President Jerry Jordan called on his members to stay home due to the safety concerns.

In a statement Wednesday, Jordan said the district “made the right decision to delay the reopening of school buildings.”

He said the union’s position — that “we are unable to verify the safety of buildings” — hasn’t changed. “Our goal of returning to school buildings when it is safe to do so also remains unchanged,” the statement said.

The Caucus of Working Educators on Wednesday said the district has to “drastically improve their communication and transparency” along with assessing ventilation and making vaccines available to all staff before buildings open. “We don’t have evidence that these goals can be accomplished by March 1.”

Hite said Wednesday that he believes the buildings are safe, but he said the district is waiting to hear the results of mediation. He also wants teachers to have enough time to prepare their classrooms for students and to learn how to teach in person and virtually at the same time.

Hite initially said teachers who didn’t report would be disciplined. But the district agreed to allow teachers to continue working remotely while the mediator, Dr. Peter Orris, reviewed ventilation reports and other documents tied to building safety.

The option for mediation was laid out in a memorandum of agreement secured by the union in the fall, which outlined the conditions for a safe reopening. Jordan called for mediation amid growing concerns that many buildings lacked adequate ventilation and that other longstanding issues, including asbestos, mold and lead, were still potential dangers in many buildings.

Teachers and parents have ridiculed the district’s purchase of 3,000 fans to improve air flow in classrooms in 32 schools where the aging ventilation systems had been turned off. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said during a visit to Philadelphia earlier this month that she thought the fans were a parody from Saturday Night Live. Experts, however, have said fans could be a good strategy to improve air circulation.

The mediator started working on Feb. 5, but the two sides did not come together until last Wednesday. No timetable has been set for a decision, but as mediation has dragged on, it has seemed increasingly unlikely that students could return as originally planned.

On Wednesday, Hite also outlined a plan for doing rapid COVID-19 testing of students and teachers, saying the district had “ample supplies.” All staff members will be tested weekly and students will be tested randomly, he said.

Many teachers also wanted to be higher on the priority list for vaccinations before being required to return to buildings. Some wanted to be fully vaccinated first. Hite has advocated for teachers to get priority for vaccinations, but he said Wednesday that “it’s never been a priority for vaccines to be a part of the reopening.”

The city and district announced two weeks ago that it had worked out a plan with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to begin vaccinations for school workers starting Feb. 22, both at CHOP and at six school sites around the city. Invitations should go out starting Wednesday from CHOP, including to school staff who have been working in school buildings or will be returning as part of the reopening, Hite said.

Hite estimated that 10,000 school staff would be required to reopen buildings for the early-grade students.

On Wednesday, Dr. David Rubin, the lead of PolicyLAB and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said during a City Council hearing on school reopening that he believes it is safe to reopen schools “based on the science.” He cited falling case rates, the experiences of other schools in the region, and plans to do rapid COVID-19 testing of students and teachers.

Rubin said vaccinations are important, but not a precondition to reopening. Similarly, he said that ventilation improvements were desirable, but not as crucial as primary interventions, such as wearing masks, social distancing, and keeping sick people out of the buildings. Opening as early as next week “can be done safely,” he said.

Hite, who also spoke during the council, said that all sides have the best interests of students at heart. “Let’s work together and let’s all make this happen.”

The city council hearing went on for more than five hours as parents, teachers, principals, and union leaders almost universally blasted the district leadership for its ”dime store fans” and pre-pandemic failure to adequately deal with asbestos and other school hazards. The principals pointed out that each school is in vastly different condition. “Before moving to a safe opening, we need clear, concise, transparent communication regarding each school’s status,” said Lauren Overton, principal of the Penn-Alexander Elementary School in University City.

A handful of parents, however, said that continued closure is further hurting the most vulnerable students. “Is it safe not to return?” asked parent Jen Leaman. “The educational losses over the last 11 months are monumental.”

The drama in Philadelphia comes as some school districts across the country grapple with reopening.

Philadelphia’s saga has been marked by strong distrust between the administration and the union, and the administration and the public. In a virtual rally on Monday, students, teachers and activists demanded a stronger voice in reopening plans and said they had been shut out of the process.

“We need proper ventilation, not crappy fans,” said Billy Seng, a sophomore at the Academy at Palumbo and a member of the advocacy group Viet Lead. “Our buildings have crumbling ceilings, lead and asbestos. We had that before COVID...we will continue fighting for a truly safe reopening.”

Shakeda Gaines, president of the Home and School Council, said that there has been “disrespect” coming from the district. “They’re trying to open schools even when we got together as a collective and said no,” she said. “We’re saying no to fans, no to lead paint...to asbestos, mold, lead, no to our children dying.”

Acknowledging the trust issues on Wednesday, Hite said part of the problem is when “there are sections or pockets of individuals who want to draw attention to something that is wrong and then apply that to all of the 227 buildings.”

“All we can do is to continue what we’ve done and that is to communicate,” he said.

National and local health experts have said ventilation is but one strategy among many to mitigate the spread of the virus. But the city’s activists jumped on the issue to draw more attention to the overall disrepair of many of the district’s buildings, which have an average age of 75 years.

The district’s own studies have shown that it needs $4.5 billion to fully upgrade schools.

The district has produced hundreds of “air balancing reports” in its classrooms and released other information on building conditions. But the critics were not mollified.

“We can’t verify the results,” said Art Steinberg, head of the PFT’s Health and Welfare Fund and president of the statewide federation, in an interview during an anti-reopening rally on Feb. 8. “We do not have any trust in the information. We’ve asked for data backing it up...they’ve refused to give it to us.”

Hite disputes that the union has been denied information, saying that officials have met regularly with union leaders.

From the start, Philadelphia’s health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley has said it was safe to reopen schools. More than 100 private schools have been open to varying degrees since March, with little evidence that they accelerated the spread of COVID-19 in the communities, he said.

Many parents desperately want their children back in school, but fear for their safety.

Jasmine Ellis, whose son attends Grover Washington Middle School, said their school is in a relatively new building, but has had problems with mold in its auditorium. She said the building wasn’t safe before the pandemic.

At the same time, her son, who has special needs and a heart condition, “hates every second” of remote schooling. “Learning at home is horrible for us,” she said.

A former school district employee who worked as an aide in several schools, Ellis feels that the district has long neglected building maintenance.

“They have to go in and do what really needs to be done and what they’ve been sweeping under the rug,” she said.

Analysis: Most schools meet district ventilation standards. Experts say that may not be enough

2021-02-05T20:01:20+00:00

With Philadelphia’s youngest students scheduled to return to school in a few weeks, the ventilation in most schools meets the district’s air circulation standards — but only because so few students are returning and the standard is minimal, a Chalkbeat analysis found.

The air flow in about 94% of elementary schools is adequate by the district’s measures, according to hundreds of ventilation reports reviewed by Chalkbeat. But that is because fewer than 10% of the district’s enrolled students are returning and the district’s ventilation standards, which have long been acceptable for schools, are lower than that required to prevent the spread of airborne diseases.

Ensuring that the city’s aging buildings can be ventilated to help reduce the spread of the coronavirus has become one of the most urgent tasks facing district officials ahead of students returning to classrooms on Feb. 22. In recent months, many parents, teachers, and union officials have cited ventilation issues as a reason why schools couldn’t safely reopen for in-person learning.

Declaring that it has “concerns” about ventilation in many schools, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers requested the intervention of a third party through the city Department of Labor to determine whether it is safe to return. About 2,000 teachers for grades prekindergarten through second grade have been told to return Monday. But on Friday, Jerry Jordan, president of the PFT, told teachers not to come back to buildings because of safety concerns. He said they should continue to work remotely.

Jerry Roseman, the union’s environmental scientist, said that simply looking at the numbers “is not good enough.” For instance, some of the schools may have mechanical ventilation systems that were shut down due to asbestos issues, and he said it isn’t always clear from the reports whether the issues have been resolved or if the school is relying on another ventilation method, such as window fans.

“The reporting from the district needs to be more detailed to be able to make an independent assessment of safety,” he said.

On ventilation, a binding agreement between the district and the union says the district must complete an “air balancer certification” for each space that will be occupied and identify the maximum occupancy based on “the available CFM or fresh air flow.” CFM stands for cubic feet per minute. The standard is 15 CFM per person.

Experts on industrial hygiene explained that the standards, those sanctioned by The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, are meant only to maintain tolerable aesthetic conditions when people gather in a confined space.

Chalkbeat’s analysis is based on the hundreds of “air balancing” reports available through the district’s Reopening Readiness Dashboard. Officials have now released reports for nearly all of the city’s 215 buildings, including 147 elementary schools to which students and staff are scheduled to return. Many schools have more than one report because the district commissioned a number of retests for schools that had poor ventilation numbers before any action was taken.

In some schools, the district said it retooled neglected mechanical HVAC systems. There are three kinds of these: “housefan” systems in some of the oldest buildings, classroom unit ventilators, and central air handling systems. For up to 40 others officials decided to install window fans to recirculate air.

Use of the window fans has been savaged on social media by parents and teachers who said the fans couldn’t protect students against the virus or keep kids comfortable in winter. Experts, however, told Chalkbeat the fans were a good strategy to improve ventilation.

National data indicates that schools aren’t major vectors for virus transmission in earlier grades. But it can be tough to curb transmission in regions with high rates of the coronavirus.

Philadelphia’s positivity rate was 6.3% as of Jan. 24, about one percentage point lower than when the district tried to reopen in November. The Pennsylvania Department of Education guidelines and the MOA with the teachers union say a hybrid model is acceptable if the city positivity rate is below 10%.

But with new variants of the coronavirus circulating, many are urging caution.

The district is also dealing with a legacy of distrust and past problems, such as temporarily closing schools to deal with loose asbestos and the botched construction project at Benjamin Franklin High School for the co-location with Science Leadership Academy.

“The Hite administration has a track record of not putting health and safety of students and staff first,” said Charlie McGeehan, a member of Caucus of Working Educators and teacher at the U School. He said the fans being used in some schools “are the same as in my dorm room in college … this does not bring me to trusting the district.”

District officials, the Philadelphia Health Department and public health experts at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all support returning to in-person school for younger students.

Both Hite and district chief operating officer Reggie McNeil have described ventilation as an additional layer of protection to supplement wearing a mask, social distancing, and vigilant hygiene practices. But ventilation looms large in the public’s mind as crucial to safety.

Breaking down the analysis

Chalkbeat took a close look at the district’s ventilation reports to try to determine whether enough rooms were adequately ventilated compared to the number of students who chose hybrid learning. We found that all but 9 schools — 94% — meet the minimum accepted standard.

We determined how many schools had enough adequately ventilated rooms for at least 10 occupants, and compared that number to the number of students who planned to return. We took into account that due to the cohorting system, only half the returning students would be in the building at the same time.

The district’s ventilation reports use the 15 CFM per person standard to measure the safe occupancy of each room. Contractors also measured safe occupancy by social distancing standards, and the lower of the two numbers will be enforced.

Industrial hygienist David Krause said the ventilation standard is not remotely close to the air flow needed to curb the spread of a contagious virus.

“The current code was never meant to control infections in non-healthcare settings. It was intended to … control body odor, nothing more,” Krause said.

Typically, ventilation for disease control is measured by air changes per hour, the rate at which outdoor air replaces indoor air, Krause said. The minimum ventilation that hospitals must have is 6 air changes per hour, and according to a Harvard study, schools should aim for 5 air changes per hour.

Chalkbeat’s analysis indicates that the average city classroom with one of the district-installed fans has a rate of 2 to 2.5 air changes per hour. To reduce the probability of infection by about 90%, 6 air changes per hour are required; 2 air changes per hour reduces risk by less than 70%.

Still, the district’s ventilation numbers look better than they did several months ago. A Chalkbeat analysis from October found that only one-third of classrooms could safely hold 15 or more people. Since then, the district has ordered more than 1,000 fans to help remediate ventilation in its classrooms.

The fans, manufactured by Comfort Zone and Lasko, recirculate contaminated indoor air with outdoor air, and provide about 250 to 300 CFM of ventilation to any given room. Officials are aiming to have all the fans installed by Feb. 8, when staff return to schools, and McNeil said the work is now 37% complete.

Hite mistakenly said during last Thursday’s school board meeting that each fan would be equipped with a gauge to measure temperature and CFM in real time, but later corrected himself.

While the fans are a good step, Krause said that ventilation measures should be supplemented with air filtration.

Ventilation takes indoor air and replaces it with outdoor air, while the filters clean indoor air and spit it back out into the room. Both approaches add an extra layer of safety, but with filtration, students wouldn’t have to worry as much about cold air blowing into their classroom. It’s a more expensive approach than simply improving ventilation with window fans, but one that Krause says is affordable.

In New York City and Chicago, the school districts rushed to purchase air purifiers at the beginning of the school year, but Philadelphia didn’t. McNeil said that’s because most high-quality filters would damage mechanical ventilation systems in many of Philadelphia’s older school buildings. In place of installing filters, the district is looking at potentially adding portable air purifiers to some rooms with fans.

Krause said he commends the district for testing and remediating antiquated ventilation systems, but questions the adequacy of the efforts to protect students and teachers.

“What you’re doing is you’re peeling back the bandage on a wound in the United States that schools, the place we send our children, have not been a safe environment with respect to ventilation,” Krause said.

Dale Mezzacappa contributed to this report.
Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee contributed data analysis.

How we calculated the maximum occupancy

The safe occupancy measures in this table are based on the School District of Philadelphia’s ventilation reports, which use a 15 CFM per person standard. That’s not the standard experts say is needed to significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19.

We calculated maximum occupancy numbers by adding up the safe occupancy of each school’s classrooms and then subtracting any rooms that were deemed safe for fewer than 10 people.

We then compared each school’s maximum occupancy to the number of students returning to that school for hybrid learning. Under a hybrid model, only half of the students who opted to return would be in school on a given day. So, if the school’s maximum occupancy exceeded half the number of students who chose hybrid learning, we deemed the school “safe.”

Don’t see a searchable table below? Click here.

School Name	All K-2 students	Students returning	Percent students returning	Max Occupancy	Safe by district standards for returning students
Mayfair School	659	176	27%	1111	Yes
Anne Frank School	652	266	41%	160	Yes
Solomon Solis-Cohen School	560	185	33%	189	Yes
Clara Barton School	527	147	28%	679	Yes
J. Hampton Moore School	511	167	33%	464	Yes
Edwin Forrest School	452	141	31%	299	Yes
William H. Loesche School	445	190	43%	618	Yes
Lewis Elkin School	384	21	5%	873	Yes
James R. Lowell School	363	100	28%	501	Yes
Gilbert Spruance School	360	62	17%	365	Yes
Louis H. Farrell School	355	122	34%	186	Yes
Laura H. Carnell School	347	55	16%	881	Yes
Frances E. Willard School	346	96	28%	14	No
Juniata Park Academy	306	74	24%	860	Yes
Southwark School	305	99	32%	275	Yes
Stephen Decatur School	295	178	60%	683	Yes
Henry W. Lawton School	282	94	33%	731	Yes
Rhawnhurst School	280	72	26%	428	Yes
John H. Webster School	263	97	37%	387	Yes
Alexander K. McClure School	262	62	24%	358	Yes
Thomas Holme School	261	103	39%	1268	Yes
Philip H. Sheridan School	258	78	30%	349	Yes
Ethan Allen School	256	33	13%	423	Yes
Joseph Greenberg School	252	124	49%	553	Yes
A.L. Fitzpatrick School	247	126	51%	804	Yes
Robert B. Pollock School	247	65	26%	38	Yes
Albert M. Greenfield School	239	71	30%	462	Yes
Olney School	233	33	14%	327	Yes
General George A. McCall School	232	70	30%	525	Yes
Fox Chase School	232	125	54%	339	Yes
Sadie Alexander School	229	155	68%	485	Yes
Joseph H. Brown School	228	55	24%	0	No
James J. Sullivan School	222	29	13%	598	Yes
Hamilton Disston School	222	65	29%	604	Yes
John Hancock Demonstration School	220	129	59%	295	Yes
John M. Patterson School	219	70	32%	1041	Yes
Stephen Girard School	219	66	30%	0	No
Francis Hopkinson School	218	45	21%	625	Yes
Bayard Taylor School	217	70	32%	73	Yes
Watson Comly School	215	131	61%	406	Yes
Thomas G. Morton School	212	45	21%	464	Yes
Bridesburg School	212	116	55%	522	Yes
William Cramp School	208	30	14%	575	Yes
Andrew Jackson School	206	42	20%	538	Yes
Horatio B. Hackett School	204	98	48%	411	Yes
John B. Kelly School	202	35	17%	575	Yes
Benjamin Franklin School	202	50	25%	52	Yes
Joseph W. Catharine School	200	37	19%	152	Yes
Andrew J. Morrison School	200	103	52%	509	Yes
William M. Meredith School	199	116	58%	582	Yes
Alexander Adaire School	199	50	25%	126	Yes
John Barry School	192	59	31%	427	Yes
Richmond School	191	85	45%	479	Yes
Honorable Luis Munoz-Marin School	190	77	41%	310	Yes
Prince Hall School	189	57	30%	849	Yes
George W. Nebinger School	184	47	26%	413	Yes
Julia de Burgos School	184	95	52%	484	Yes
Bache-Martin School	176	127	72%	257	Yes
Thurgood Marshall School	176	37	21%	85	Yes
Thomas K. Finletter School	175	24	14%	931	Yes
Francis S. Key School	172	91	53%	547	Yes
Mary M. Bethune School	172	56	33%	37	Yes
Cayuga School	171	59	35%	443	Yes
Charles W. Henry School	171	98	57%	588	Yes
Eliza B. Kirkbride School	170	83	49%	659	Yes
William Rowen School	167	30	18%	150	Yes
Henry C. Lea School	165	37	22%	232	Yes
Ellwood School	162	45	28%	0	No
John H. Taggart School	159	59	37%	484	Yes
Joseph Pennell School	159	22	14%	912	Yes
Franklin S. Edmonds School	158	21	13%	679	Yes
Allen M. Stearne School	157	55	35%	289	Yes
Tanner G. Duckrey School	155	33	21%	622	Yes
Kennedy C. Crossan School	154	71	46%	161	Yes
Shawmont School	152	91	60%	0	No
Cook-Wissahickon School	150	72	48%	197	Yes
James Rhoads School	148	91	61%	250	Yes
Add B. Anderson School	147	18	12%	80	Yes
Eleanor C. Emlen School	147	30	20%	348	Yes
Jenks Academy for Arts and Sciences	147	52	35%	349	Yes
Richard R. Wright School	144	36	25%	347	Yes
Abram S. Jenks School	140	49	35%	209	Yes
Potter-Thomas School	139	36	26%	469	Yes
S. Weir Mitchell School	138	63	46%	610	Yes
Samuel Powel School	138	1	1%	0	No
Dr. Ethel Allen School	138	23	17%	249	Yes
William C. Bryant School	136	17	13%	594	Yes
John Moffet School	136	54	40%	332	Yes
D. Newlin Fell School	135	49	36%	419	Yes
William H. Ziegler School	134	40	30%	358	Yes
Alain Locke School	132	25	19%	682	Yes
Thomas Mifflin School	132	45	34%	381	Yes
John Marshall School	132	28	21%	287	Yes
Benjamin B. Comegys School	129	12	9%	219	Yes
George W. Childs School	129	43	33%	882	Yes
Kenderton Elementary School	128	41	32%	479	Yes
Thomas M. Peirce School	126	28	22%	No report
Anna B. Day School	123	19	15%	326	Yes
Edward Heston School	122	21	17%	431	Yes
Edward T. Steel School	120	36	30%	0	No
Edwin M. Stanton School	119	50	42%	381	Yes
Chester A. Arthur School	119	80	67%	331	Yes
Jay Cooke School	119	50	42%	154	Yes
Penrose School	118	40	34%	1433	Yes
Julia W. Howe School	118	41	35%	272	Yes
William H. Hunter School	117	39	33%	199	Yes
Avery D. Harrington School	116	25	22%	70	Yes
William Dick School	115	63	55%	411	Yes
E. Washington Rhodes School	115	28	24%	845	Yes
John F. Hartranft School	114	32	28%	696	Yes
James Logan School	114	10	9%	1176	Yes
Theodore Roosevelt School	114	34	30%	997	Yes
Samuel Pennypacker School	112	34	30%	No report
James G. Blaine School	111	17	15%	855	Yes
Henry H. Houston School	108	47	44%	623	Yes
Lewis C. Cassidy Academics Plus School	107	35	33%	469	Yes
Anna L. Lingelbach School	107	18	17%	245	Yes
Robert E. Lamberton School	106	22	21%	776	Yes
Vare-Washington School	105	56	53%	398	Yes
Isaac A. Sheppard School	105	22	21%	262	Yes
William C. Longstreth School	103	33	32%	201	Yes
General George G. Meade School	103	15	15%	645	Yes
George W. Sharswood School	101	46	46%	154	Yes
William D. Kelley School	100	12	12%	477	Yes
Andrew Hamilton School	98	17	17%	181	Yes
Rudolph Blankenburg School	98	32	33%	431	Yes
William McKinley School	97	10	10%	210	Yes
John Welsh School	95	33	35%	483	Yes
Delaplaine McDaniel School	91	13	14%	584	Yes
General Philip Kearny School	88	15	17%	15	Yes
Overbrook Educational Center	86	52	60%	432	Yes
Henry A. Brown School	85	24	28%	623	Yes
Samuel Gompers School	80	30	38%	217	Yes
Paul L. Dunbar School	80	16	20%	327	Yes
Spring Garden School	79	10	13%	316	Yes
John F. McCloskey School	78	12	15%	331	Yes
Morton McMichael School	77	37	48%	770	Yes
Laura W. Waring School	77	29	38%	0	No
Fitler Academics Plus School	77	12	16%	0	No
F. Amedee Bregy School	71	24	34%	400	Yes
James Dobson School	67	35	52%	306	Yes
Overbrook Elementary School	63	4	6%	306	Yes
Robert Morris School	62	6	10%	224	Yes
Martha Washington School	59	29	49%	367	Yes
Edward Gideon School	59	12	20%	646	Yes
James R. Ludlow School	59	30	51%	497	Yes
Widener Memorial School	26	21	81%	960	Yes

Most Philadelphia school ventilation meets the district’s standard for safe occupancy for returning K-2 students

An earlier version of this story listed incorrect data for Watson Comly School and Overbrook Elementary School. Those schools have been updated.

Despite teachers’ concerns, superintendent believes Philadelphia classrooms are safe

2021-02-04T22:49:32+00:00

With about 2,000 teachers set to return to buildings Monday, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers has asked for a third-party evaluation of whether classrooms meet high enough safety standards for students and teachers to safely come back this month for in-person learning.

PFT president Jerry Jordan said he requested the evaluation because there are a number of unresolved ventilation issues. “Due to ongoing ventilation issues amidst a global pandemic, I cannot, at this time, say schools are safe to reopen,” Jordan said in an email to his members Wednesday night.” The union is seeking the assessment under a school safety memorandum of agreement it reached with the district in the fall.

Superintendent William Hite said Thursday that he welcomes the evaluation and believes the district has taken enough precautions to make schools safe.

“Safety and choice are the two pillars of the [school reopening] plans we’ve created,” he said, citing not just plans to circulate fresh air in buildings, but other protocols including frequent and random testing for the virus.

The teachers are due to report to school buildings Monday under the first phase of a plan to gradually resume some in-person learning, starting with students in prekindergarten through second grade. Students who elected to return instead of continue learning at home — about 9,000 out of 32,000 eligible — are due back starting on Feb. 22.

According to the agreement, the third party will be appointed by the city’s Department of Labor. It is likely to be a labor mediator versed in issues of workplace safety.

City Department of Labor spokesperson Lauren Cox issued a statement saying “we are in conversations with a potential mediator and can share more once that person is confirmed,” and the person’s job would be to “charged with determining whether the district is in compliance with the terms outlined in the MOA.”

Hite said he didn’t expect the third-party intervention to be complete by Monday, and that while the process could possibly delay the return of students, “it will not delay our expectations for teachers to be in classrooms and they would only be in the classroom by themselves.” Ventilation is of particular concern when there are many people congregating together.

The district has been doing air balancing tests in its buildings to determine adequate ventilation levels to support occupancy by multiple people. The reports are posted on its website.

Jordan said that school reports on ventilation “are in many cases incomplete,” with many classrooms having “zeros” next to them, meaning that they have minimal air circulation.

The district has purchased window fans to recirculate air in some classrooms in at least 19 elementary school buildings that do not have adequate ventilation systems. The fans have been criticized and ridiculed as a flimsy solution to a serious problem.

Hite defended the fans, calling them “a good faith effort we’re making to introduce fresh air” into classrooms.

“In many school districts that have returned already, they’re simply opening windows,” he said in a press call with reporters. “We wanted to create a mechanism to guarantee a certain amount of fresh air into the spaces, in addition to everything else we’re doing. This is just one piece.”

Besides noting that teachers who return next week will be alone in their classrooms, he said that principals, cleaners, custodians, and food service workers have already been working in school buildings for weeks, and that the district has been and will continue regular COVID-19 testing for those in buildings. He reiterated that all building occupants are expected to observe other protocols, including wearing a mask, frequent handwashing, and social distancing.

He said he hopes the outside evaluator will find the district has met the terms of the agreement and that there are safe levels of ventilation in the schools. If not, he said the district would follow any recommendations made.

The union would not say whether it was advising teachers not to return to classrooms on Monday, and Hite would not say whether any who do not will be disciplined.

Kate Sannicks-Lerner, a kindergarten teacher at Julia de Burgos Elementary School in Kensington, said she does not plan to set foot in the building on Monday, feeling conditions are unsafe. The first “air balancing” reports for de Burgos had zeroes for most of the classrooms, meaning there was not sufficient air circulation. A report that came out two days ago had higher numbers, which indicates better air conditions

“I will report to work at 440,” she said, referring to the district’s headquarters at 440 North Broad Street. “Or maybe the parking lot (at de Burgos). I haven’t decided yet. I’ll continue to sign in and teach my students virtually.”

She said her husband has a heart condition that puts him at high risk should he contract COVID-19 and she is worried about the new variants of the virus that have been circulating.

Jordan said that communication with the district on ventilation and other issues has not been ideal, describing it as an unsatisfying “back and forth.” He said the district has limited the ability of the PFT’s environmental scientist, Jerry Roseman, to independently test and inspect classrooms.

“I have it in writing,” he said. Hite disputed this.

“They’ve been invited to observe the testing, and we are providing all of the air balancing reports to them as well,” he said.

The mediation, Hite said, “is a natural next step” in a situation where the two parties don’t agree, adding: “I look forward to the outcome.”

Philadelphia board promises change after report on low achievement, racial disparities

2021-01-29T19:47:35+00:00

A report presented Thursday to the Philadelphia Board of Education showed that just 32% of third graders read on grade level, with stark gaps among racial groups and particularly low scores for English language learners and students with disabilities.

The report classified 63 elementary schools as “off-track,” 64 as “near-track” and 21 as “on-track,” categories based on their progress toward meeting five-year goals in reading, math, and college readiness. The benchmarks for the report were gleaned through the district’s internal reading assessment, AIMSweb. Those considered on-track are likely to reach the goal of having 62% of students proficient by 2026.

In a stark example of inequity within the district, the board’s data show that schools considered on track enroll fewer than 5,000 students and are disproportionately white, while the near-track and off-track schools enroll more than 31,000 students in the grades studied, kindergarten to third grade.

At its first meeting since announcing its intent to focus on how the board can assure all students succeed, the board spent two hours questioning Superintendent William Hite about the poor results and discussing strategies for improvement. As part of their five-year “goals and guardrails” focus, they have set a goal for 62% of students to be proficient in English language arts by 2026. This is the first of many promised presentations on the goals and sub-goals. The next report will explore reading achievement for third grade through eighth grade.

Board members have promised to hold Hite and themselves accountable for making improvements, even if it means substantial changes in how they have traditionally operated.

“These trends are not surprising to any of us, now we have to talk about what we can do about it,” said Mallory Fix-Lopez, the board member who led the session.

Potential answers include abandonment of longstanding practices around teacher assignment and putting more resources into some schools compared to others, both of which have been largely off the table in the past. Hite said the findings would inform upcoming negotiations with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, whose contract spells out the terms for how teachers are assigned to schools, which still relies heavily on the choices of teachers.

He and Fix-Lopez said it might be time to offer incentives for teachers to go to and stay in challenging schools.

“We need to understand better what’s causing teachers to move,” Hite said.

Among the causes are school climate, including serious disciplinary incidents as well as student and teacher attendance rates. He pointed out that attendance in the top-tier schools is much higher, with 71% of students attending 95% of the time, compared to 54% in the near-track schools and 43% in the off-track schools.

Besides the numbers showing much lower student attendance, Hite said the bottom group of schools had much higher poverty rates, and more students learning English and with special needs. A higher percentage entered kindergarten already behind and without pre-kindergarten experience. The lowest tier schools also as a group had less experienced teachers, more teacher turnover, and a lower percentage of teachers rated “distinguished.”

At all the schools, regardless of overall achievement, there were racial achievement gaps, with Black and Latino students scoring below whites and Asians. Black and Latino students in the top-tier schools are on track to reaching the goal of 62% proficiency by 2026, with about half reaching the mark now. But two-thirds of white and Asian students in those schools are already there.

Even at the top-tier schools, English learners and special education students are not on track to reach the goal.

Board president Joyce Wilkerson said the district needed to have frank discussions around race, expectations, and “bigotry,” and the potential effect on student outcomes.

“I have this unease, when we talk about subgroups we seem to be masking issues of race,” she said. “I worry that we’re not tackling directly low expectations we have for some kids and the role that that might play....we said we will grapple with the role of structural racism, I worry that we’re glossing over the role of race, bigotry, low expectations, in talking about this in a very sanitized way...if we’re going to do the work, we need to do it in a very authentic way.”

Wilkerson asked whether the researchers controlled for factors other than race that could account for the disparities, such as homelessness. Hite said there were correlations with race, poverty, food insecurity, school attendance rates, and neighborhood conditions, and that the district would further probe that data. Wilkerson also promised to look into disparities by race in student disciplinary referrals and why the percentage of Black and Latino students has declined in coveted special admission high schools.

In response to Wilkerson, Hite also stressed the need for changes in teacher professional development that focus on long-term growth rather than “drive-by” sessions, and that more deeply explore attitudes and expectations.

And he also said that there would be changes in the reading curriculum based on the findings, moving from a “balanced literacy” approach to one that pays more attention to phonics and phonemic awareness.

As part of the “goals and guardrails” reorientation, the board changed its speakers policy, limiting it to 30 members of the public and up to 10 students, and giving them two minutes to speak instead of three. The changes did not go over well with those who spoke Thursday, many of them regulars.

They weren’t mollified by the board’s intent to hold regular town halls every two months, saying that is no substitute for letting people speak at the board’s monthly action meetings.

Jesse Godschalk, a teacher, said he applauded the “frank and open discussion” around the goals and guardrails, but said the change in the speakers’ policy is a “huge step in the wrong direction” that will short circuit any effort by the board to build trust with the community. “We see you replacing this public forum with smaller ones and new procedures that you have full control over,” Godschalk said.

Karel Kilimnik, a retired teacher and member of the watchdog group Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, also criticized the speakers policy and called the goals and guardrails presentation a “colorful rubric…[with] verbiage thrown at the wall to see what sticks.”

The board also indicated its approval for the district’s hybrid learning plan scheduled to begin next month, with six of the seven members speaking in favor of it as long as safety protocols are in place. Only Angela McIver said she was opposed.

She said she “can’t in good conscience” support reopening, planned for Pre-K through second grade students in late February, while “hospitals are overwhelmed by a virus our country has failed to control.” Several speakers also blasted the plan; one speaker called it “ridiculous” with the advent of new variants of COVID-19, another said the administration was forcing teachers to make “life or death” decisions.

“We will hold you responsible when your decision inevitably results in illnesses, deaths, and community spread,” said parent Sonia Rosen.

Philadelphia plans hybrid school reopening next month

2021-01-27T17:15:04+00:00

The School District of Philadelphia plans to open school buildings to students in prekindergarten through second grade next month for a mix of in-person and digital learning, Superintendent William Hite announced Wednesday.

Students are due to return Feb. 22, with staff expected to start preparing on Feb. 8.

Hite presented similar plans last summer to reopen schools in September, and again to start in November. Both times, the plans were delayed, the first time after bitter opposition from parents and teachers, and then primarily by a late fall surge in cases of the coronavirus.

The prolonged absence of most of the city’s children from school, now approaching a year, is taking its toll on the city and on families, Hite said, declaring that it is time to start phasing in hybrid learning as a start to restoring normalcy.

Teachers and others have been doing “heroic” work to educate children virtually, Hite said.

But “We know that children, especially our youngest learners, and those with complex needs, learn best in person,” he said. “We also know that being out of school buildings has not been easy for far too many of our students and their families...we have an obligation and we must take action now.”

The youngest children, those learning to read, are especially vulnerable to learning loss, Hite said.

Hite said that he hoped additional groups of students, starting with those with complex needs, including English learners and children with disabilities, will be able to phase back into some in-person learning by March, adding that all future plans “will be guided by science.”

Hite also expressed concern that “escalating violence and feelings of isolation are tragic consequences of the pandemic,” a point driven home by City Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez, chair of the education committee, whose Kensington district is mostly Latino and low-income.

“Many of the students that I represent are only safe in our school buildings, they only eat in our school buildings, they only learn in our school buildings,” she said, repeating what she said at a council hearing last week. “And I stand by those words.”

Hite and Sanchez also said they both would push for teachers and other education workers to be moved up in the hierarchy of those next in line to be vaccinated. “City council is committed to advocating strongly with the mayor and the health department that vaccinations of teachers get prioritized,” Sanchez said.

A district spokeswoman said they would advocate for workers who are needed for the Pre-K to second grade population — about half the estimated 18,000 educator workforce — to be put to the very top of the educator list.

The hybrid plan calls for students to come back two days a week, in shifts, and learn remotely the rest of the time.

In November, when the district surveyed families for a nearly identical plan, 9,000 students elected to return to school buildings for hybrid instruction, while 6,500 decided to stay entirely virtual, and the remaining students submitted no choice, staying all virtual by default. There are about 30,000 pre-K through second grade students in the district.

Only students who chose the hybrid model in the fall survey will return to in-person school Feb. 22, officials said. Other students will be able to opt into hybrid at a later date “when we can safely phase in more students,” Hite said.

According to a Chalkbeat analysis of school-by-school data, schools with larger percentages of white students saw a moderately higher rate of parents selecting the hybrid model over fully virtual. And in schools with three-quarters or more economically disadvantaged students, families in general were less likely to select hybrid. There is also a marked difference in building conditions across the city.

Hite also outlined measures the district has taken to prepare school buildings and the safety precautions that will be enforced.

Students and adults will be pre screened before entering school buildings, personal protective equipment will be available, and mask wearing will be mandatory. Bathrooms and classrooms also have been adapted to ensure social distancing, and plexiglass barriers were installed in offices and classrooms. Cleaning protocols have been enhanced with EPA-approved supplies, and 75 new cleaners have been hired. Touchless hand sanitizer has been distributed throughout buildings, and water fountains are also touchless. Signs promoting social distancing in hallways and classrooms have been installed.

Karyn Lynch, the district’s chief of student support services, said that all staff, and parents on behalf of their children, will be required to answer a series of questions about their health every day, and that there will be regular “asymptomatic testing” of a certain percentage of people, using rapid COVID-19 tests provided by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia that provide results within 15 minutes.

In the fall, as part of its contract, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers signed an agreement with the district, complete with a grievance procedure, to monitor and enforce safety conditions.

PFT president Jerry Jordan said that his union plans to vigilantly monitor whether the conditions are strictly followed. He said he still has concerns over the adequacy of ventilation in many school buildings, a skepticism shared by many parents and teachers.

“I want to honestly say to my members that ask if my schools are going to be safe for me to go into,” he said. “I want to be able to say it is safe.”

He said he would “prefer” that teachers be vaccinated before returning, but is not insisting on it. Robin Cooper, president of the union that represents principals and other administrators, reiterated the need for educators to be declared essential workers.

She and Jordan said there have been COVID-19 cases among workers who have already returned to school buildings, although Lynch said that the rapid positive tests have all turned out to be negative.

“Administrators and all school staff must be given the status of essential workers so they can be given the vaccine,” Cooper said. “This is the safest and the only way.”

Skepticism remains among parents and teachers, especially around the adequacy of ventilation and other conditions in the district’s aging buildings, which have been plagued with toxins including asbestos and lead paint, the result of decades of deferred maintenance.

Since schools closed last March, the district has conducted air-balancing studies in all schools and upgraded ventilation in many buildings in recent months, either retooling existing systems that had been neglected or installing window fans that more efficiently circulate air. Maximum occupancy has been listed for each room, based both on ventilation and on social distancing requirements; in each case, the lower number will be enforced.

Class sizes are halved under a hybrid model, with no more than 15 students in a classroom at once. But the actual number of children in classrooms will likely be much lower because less than a third of eligible students elected to return.

In October, just one-third of elementary classrooms were safe for that many students, a Chalkbeat analysis of school ventilation reports found. After the remedial work around ventilation, the district commissioned retests for many schools that now show most elementary schools have sufficient numbers of adequately ventilated classrooms for the number of students expected to return. Hite said mechanics will continue to repair ventilation systems in areas that didn’t meet standards, and window fans have been installed in some rooms to improve air flow and ensure occupancy safe for up to 18 people.

A new set of reports that measure safe occupancy by social distancing guidelines in addition to ventilation is available through the Reopening Readiness Dashboard. So far, there are social distancing reports for 45 schools.

Hite noted that the health department “at any time” could order schools or classrooms to be closed due to a COVID-19 outbreak, and he said that district staff was well prepared “to support smooth transitions between hybrid and digital learning models when needed.”

“I want to be clear, COVID will come to schools, it is not a matter of if, but when,” said Gail Carter Hamilton, a pediatric resources manager in the city health department. “Our job is to help the...school district of Philadelphia to know what to do and be prepared when this happens.”

As the pandemic isolation has dragged on, Hite, Kenney, and Farley have consistently sought to balance the damage to children as a result of learning loss and the absence of socialization with the risks of resuming in-person instruction. More than 100 private schools have remained open for hybrid learning since September, and the health department reported that they had seen nine “outbreaks” of COVID-19 since the fall — defined as six or more cases within a 14-day period — that could at all be attributed to spread within the school.

The reopening announcement comes a day after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared that “most available evidence” shows schools can stay open if safety precautions are followed.

Last week, Dr. Susan Coffin, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pennsylvania, said at a forum sponsored by the Policy Lab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia that school could even be safer for children than staying home. “Schools may be little islands of safety,” she said.

At the same forum, the top education official in Rhode Island, where most students have remained in school, said that all-digital learners actually had higher rates of COVID-19 infection than those who attended school.

Deputy health secretary Dr. Caroline Johnson said on Tuesday that the city is looking to partner with a city hospital to vaccinate what she estimates are 20,000 education workers. But she said such an effort would not start for several weeks. Johnson also said that the city would take responsibility for vaccinating Philadelphia teachers who live outside the city.

Teachers are behind those who work with the elderly, corrections and transit workers, police, firefighters and others. Farley explained that while it is important to vaccinate teachers, he noted that the people these others encounter as part of their jobs are more likely than children to get sick or die from COVID-19.

“We will continue to advocate for district staff to have access to the vaccine as soon as possible,” Hite said. “At this time, we don’t know exactly when and how many doses of the vaccines will be available to district staff given supply constraints.”

Neena Hagen contributed reporting and data analysis.

‘Frustrated and disappointed’: Child care providers in Pennsylvania call on governor for help

2021-01-26T21:30:04+00:00

Pennsylvania child care providers, advocates, and key legislators renewed pleas to Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration last week to release $302 million in federal aid — but change how it is distributed to child care centers.

Every week, child care centers are being forced to lay off workers or face closure due to soaring costs and a state subsidy system that abruptly changed in September, decimating their finances.

Despite months of advocacy on the issue, nothing has changed.

“I know Gov. Wolf cares” about saving the child care sector, on which so much of the state’s economy depends, said Nancy Thompson, executive director of Jolly Toddlers in Bucks County, a sentiment echoed by others involved in a Zoom press conference last week. “That is why I am so frustrated and disappointed.”

Public Citizens for Children and Youth organized the press conference, which featured legislators from the Women’s Health Caucus. They and the providers said the collapse of the industry disproportionately affects women, particularly women of color, many of whom either work in child care or rely on it. Widespread closure of child care centers would hurt working families across the state, they said.

Providers and advocates began drawing attention to the issue last summer, when the state said it would change its subsidy reimbursement policy in September. The change based subsidies on currently enrolled students, rather than pre-pandemic enrollment numbers, leading to a sharp drop in reimbursements at the same time that providers were spending more on health measures to mitigate the spread of the virus.

Of the $900 billion federal relief package already passed by Congress in December, $10 billion was earmarked for the child care industry. About $302 million of that is expected to go to Pennsylvania through the Child Care Development Block Grant, which supports state-subsidized child care for low-income families.

But the state Department of Human Services said it still does not have all the official details from Washington.

“The Department of Human Services is reviewing the recently signed Consolidated Appropriations Act and guidance on allowable uses and determining its impact on Pennsylvania and the programs and services we administer,” wrote Erin James, press secretary for the DHS. “We are grateful for the additional support and will continue to work with the incoming Biden administration and Congress to ensure Pennsylvania and other states have the funding needed to navigate the pandemic and economic uncertainty.”

They have until Feb. 25 to submit their plan to the federal government, but have not outlined how the funding might be distributed or what the priorities might be.

Providers and advocates are urging policymakers to quickly allocate the money in a way that avoids further closures of child care centers. They would like to see the subsidy policy changed to account for enrollment declines since the start of the pandemic.

As of late December, about 480 child care centers have permanently closed, according to a letter sent to Tracey Campanini, deputy secretary of the Office of Child Development and Early Learning, or OCDEL, from a coalition of 10 child care advocacy organizations, which make up Start Strong PA. Some providers believe that number is higher because smaller centers that accept only private pay can be harder to track than those that accept public funding.

In the letter, providers and advocates proposed a number of recommendations for how federal money could be used to help both working families and child care centers. The letter was in response to a call for policy recommendations from OCDEL.

The first priority was consistent with the message of Thursday’s press conference in pressing for reestablishing subsidized funding based on pre-pandemic enrollment. Child care centers often rely on both government subsidies and direct payments from more affluent families — but a spike in unemployment during the pandemic also has made private payers scarce.

Some providers across the state and the country have taken out personal loans or have taken on other forms of debt in order to cover costs. Others have had to layoff staff or cut workers’ pay.

“In regular times, our system is based on enrollment, and I can pretty much get behind that,” said Leslie Spina, director of Kinder Academy. “You shouldn’t get paid if children aren’t there. But this is not the normal time.”

Spina has seen a 50% drop in enrollment since March, when the pandemic forced schools and centers to close. Since then, she has had to close one of her five Philadelphia locations, shift a second to a virtual program, and put on hold construction on a sixth center that was near completion. Spina estimates that her costs have doubled since the pandemic started.

Providers and advocates are confident that enrollment will increase as vaccination rates go up and things start to return to normal. Before the pandemic, childcare centers across the state consistently had waiting lists.

With enrollment from every possible direction decreasing, the fixed costs for providers have increased during COVID-19 as child care centers partition staff into strict “pods” that limit staffing flexibility, escalate cleaning protocols, purchase individualized supplies, and incur other pandemic-related expenses.

Advocates and providers also have asked the state to provide financial relief directly to child care staff, who are not represented by unions and don’t receive hazard pay.

The child care industry has said nationally it needs about $50 billion to survive the pandemic. They would reach that number with the $10 billion approved by Congress in December and the $40 billion included in President Joe Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion stimulus package.

Even before the pandemic, gaps in affordable child care made it difficult for some parents to work in Pennsylvania. The Center for a Strong America estimates the cost of that to be as high as $2.5 billion.

“Employers were struggling before to find workers because of issues with access and affordability of child care,” said Steve Doster, the Pennsylvania State Director of Council for Strong America and a signatory of the letter.

Advocates believe there could be a need for more child care subsidies, even after the pandemic.

The letter said: “Families, who most likely exhausted savings to make ends meet, will return to the labor force with significantly fewer financial resources resulting in a need for subsidized child care.”

Advocates also fear that federal funding might make the child care industry an easy target for state budget cuts, especially as state revenue has decreased since the pandemic.

“There will be an in-depth desire on the part of the House leadership and the Senate leadership to say, $300 million came in from the feds, we can reduce state funding by that amount,” said Donna Cooper, Executive Director of PCCY.

“PA Republicans and Democrats need to say this money is not going to supplant state funds,” said Cooper, otherwise “you’re begging for the money you used to have to be replaced.”

With inauguration, some hope for early child care in Philadelphia

2021-01-20T22:25:30+00:00

Mary Graham remembers a few years ago when someone asked her why early childhood educators didn’t go on strike for a day to protest the industry’s low wages and reimbursement rates.

“We can’t do that. We can’t do that to working families. The country would fall apart if child care shut down,” she recalled saying, even if such a move would shed light on a chronically underfunded and underappreciated industry.

The coronavirus pandemic effectively did shut down much of the child care industry in Pennsylvania for several months starting in March, with devastating costs. Even as centers were allowed to open back up, enrollment has been down and the financial costs of doing business has increased with new health regulations. Widespread school closures, skyrocketing unemployment, disappearing child care centers, and prolonged lockdowns have made clear how crucial child care is to the economy.

The crisis has pushed child care to become a top policy issue, and President Joe Biden’s proposed massive relief package is evidence of a monumental shift, giving hope to an industry that has experienced a dreadful year. As such, for child care providers across Pennsylvania, Inauguration Day this year is about more than just a transfer of power.

The $1.9 trillion America Rescue Plan announced by the Biden team before the inauguration includes $40 billion for the child care industry. With the $10 billion for child care passed by Congress in the last coronavirus relief package, the proposed number matches the $50 billion in federal aid that advocates have repeatedly said was needed for the sector to survive.

Child care became a campaign topic in 2020 both nationally and locally, as politicians laid out plans for helping struggling Americans navigate the crisis. Bipartisan support for child care has grown over the past several years as the lack of affordable and high-quality child care has been pinpointed as an important barrier to employment. Advocates and child care providers alike are increasingly optimistic that 2021 might be the year that child care becomes a longstanding policy priority, not just an industry to be bailed out.

Biden’s proposal is already getting pushback from some senators who are alarmed by the price tag, and it’s unclear whether Congress, now controlled by Democrats by a narrow margin, will approve it in its entirety. But advocates say the plan’s commitment to child care indicates that the needs of the industry are being taken more seriously.

“Congress is going to have to do its thing and we’ll have to see what comes of this. But what is heartening is that our policymakers are hearing the message that child care is a vital sector to our economic recovery. The fact that it was so well represented in that package does speak volumes and gives us a sense of optimism that that will be successful in continued efforts to try and stabilize the sector,” said Steve Doster, Pennsylvania State Director for the Council for a Strong America and part of the Start Strong PA coalition, which has been advocating for increased funding for child care in Pennsylvania.

Still, child care has been gaining bipartisan support for years, on the state and federal levels. Advocates hope that even with a divided Congress, child care funding might be more likely to make it through the negotiations.

“The nature of the people who are in this field long term is to be optimistic, “ said Leslie Spina, director of Kinder Academy, which currently includes four child care and pre-kindergarten centers in Philadelphia. “The people who’ve been doing this for a long time, we always operate on a shoestring budget, we don’t get the respect that we deserve in a multitude of ways, but it goes beyond that. On the hierarchy of educating children in this country we are at the bottom of that hierarchy.”

So far, 2021 has encouraged that optimism.

Of Biden’s proposed funding package, $15 billion would go to the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which funds state-subsidized child care for low-income families, while $25 billion has been proposed for an “emergency stabilization fund.”

Advocates are also encouraged that Biden’s most recent proposal includes $350 billion in local and state government aid, aimed at helping struggling state and local budgets. The relief bill is a one-time payment, but cuts to child care in the state budget could have lasting consequences for years to come.

“We are thrilled. They are finally recognizing the need,” said Graham, “but it is only a bandaid.”

Providers say the need is widespread, from short-term relief to keep the industry from collapsing due to COVID-19 to long-term increases in Pennsylvania’s reimbursement rates in order to increase wages and address dire staffing shortages.

The first priority is maintaining the landscape of high-quality child care centers that advocates have built over the past several decades. With at least 480 child care centers closed across the state, the child care gap is widening.

But the needs go beyond mitigating the effects of the virus. State-subsidized child care could be even more crucial after the pandemic, if unemployment rises and families are stretched increasingly thin. But in order to make child care a reality for working families trying to go back to work, advocates say the state will have to address the existing problems in the industry and those caused by the virus.

Graham has seen a 40% decrease in enrollment since the pandemic started, not including those children who are now attending virtually. Revenue has been cut even further, by about 60%, because of a change in state-subsidy payments. Even during a typical year, the state’s program to subsidize care for low-income families doesn’t cover the full cost of child care.

For child care centers to be considered “high quality” within the Keystone Stars program, they must meet certain requirements, such as having staff with advanced degrees. They also must provide staff with benefits, such as health insurance. So while there are higher reimbursements for higher quality, the costs are even more substantial.

One of the biggest issues is staff retention. Salaries offered by child care centers often aren’t competitive, especially when requiring advanced credentials and relying on a state subsidy for low-income families.

Addressing these issues would take commitment from both Washington and Harrisburg, but some child care providers believe if they can survive the COVID-19 crisis there could be a better understanding of the service the child care industry provides.

“It is wonderful, we are so happy with the proposals coming out of the incoming Biden administration,” said Graham. “It is a desperately needed emergency investment, but we also need long-term investments.”

Philadelphia to offer in-person special education testing to 600 students

2021-01-15T00:22:45+00:00

The Philadelphia school district will open six high schools on Jan. 25 as regional centers for evaluating 600 high-needs special education students, Superintendent William Hite announced Thursday.

West Philadelphia High School, Edison High School, Martin Luther King High School, Strawberry Mansion High School, The Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush, and the High School for the Creative and Performing Arts will design new or updated individualized education programs. The district will help families with transportation to and from the centers, if necessary, and will offer meals at the sites.

The 600 students initially identified by the district are mostly those with complex needs and are a subset of the 21,000 district students with IEPs. They have disabilities that require some in-person therapy or interventions, said ShaVon Savage, the district’s deputy chief of specialized services.

For now, the centers will offer only special-education testing, not services. “It is our intent to open the centers for purposes of assessment first,” Savage said. “There is a strong possibility that we will be able to provide additional supports and services to special education students in these centers moving forward.”

Officials have identified students in this category who need evaluations or re-evaluations, and will begin notifying families Friday and next week starting Tuesday. (District offices will be closed Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.) Families will be able to opt out.

The long-term future of the centers depends partly on how quickly schools may open more widely for some in-person instruction. For now, Savage said, the plan is for the centers to stay open “indefinitely.”

Hite said that he would have more news within a week or two on any expansion of hybrid and in-person learning across the district.

Savage and the district’s student health medical officer, Dr. Barbara Klock, stressed that strict COVID-19 protocols will be in place at the regional centers.

“Health and safety practices are at the forefront of every decision we make,” Klock said. School staff will be tested weekly, Hite said, and students will be tested daily using a rapid test that provides results in 15 minutes.

No more than two adults will be in a room with a student, and all will be required to wear masks and observe 6-foot social distancing. In cases where that might not be possible, as in an evaluation for a student with physical disabilities, examiners will wear extra personal protective equipment, Klock said.

Savage noted that all-virtual learning has been going on in Philadelphia for much of a year, and said that this is the appropriate time to prepare for some in-person learning for students with complex needs.

“No one could have predicted that we would have stayed closed for this extended period of time,” she said. “We are now planning forward so that we can begin to really get into the depth of serving students in this new environment.”

Hite said that when more in-person learning resumes, it will start with prekindergarten through second graders. The next groups to go back would be all students with special needs from grades three through 12 and students in career and technical education fields that require certifications with equipment that’s only available in schools. “We will look at other groups after that,” he said.

Hite said that the schedule for a return to more in-person learning will not depend on the availability of COVID-19 vaccines for school workers. “Naturally we support expediting the vaccines so educators are receiving those, but the return is not conditioned on individuals receiving the vaccines.”

City health officials said earlier that vaccines might be available to school personnel as soon as later this month, but Hite and Klock said logistical details of who will be prioritized and the process of giving the vaccines were still being worked out.

Philadelphia school leaders confident schools will reopen this year

2021-01-08T23:30:03+00:00

Superintendent William Hite, Board of Education President Joyce Wilkerson, and teachers’ union President Jerry Jordan all say they are confident school buildings will open for some students this school year.

Hite will likely announce a reopening plan within the next “10 days or so,” he said in an interview Thursday. Hite noted the Pennsylvania departments of health and education had that day revised the guidance for school reopening, encouraging schools to resume instruction for elementary students — even where virus transmission rates are still relatively high.

“Beginning with the start of the second semester, the departments recommend public schools in counties with substantial transmission consider returning elementary school students to in-person instruction while secondary school students remain fully remote, provided they follow all applicable orders and safety protocols,” said the revised guidance, signed by acting education secretary Noe Ortega and health secretary Dr. Rachel Levine. They also urged resuming in-person instruction for targeted populations including English language learners and students in special education.

Levine and Ortega cited studies showing younger children have less susceptibility to the virus. But the statement emphasized that the final decision is up to local officials.

“I think it strongly recommends that younger students come back to school,” Hite said. “And I think their timeline is around the end of the first semester, which is the beginning of February. Those are the same group of children we were working toward getting back into the school already.”

Jordan reiterated in an interview that the union had secured during contract negotiations a series of conditions necessary to open schools, complete with grievance procedures to enforce them.

“I think teachers want to be in the classroom, they want to be face to face with kids, kids need direct instruction,” he said. “We as a district and union are farther ahead than many places.”

Jordan pointed to Chicago as an example where the school district and teachers union have failed to reach an agreement about school reopening. District leaders there have moved ahead with plans over the objections of the union.

The school district has tried twice to reopen schools for 30,000 students in pre-kindergarten through second grade — first in September and then in November. Each time, the return was called off due to public opposition. A main concern was that the aging buildings aren’t safe.

Hite said Philadelphia has done more than many other districts to work on their buildings while they are empty of students and staff, and is one of the few to write detailed ventilation reports and make them public. The reports have alarmed parents because many schools have few classrooms that are deemed usable, but Hite noted that initial plans call for relatively few students to return. If areas of the buildings aren’t considered safe, they won’t be used, he said.

He also said there are plans to test students and staff for COVID-19 regularly once buildings are open. “There are protocols in place for testing, it is our goal to get young people back into school as quickly as possible,” he said.

Within two weeks, Hite said, the district is likely to open some schools in each area of the city for students with disabilities who need services that are difficult or impossible to deliver virtually, such as occupational and physical therapy.

In addition to younger students, Hite is concerned about older students in career and technical education classes who need hands-on experience in order to accumulate enough hours for certification in their chosen field.

“They have required hours on equipment that is only available in schools,” he said.

Wilkerson said many teachers and families want children to return for some in-person learning. When the district did a survey in preparation for opening schools on a hybrid model in November for students in pre-K through third grade, about one-third opted to return.

A Chalkbeat analysis of the fall survey results from families showed that in schools with higher percentages of white students, parents were significantly more likely to select the hybrid model over fully virtual. And schools with 80 percent or more economically disadvantaged students saw a lower rate of families choosing hybrid.

The board president thinks the availability of vaccines “changes the analysis somewhat.” She added, however, that the logistics are “mind-numbingly complicated.” For instance, if teachers are given priority for vaccines in Philadelphia, as Mayor James Kenney and health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley have indicated, how will that work for those — about half, she said — who don’t live in the city?

“I have no idea how any of that works,” she said. She predicts that some schools will open and then close again, depending on their neighborhood and the level of spread. Hite also has said as much.

“I am confident in some form or fashion we will have in-person something,” she said. “What I do know is that we need to get kids back in school.”

Chalkbeat intern Neena Hagen contributed data analysis

‘Ordered chaos:’ Teachers and families adjust to pandemic pre-K in Philadelphia

2020-12-21T20:47:39+00:00

Confidently sporting a pale green dinosaur T-shirt, 4-year-old Ezra sat down at the table in his living room for “his meetings.”

Far from the boring team meetings that most adults, including his parents, have grown accustomed to in the age of COVID-19, Ezra’s “meeting” consisted of him sorting buttons by size, shape and color. Later his pre-kindergarten teacher would read a book out loud about different kids wearing clothing with various buttons, snaps and zippers.

Ezra’s classmate, Jaden, 3, also enjoys being like the rest of his family. “He sees everyone doing the same thing: I am at my laptop, his mom is at her laptop, his older sister is at her laptop, so what do little kids like to do? They want to do what everyone else is doing,” said Jaden’s father, Jermaine Millhouse.

Both Jaden and Ezra attend pre-kindergarten at Kai’s Comfy Corner, one of 136 centers that are part of the PHLpreK program. Like child care providers across Philadelphia, Kai’s Comfy Corner has made adjustments to cope with the realities of the coronavirus pandemic — it’s among just 74 who are offering some remote learning.

Jaden sits during virtual class.

The change has been an adjustment for families and teachers alike. Kai’s Comfy Corner enrollment dropped from about 70 students to 18, and the center adopted a hybrid model with three days in person and two days with a half hour of virtual learning. The remote days allow the teachers to deep clean the classroom and write lesson plans that integrate both in-school and at-home learning.

At the onset of the hybrid model, parents and teachers at Kai’s Comfy Corner were concerned about the impact on early childhood development and kindergarten preparedness. But several months in, some staff and parents say the center has made the best of a bad situation, with surprising results.

“From our end it is going really well, although I am sure it is much more work for [the staff]. Honestly, I have been surprised at how engaged Ezra has been in the virtual modules,” said Patrick Manning, Ezra’s father.

Millhouse said it took Jaden a few weeks to learn to sit still and pay attention during the 30-minute remote classes. By imposing a routine that mirrored the real classroom, it became easier. “We had to plan it. We had to set it up like they were in school,” he said.

Now, more than three months into the school year, the 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds interact enthusiastically with their teacher and classmates on Zoom. On one recent Thursday, Jaden jumped to answer a question about a book the teacher was reading.

“What does an author do?” the teacher asked,.

“The author writes the book,” Jaden said.

For perhaps the first time, parents are getting a glimpse into how much planning going into pre-K lessons. What may look chaotic, especially on Zoom, has its purpose.

Bryanah Tonkins, head teacher, initially tried to start with students muted, in order to mimic a classroom practice of “having your listening ears on” when another student is talking. But teachers found they missed valuable things that students said while muted.

“The environment of just letting them talk when something comes to mind is good. It helps them feel comfortable, it helps them engage with the class. One-at-a-time might work in person, but it is hard to get them to understand that only one person should talk when they are physically just there by themselves.” So instead, the audio is on for all students for the duration of the class. Sometimes children talk over each other, sometimes they get off topic, but in the end they are all learning, she said.

“It is ordered chaos,” said Tonkins, “but when you go into a classroom face-to-face and you hear that hum. You always want to hear that hum in a daycare center because it shows kids are engaged, talking, participating.”

For some families, the virtual sessions are the students’ only interaction with other children. Jillian Tropea signed up her 3-year-old daughter, Journey, for virtual classes out of concern about the health of the girl’s elderly grandmother.

“I really wanted her to go to pre-K. But with my mother-in-law, it is just not possible right now with COVID,” said Tropea. Instead, she stops by the center every Wednesday to pick up the props and instructions for the activities for the week, keeping her daughter as engaged as possible on her own and joining the Zoom classes

Learning material assists virtual class at Kai’s Comfy Corner.

Thursdays and Fridays.

Tropea hopes the time, although short, makes a difference and helps to combat social isolation. She worries about the toll the lack of socialization over the last nine months has had on Journey.

Ezra’s parents too, worried about the social and emotional cost of not sending him to the in-person program. That’s why they decided to do the hybrid model. “It was a constant back and forth all summer,” he said.
During the initial shutdown last spring, they started to see the effects on Ezra and his 9 year-old brother, who is attending fourth grade virtually. With all of the talk about the pandemic and quarantine, both boys were becoming afraid of going outside and seeing other people. His parents also noticed changes in Ezra’s ability to regulate his emotions.

Now Manning said Ezra is as excited about the virtual days as the in-person ones. Even if the virtual program is only 30 minutes twice a week, the continuity of seeing familiar faces five days per week has been surprisingly significant, he said.

Early childhood educators have had to adapt too. They still have to teach the children, but they also give overwhelmed parents tools and tricks to facilitate learning at home.

“The real hard part is sitting down at the planning stage each week when we have to say ‘Ok we are reading this book and we are counting so what can we do at home, what kind of supplies do we need to give to them?’” said Tonkins.

They also need to explain to parents the lessons’ objectives, how it ties in with what is going on in the classroom, and how to extend it beyond the limited screen time the students are allowed to have with their teachers.

“It is a lesson for the families as well as the children,” said Tonkins.

Most parents aren’t trained educators, and before the pandemic, some might have viewed pre-K exclusively as child care. Many parents now are seeing what it takes to get their children ready for kindergarten, she said.

“Before parents might think, ‘Ok great, my child painted me a picture’ but they might not understand what is behind all of it,” said Tonkins.

Manning said he has learned so much from watching and observing the teachers during virtual classes. Now he finds himself talking about concepts like “structured play” and trying to bring the classroom into the home. He said he hopes some aspects of the hybrid model will continue beyond the pandemic.

“Now I am not just handing him playdough to pound it out, but we will trace an ‘A’ in it or something,” he said.

Tonkins sees more progress than ever in her students, especially notable during a pandemic in which many students and families have struggled with remote learning. She attributes that progress to the children practicing at home with their parents.

“We are kind of co-teaching almost. It is really a team effort and we have to all be on the same team as we continue his learning process at the home,” said Millhouse, Jaden’s dad.

Philadelphia widens free internet eligibility for families with children in school

2020-12-18T23:46:59+00:00

Do you have Internet Essentials? Take this survey about the quality of your connection.

Philadelphia has expanded eligibility for PHLConnectED, its program to provide free internet access to families with school-age children.

City officials intensified outreach this week to families who now qualify for the program.

Under the new guidelines, all families who participate in public benefit programs with income qualifications, such as food stamps, will be eligible. Students who receive special education services or are learning English also qualify.

“We want to connect as many families as possible to reliable internet access,” said Mayor Jim Kenney in announcing the outreach campaign. “As digital learning continues, access to high-speed internet is more important than ever.”

Among the main beneficiaries of the expansion are customers who were enrolled in Comcast’s low-cost Internet Essentials program — especially those who fell behind on their payments — before the pandemic forced most learning online and Comcast began offering free access to new customers.

Even at $9.95 a month, the cost can prove too much for families who are struggling with other obligations, especially those who lost jobs during the pandemic.

“Throughout this process, we’ve also learned that many families already have internet service, but struggle to afford it,” said Chief Information Officer Mark Wheeler. Those already enrolled were not eligible for the two-months-free offer Comcast made last spring to new customers when some virtual learning began for almost all the schools in the city.

About 7,000 people signed up for the Comcast offer between April, when the offer was made, and August, when PHLConnectED started as a joint venture with the city, school district, internet service providers, and several foundations and non-profits. The $17 million program promised free internet until June 2022 to eligible households with students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade in the Philadelphia school district, as well as at most charters and some private schools.

Those 7,000 families have since been notified that they could enroll in PHLConnectED and receive free internet through the end of the 2021-2022 school year. That group accounts for more than half of the 12,000 families PHLConnectED has enrolled since its August launch, according to officials.

As part of PHLConnectED, the city designated three organizations to employ “digital navigators” who track down families, tell them about their eligibility, and help them complete the multi-step process.

“Most of the people I have talked to on the phone about Internet Essentials and PHLConnectED, they don’t know where to start,” said Miyo Imai, a digital navigator for the ExCite Center of Drexel University.

Besides Drexel, the other organizations with digital navigators are Community Learning Center, an adult literacy organization, and SEAMAAC, an advocacy group for immigrants.

Even before PHLConnectED started, Drexel and the other organizations had been reaching out to clients trying to help them with their internet connectivity and to obtain Chromebooks or other devices.

Signing up for PHLConnectED requires several steps, and many families just didn’t follow through.

“They have to take the initiative,” said Imai, who is a Drexel student studying computer science and psychology. “In the beginning, we weren’t getting very many calls, and we weren’t sure how to get the word out there.” It’s a Catch-22, she said — promoting a program online doesn’t work if people aren’t online.

“It was hard to get the word out to people who really needed it,” she said. The city turned to advertising through other means, which helped somewhat, she said.

But altogether, she estimates that she only succeeded with about 10 families to complete the process from beginning to end.

To sign up for the program, families can call a 24-hour, 211 hotline. They get a promotional code from the district or their participating school, which they must then activate before receiving the equipment they need to get online. Some families, such as those with less stable living situations, get hotspots through T-Mobile if that will better serve their needs.

Imai and other navigators said many families are in situations where other life challenges take priority over signing up for internet access.

“We have people coming back to us who don’t know how to set it up once they get a kit from Comcast,” Imai said, “Some have data plans on their phone, so we can send them links. But with other people, it is harder. They’ve never seen a modem or a router, they don’t have any idea what to do with them. There is such a range of people’s experiences with tech.”

Other people have called the Drexel navigators to say that their internet speeds are “ridiculously low. “One woman said she couldn’t open up a single web page,” she said.

Existing customers whose bills are in arrears will not have those obligations forgiven, but have not had their service cut off and will be able to receive free service through June 2022.

Before the expansion, eligible families included those with no access or access only through mobile phones, anyone experiencing housing insecurity, or those who had students who spent their days with caregivers at locations without access.

Pennsylvania preschool program lifts math, language skills, study shows

2020-12-18T01:19:39+00:00

Children who participate in Pennsylvania’s biggest early childhood program, Pre-K Counts, show advantages in math problem-solving and language skills, putting them four to five months ahead of kindergarten peers without the experience, according to a new study.

Pre-K Counts provides free half-day and full-day programs for 3- and 4-year-olds at risk of school failure from low-income families, those making up to 300% of the federal poverty level.

Pre-K Counts targets in particular English language learners and children with special needs. The program, which started in 2008, enrolls about 25,000 children who attend early childhood programs that the state has certified as high quality and meeting certain standards.

“These results suggest that early prekindergarten experiences in PA PKC may provide an important buffer, particularly for children from low-income families or who are otherwise at greater risk for school failure,” said the report, whose primary author is Ellen Peisner-Feinberg. She is a research professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied several state preschool programs, including those in Georgia and North Carolina.

The study found that the benefits were not greater for students who attended for two years instead of just one.

The study also highlighted areas for improvement. For instance, children who participated in Pre-K Counts did not show greater gains in social development, cognitive processes, and some areas of literacy; these are all areas where additional teacher training might offer students more varied experiences in their second year.

Because language and math skills most strongly predict academic achievement, the report noted, strength in those areas point to the benefits of Pre-K Counts. Children leaving preschool with a four-to-five-month advantage is “a substantial difference in terms of skills development, particularly for young children,” it said.

While Pre-K Counts is among the better state early childhood programs in the country, “it still has a lot of work to do,” said Steve Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research.

“One of the things research has shown over the years is that accomplishing goals set for early childhood programs is really difficult,” he said. He noted that the state funding for Pre-K Counts has varied over the years, which has “made it difficult to consistently build the level of quality that they want.”

Plus, the pandemic has slowed progress in expanding high-quality early childhood education, he said. Many child care and early childhood programs in the state have shut down, permanently or temporarily, as attendance has plummeted. Others have laid off teachers in whom they have invested training.

“The pandemic has hit them from all sides,” Barnett said. “This is a very tough year to address the quality issue, but it’s clear it needs to be addressed.”

Pre-K Counts is one of several state early childhood programs, including Ready to Learn, all funded through a combination of public and private dollars. Philadelphia has its own program, called PHL Pre-K, which makes quality care available to additional city families.

National research has shown that students who are proficient readers in third grade are significantly more likely to graduate from high school, and that students who enter kindergarten without a good foundation are less likely to reach that milestone.

President-elect Joe Biden has a plan to address the needs of children from birth to age 5, including universal access to pre-K, but it is unclear how much of it will be enacted and funded.

“As states struggle with the pandemic and its budget impacts, the nation must find ways to support essential investments in effective programs,” Barnett said.

The study was conducted before the pandemic, with students who were in kindergarten in 2018-19 and in Pre-K Counts in 2017-18. It included nearly 600 students from 28 school districts, including 51 schools and 178 classrooms.

The study was funded by the William Penn Foundation, which has also given a grant to Chalkbeat for coverage of early childhood education.

Child care providers in Philadelphia warn of mass closures due to new state policy

2020-10-23T23:45:45+00:00

Early childhood education providers from Philadelphia and around the region warned Thursday that many are in danger of going out of business unless the state changes how they are subsidized.

As part of an online “speakout” on Zoom, 81 child care providers said they had lost a collective $1.4 million in state funding last month, when a reimbursement formula changed. The formula had been based on pre-pandemic enrollment, but has switched to actual attendance. They described the effect as “devastating.”

“This is a statewide issue, not just for Philadelphia,” said Mary Graham, executive director of Children’s Village, which is located in Center City.

Most of the centers in Philadelphia survive on state subsidies, supplemented by parent copays. Some also have clients who pay full tuition. All this income was affected, they said.

Providers said they are suffering a “triple whammy” of losing staff, losing money, and losing enrollment — all while pandemic-related costs are soaring.

Provider after provider described how their enrollment has plummeted while their expenses have increased due to the impact of COVID-19. In addition to the need to purchase personal protective equipment, or PPE, the centers also had their maximum capacity decreased by social distancing requirements. Many have already laid off staff, including some in whom they have invested so they can obtain more credentials.

Statewide, more than 300 providers have closed permanently and 400 others are temporarily closed, said Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, an advocacy group. At least 60 of those closures have occurred in Philadelphia.

Like schools, most child care centers closed abruptly in mid-March when the virus started to spread. According to a survey by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, since then enrollment in child care centers is down 66%. A study from Pennsylvania State University estimated that centers in the state lost $325 million from a combination of lost revenue and increased costs.

From March through August, the subsidy for state programs, primarily Child Care Works, was based on the center’s pre-pandemic enrollment. Then the state Office of Child Development and Early Learning, or OCDEL, said that starting in September, it would reimburse based only on actual attendance. Providers received their September checks this week.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Human Services, of which OCDEL is a part, did not return a call asking for comment.

State officials previously said that they expected the child care centers to fill many of their seats with school-age children who utilized centers all day, not just after school.

While some of that happened, it wasn’t enough to make up for the losses. Susan Kavchok, executive director of Childspace, said that her two centers, in Germantown and Mount Airy, lost $16,000 last month due to the change in reimbursement policy. She said she does have some school-age children for a full day, but that only cut her losses in half.

“Our losses would have been double that amount if not for the full-day services,” she said.

Besides their role in maintaining a health economy by allowing parents — especially women — to maintain their jobs, center directors said that they also provide a critical service for low-income families and neighborhoods.

Damaris Alvarado of Children’s Playhouse said her two South Philadelphia sites had capacity for 280 students and were usually full with a waiting list. Today the sites enroll 200 students, or 72% of capacity. This has put their survival in danger, she said, which would be a blow to the local community.

Alvarado said the centers often connect families to other services and provide meals, diapers, and educational resources. Many of the families are immigrants, she said.

“We are a lifeline for them,” she said.

Brightside Academy has 33 centers in some of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods with the largest numbers of low-income families. Aliya Brown, a senior director who runs the center at Kensington and Allegheny, said: “If this policy is not reversed, I don’t see how we can stay open.”

Cooper, who had been policy director for former Gov. Ed Rendell, said she doesn’t believe state officials understood the implications of the policy.

“Now they do, and they need to rethink it,” she said.

Philly child care, early childhood in ‘dire’ position

2020-09-25T22:25:46+00:00

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Leslie Spina’s five Kinder Academy child care centers were always full with a waiting list. Now, enrollment has dropped by more than half — from 500 to 215.

“It’s not sustainable at numbers like this,” Spina said. “We hope that people will come back, but we understand if they don’t.”

As the school year gets underway, child care and early education providers and advocates in Philadelphia characterize the state of the industry as precarious. Families are not enrolling their children in the same numbers as before, meaning centers’ income is down even as their pandemic-related costs go up.

And the cost crunch is about to get worse.

Early childhood education is supported in Pennsylvania through a variety of federal, state, and local subsidies. Programs include federal Head Start, the state’s Child Care Works, and the city’s early childhood program known as PHLPreK. Most Philadelphia centers have students who qualify for one or more of these programs and the bulk of their revenue comes from the subsidies, supplemented by parental co-pays and some full-pay clients.

Until August, the state paid subsidies for all students who were enrolled before Gov. Tom Wolf ordered most centers to close in March. Starting this month, however, the state decided to pay only for students who actually attend.

Center operators are bracing for the drop in revenue, which will show up in the check they get at the beginning of October.

“It’s more than precarious. I think the industry is about to go off a cliff,” said Bevin Parker-Cerkez of the city’s Reinvestment Fund, a financial institution with a mission to help underserved communities through investments, partnerships, and expertise. Since the pandemic started, the fund has made $5 million in grants to 415 child care and early education providers in Philadelphia to help them stay afloat.

In August, the fund surveyed its grantees, which encompass the gamut of providers, from small home-based family care homes to individual centers to larger multi-site organizations like Spina’s. Parker-Cerkez said 379 of the 415 grantees responded. And they reported that their pre-pandemic enrollment had shrunk by 27% — from 18,766 to 13,666.

“I think we’re in a dire situation,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of the advocacy group Public Citizens for Children and Youth. She said the state isn’t looking ahead to the long-term consequences.

“We need the state to assiduously look at the data in September on the share of children attending child care, and if parents still demonstrate trepidation they need to fund these centers or they won’t be there when the economy reopens,” she said.

Statewide, enrollment is down by 12,000 students, and 700 of 7000 centers have yet to reopen, with 260 already saying they are closing permanently.

Beyond the change in the state reimbursement policy, the larger issue is inadequate federal and state support for an industry that is vital not only to child development but to the reopening of the economy. This is a prime example of how the pandemic and government decisions of where to direct stimulus funds reflects — and is exacerbating — the country’s yawning inequality, Cooper said.

“Programs that run in the subsidy system are the hardest hit by the enrollment problem,” Cooper said. Many workers who used private child care, she said, continued to pay their centers even if they were not sending their children.

But the subsidized system, which largely serves lower-paid workers, “has been hit very hard,” Cooper said. Its families “are the people who work in the restaurant, retail, warehousing industry...many are school district employees. We know all these people need to go back to work. Everybody wants the entire economy to reopen and for that to happen, subsidized child care has to reopen.”

Spina’s Kinder Academies, located in Northeast Philadelphia, are a case in point.

Her centers serve primarily immigrant families; Chinese in Mayfair, Brazilian in Rhawnhurst. The Castor location is dominated by families from the Middle East, and she has several Arabic speakers on staff. They all get high marks from Pennsylvania’s Keystone Stars rating system.

She notes that the centers are more than places of learning. They each serve 10 meals a week and maintain a food pantry. “We make sure they have health insurance,” she said. “We sign them up for WIC . We have people who are food insecure, housing insecure, we’re always doing the work to help people get what they need to survive.”

She understands people’s reluctance to send their children back now. They are out of work, and they fear COVID-19. To make up for the enrollment decline, she — like other child care providers — has taken in school-age children all day and are supervising their virtual education. The state changed its reimbursement, in part, because it was expecting that school-age children would make up for the drop in preschoolers, but that hasn’t happened.

Plus, “The reimbursement rate doesn’t make up for the cost of all-day care,” Spina said.

Spina has plans to open a sixth center in Oxford Circle, in which she has already invested $2 million, rescuing an abandoned church from planned demolition and the property from yet another convenience store. “Now it will be a child care and family support center, as well as a site for teachers’ continuing education,” she said.

But now those plans are on hold despite a shortage of slots — before the pandemic, Cooper said there was a waiting list of 13,000 for subsidized child care spots in Philadelphia. “There is tons more need than is available in Philadelphia in the regular times,” she said.

Not only does Spina worry that the new center will never open, she fears she may have to close some of her other sites.

“I hope I don’t regret spending this money and shutting all but one down,” she said. “Maybe we should have done that.”

LaTonta Godboldt of Small Wonders family child care

LaTonta Godboldt is another provider who is coping with similar issues. She built a successful and highly rated family child care business called Small Wonders in her North Philadelphia home, and she was planning to open a center for 30 or so students nearby.

“I was in the process of expanding to a larger center, I’ve been paying rent on the building through the entire pandemic,” she said. She had been interviewing staff; to maintain her Keystone 4 Star rating she needs eight adults.

Godboldt has been getting help from the Reinvestment Fund, but at this point the picture doesn’t look good.

“They’re predicting $200,000 in losses for that center” unless things change quickly, she said. Current government policy regarding child care, Godboldt added, constitutes “a tremendous blow to a [social and economic] necessity that is already underfunded. The amount of money we’re getting to sustain our programs is not even close.”

The Reinvestment Fund asked operators how long they thought they could remain open under current conditions without further government aid and in light of the state’s change in policy regarding the reimbursement rate. The average, Parker-Cerkez said, was seven months. It also asked providers the top four factors they used to reach that estimation. Most said they had figured in the unpredictable environment, their financial projections, and how long they could last being unprofitable. Half said that they expected to contribute their own funds or take out personal loans.

Pennsylvania got $106 million as part of the federal coronavirus relief package specifically designated for childcare. That money was distributed to programs in two phases during June and July. In addition, the state designated an additional $125 million out of its federal COVID-19 pot for childcare; that money was given out in August and September.

Providers also applied for and received loans through the Paycheck Protection Program. (Chalkbeat is a nonprofit and also received federal paycheck protection funding.)

Cooper said that the state still has $1 billion in federal coronavirus money that is unspent, and child care is only one of many sectors, including hospitals and small businesses, that need help. Requests for a share of that money total $40 billion, she said.

A spokeswoman for the state’s department of human services said in an email that the purpose of the Child Care Works program “is to support families that need help paying for child care. CCW is not a child care provider support.

Reverting back to paying centers based on actual attendance “is necessary to comply with federal regulations [and] allow [other] families in need of care to enroll.”

She pointed out that since the pandemic closed most centers in March, the state has paid $590 million to child care providers, including $370 million in CCW subsidy payments from March through August, regardless of whether a center was operating.

Philadelphia’s office of early childhood education said that it is “working...to address immediate family and child care needs while also thinking about long-term sustainability” and is spreading the word about the availability of state subsidies and affordable child care opportunities in an effort to boost the enrollments.

The HEROES Act passed by the U.S. House in the spring included $7 billion in a Child Care Development Block Grant, but it was not taken up by the U.S. Senate. The Child Care is Essential Act, introduced in May by two Democratic House members, includes $50 billion for child care, but it was never acted on.

To what extent child care and early childhood might be included in additional pandemic-related stimulus legislation now being negotiated in Washington is not known.

For Spina, it is a matter of priorities.

“The government has bailed out the airline, banking and auto industries,” Spina said. “I have great hope that our society also values our children, especially those who are most at risk, and the state, federal and city governments will come forward. If we can survive, we’ll be able to thrive.”

Child care industry says new state reimbursement rules will be devastating

2020-07-23T23:18:27+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Child care providers say Pennsylvania’s new reimbursement rules scheduled to start in September will devastate the industry, forcing many to close and leaving parents without options as more go back to work.

Since mid-March, when most centers in the state ceased operations due to the coronavirus, the state has been reimbursing them in two of its key programs, Child Care Works and Early Learning Resource Centers, based on the number of children they had enrolled as of March 16.

On Friday, the Office of Child Development and Early Learning (OCDEL) announced that, beginning Sept. 1, it would revert to reimbursing the centers only for students actually enrolled. Most centers that have resumed operations have far fewer students than before but far higher costs due to new cleaning and sanitizing expenses and the need for extra space in order to meet social distancing requirements. This translates into more expenses and less revenue for an industry that has always operated on very tight margins.

And, because of COVID, enrollment patterns are likely to fluctuate dramatically in the near future, but centers cannot plan financially under those conditions, providers said.

Tana Rinehart, who runs the Warwick network of child care centers that has operated in Chester County for 33 years, said that even the most financially stable providers don’t know how they can stay open without further government aid and support.

“Financial predictability is crucial for our survival,” said Rinehart, who has worked in child care herself for 28 years. “I have never seen it this bad. I’m afraid a lot of us are not going to make it.”

Veronica Crisp, whose Step-by-Step Learning Center is in Delaware County, said the situation is “quite scary. I honestly don’t see how we will be able to sustain ourselves.”

The providers were also concerned about the state’s restoration of rules regarding absences. Subsidies stop if a child is absent for more than five days. But federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rules require a two-week quarantine for any child exposed to the virus.

In Pennsylvania, 169 providers have already announced that they are shutting permanently due to the impact of the pandemic on their finances. Many have laid off large chunks of their staff.

The state announcement noted that its payment policy during this period resulted in $370 million being sent to child care providers, most of which had remained closed. In addition, it distributed more than $100 million from the federal CARES Act funding in June and July and will hand out another $116 million more in August and September.

Most centers operate with a combination of state subsidies, a sliding scale of parent co-payments, and full tuition from families that can afford it. Even before the pandemic, providers have said that making ends meet while keeping quality high has always been a balancing act. For instance, child care workers are paid salaries that sometimes make it more lucrative for them to take jobs at places like Walmart and Target.

The child care centers’ dilemma is being complicated by the possibility of having to make space for older students, who will be in virtual classes at least three days a week. Centers get less reimbursement for those students than they do for infants, toddlers, and pre-kindergarten students. And adding older children also adds expenses, including appropriately sized furniture.

Another issue: The centers will be expected to help those students get online for virtual instruction, but some don’t have internet access or the appropriate bandwidth to support that.

“People are looking to child care centers to enroll school-age kids,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children & Youth, an advocacy group. “That is a giant shift for them. They’ll be expected to get ready for school-aged kids with no idea if they are going to come. Add to that the unpredictable payments. … These centers are already barely above water.”

Cooper said that more state and federal aid is needed. PCCY and First Up, formerly the Delaware Association for the Education of Young Children (DVAEYC), organized a news media call Thursday for regional providers to explain their dilemma.

Cooper noted that the federal government decided to invest heavily in helping industries such as airlines and hospitals, where normal operations have been severely altered or curtailed as a result of the pandemic. The same must happen for child care, she said.

“Once there is a vaccine and people go back to work, these centers need to be there,” she said, a requirement to fully restarting the economy.

In Philadelphia, where most students are expected to attend schools two days a week, Superintendent William Hite said Thursday that there are plans to create makeshift centers for children in places like recreation centers, churches, and libraries for the three days a week that they will not be physically in school. Those spaces will supplement the amount of room that child care centers can provide.

Cooper said that is a good idea, and she said it is possible to maintain health guidelines in those circumstances, noting that camps have been doing that this summer.

There are ways to have the child care centers absorb the older children “without jeopardizing the viability of this sector over the long term,” she said.

State Sen. Tim Kearney, a Democrat from the 26^th District in Delaware County, said that he and his colleagues are pushing for a special session of the General Assembly in August to deal with educational issues.

“We can’t talk about education without talking about child care,” he said. “This affects all of us, not just those with children who need care. It allows society to function.”

Kearney noted also that the state is “staring at a budget hole” that has deepened as the pandemic has wreaked havoc on tax collections.

“This is unprecedented. We’ve never been in a position like this,” he said. The state passed a budget that kept K-12 education funding whole for the entire fiscal year, but the rest of the budget only covers five months.

“Somehow, we are going to come back in November and figure out how to pay for the rest of it,” he said.

Up to now, he said, spending for child care in Harrisburg, unlike many other areas, has generally received bipartisan support.

Undermining the industry is “unwise,” he said. “If any industry needs stabilization to get society functioning again, it’s child care.”

Erin James, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, while noting all the extra funding provided to child care centers through the CARES Act since mid-March, said that “reverting back to real-time attendance numbers will allow more families to receive the Child Care Works subsidy, and gain access to safe and stable child care.”

She also said that “while it is true that some child care providers have decided to permanently close, the vast majority have not.” Of roughly 7,000 licensed providers, 6,300 have reopened, 650 remain temporarily closed, and “approximately 165” since the end of February have permanently closed.

Penn State Harrisburg’s Institute of State and Regional Affairs is conducting “an impact study to understand the challenges for child care providers reopening and resuming operations during COVID-19, and this study will inform distribution of the final $116 million and other decisions moving forward,” James said in an emailed statement.

The Notebook’s coverage of early childhood education is funded by the William Penn Foundation.

Child care centers are reopening, but all is not well

2020-07-13T17:20:22+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Last Monday morning, Adrian Jackell was ecstatic. It was his first day back in his early childhood center in more than three months. The plastic gowns and face shields he saw on his teachers may have been new, but the wide smile on his 3-year-old face was the same as ever.

“He loves it,” Rob Jackell said of his son. “He’s been excited to come back. I think he’s going to be happy to play with other kids, since it’s been so tough for him.”

Adrian’s parents, Rob and Mara, brought the boy to St. Mary’s Nursery School, a fixture in University City for decades, as soon as its doors opened at 9 a.m. He was greeted warmly by his teachers and couldn’t wait to start playing with his friends. Soon he would be happily sitting on a classroom floor, poring over a book with a classmate, as if nothing had changed since last spring.

But all was not normal.

As parents arrived, they found the St. Mary’s entrance blocked by a desk with a clear plastic barrier protecting teachers from children. Center director Traci Childress and her staff greeted families while looking like something out of a science fiction movie, with clear plastic face shields and colored plastic gowns covering their clothes. Oversized ID tags showed pictures of the smiling faces hidden by their masks – so the children will be less confused, Childress said.

As the morning birds sang amid dappled sunshine, the Jackells stood six feet behind their son, watching him approach the desk like a tiny traveler checking in at the airport. There, a staffer scanned his temperature and watched him carefully sanitize his hands. Then, with words of praise and smiling eyes, they escorted the boy past the barrier and into St. Mary’s. He turned for a last happy wave at his family and then disappeared into the building.

It was the center’s first day open since it abruptly closed on March 16 – a joyful occasion, but also one filled with uncertainty and fear for the future of Philadelphia’s child care sector.

‘Underfunded and under-enrolled’

“It was a broken model before, an underfunded model before COVID,” Childress said. “Now it’s underfunded and under-enrolled.”

Experts, parents, and advocates agree: The U.S. economy cannot function without reliable child care. Families like the Jackells depend utterly on places like St. Mary’s.

Mara and Rob Jackell. (Photo: Bill Hangley)

“We need to be able to work. So they need to be open,” said Rob Jackell after his son was safely inside. “I don’t know what we’re going to do if they close again. Especially if they’re open for only a few weeks and they close again.”

The same is true for thousands of families across the region as the sprawling and diverse child care sector struggles to adjust to an unprecedented challenge. As the states and federal government during the coronavirus shutdown have been crafting various rescue plans designed to reopen businesses and help furloughed workers make ends meet, child care has received some help. But, advocates and providers say, it’s not nearly enough.

For most of the time between March and last week, Childress and her staff worked tirelessly to prepare for when they could resume business. They made sure that they followed every federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention guideline, took every possible precaution, and could handle any eventuality. Childress became an expert in best practices and made presentations to her colleagues in the field.

She also had to reduce her staff, stock up on personal protective equipment (PPE), and keep in touch with families who, she knew, may or may not come back when the center reopened.

Even if all the families do want to come back, it’s not that simple. For although St. Mary’s had to spend extra money to pay for PPE and cleaning, social-distancing guidelines say that it cannot enroll the same number of students unless it rents another room. Every day is a new challenge, as changing directives translate into new costs and new questions. Among the center’s many changes: They gave up five rented parking spots in order to save $10,000, which will help balance the ever-growing PPE budget.

“Last week, the governor said children needed to wear masks … so we went ahead and ordered children’s masks. But that was quite expensive,” said Childress. “That came out Friday, and we’re opening today, and the masks aren’t here yet. And that was two and a half thousand dollars.”

Operating on a shoestring

For child care centers like St. Mary’s, this is just one more expense, leading to a grim bottom line: COVID-related costs and demands are going up, while revenues are going down.

“Think about having half the kids and twice the cost for each kid,” Childress said.

Traci Childress, director of St. Mary’s Nursery School. (Photo: Bill Hangley)

In the best of times, the child care sector operates on a shoestring, especially in a city like Philadelphia, where so many families are low-income. It’s a tight margin business, marked by the paradox: The workers are generally not well-paid, while the costs, especially for private-pay families, are high.

In the city, most of the students who are eligible for publicly subsidized programs such as Head Start, Child Care Works, and PHLpreK attend privately run centers like St. Mary’s, which receive a subsidy for each child. And most providers in Philadelphia serve a combination of children – some subsidized and some who are “private pay” and assume the full cost. In addition, the subsidized families contribute a co-pay that varies based on their income.

With the centers now resuming business after more than three months, many child care providers are afraid that policymakers will take it as a sign that they are in good shape and that the state rescue plan for the sector did its job. But that is not the case.

“Just because we can reopen doesn’t mean everything is fine,” said Jackie Groetsch, public policy field organizer for First Up, an early childhood advocacy group that until recently was called the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children (DVAEYC). “That’s important for elected officials to know.”

Programs like St. Mary’s, she said, “are taking it extremely slowly and weighing decisions in a thoughtful and intentional way,” she said. “Do they have the ability to open safely and maintain all the CDC guidelines?”

Through the federal CARES Act, Pennsylvania received $106 million in federal Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG) funds. The state distributed $51 million of that in June, and the second portion of this funding, $53 million, will be distributed in July.

In addition, Gov. Wolf and the General Assembly chose to devote $125 million in CARES Act funding designated for education in general to early learning programs. Of this amount, Groetsch said, $116 million will go to child care, $7 million to Pre-K Counts, and $2 million for the Head Start Supplemental Assistance Program.

The child care funding will be allocated based on recommendations from a study being conducted by Pennsylvania State University on the impact of the pandemic on the sector, she said, and the Pre-K Counts and Head Start funds will be issued separately to current grantees on a per-slot basis.

To help child care and early childhood centers weather the pandemic, the William Penn Foundation and Vanguard set up a $7 million emergency fund, which is being administered through the Reinvestment Fund.

City-wide survey on child care

As part of this, the Reinvestment Fund, Philadelphia’s Office of Children and Families, the Public Health Management Corp., and United Way are conducting a city-wide survey to understand child care needs as people head back to work and school.

The survey will be open on the Reinvestment Fund website for two weeks and is available in eight languages.

“The CARES Act funding is a positive initial investment, but additional significant relief is still needed to support the child care industry so programs can keep their doors open to meet the needs of working families,” said Groetsch. Some centers also received Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans.

But already, Groetsch said, 65 centers across the state have said they will not reopen.

St. Mary’s teacher Genevieve Abaara shows off her ID tag. (Photo: Bill Hangley)

There is movement on the federal level for considerably more support. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state and Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, both Democrats, have introduced the Child Care is Essential Act (S. 3874 and H.R. 7027), which would create a $50 billion Child Care Stabilization Fund. Murray is the ranking member and DeLauro is the chair of the committees that oversee the sector in each house of Congress.

Whether this or legislation like it will pass, given the political atmosphere in the nation’s capital, is another question.

“This is an industry that had tight margins to begin with,” said Nelida Sepulveda, early childhood policy director for Public Citizens for Children & Youth. “Any bump in the road may push them over the edge.” Without further assistance, she said, “some of our more savvy, more sophisticated providers don’t see the model working past six months.”

If schools in the fall do not resume on a full-time, in-person schedule, as now seems likely, the pressure for reliable child care only grows, she said.

“Parents need to go to work,” she said. “Is the child care sector able to absorb kids outside the normal age group they work with? Who will take care of these children?”

Many centers haven’t even started thinking about that, she said. “Folks are just struggling with reopening, trying to figure out how to be viable as a business, provide quality care, and ensure safe and healthy conditions to the degree they can control it.”

Childress and other providers said the problems were daunting and the questions endless.

“They said you don’t have to reduce the size of your classes, but if you follow all the guidelines on the mats for naps, where you had 20 kids, you can’t get in more than 10 or 11” in the same space, she said. But that number of children “puts me at less income.”

Before the pandemic, 138 families sent children to St. Mary’s in three programs: toddlers, pre-K, and afterschool, ranging in age from 18 months to 12 years. The toddlers and preschoolers would be separated during the day, then combined when the afterschool contingent came in.

But because it is so hard to socially distance young children, the CDC guidelines recommend not mixing the age groups. To continue with the three programs, she will have to find another room or severely cut down on the number of children served.

Then there is the issue of whether parents want to come back. Childress said that 31 of her children said they were coming back in July; normally, she said, she would have 70 children for the summer program. As of the beginning of July, she had 41 children enrolled for the fall, compared to 100 in normal times.

“My hope for September is that I can find additional space for afterschool programming, and we can increase our enrollment with those kids,” she said.

The state continued to pay the child care centers their subsidies through the pandemic. But the centers still lost income from the parent co-pays and the private-pay clients. Some St. Mary’s private-pay families sent in a check for April even though the center was closed, but it and other centers hope to eventually refund that money. And some centers got forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans to help with payroll.

But to stay solvent, Childress still had to reduce her staff from 30 to 17.

Mounting costs

And other costs continue to mount. The plastic gowns cost $4 each, and they are recommended by the CDC for one use while changing diapers. That means that one staffer could go through three or four a day. The alternative is to invest in a washer-dryer, but that also would involve the installation of a water line.

Through the CARES Act, St. Mary’s received $10,000, based on its March enrollment of roughly 100 kids.

“When we were at 30 staff members, that didn’t even cover our payroll,” she said. “It’s helpful, but it’s not enough. We’re opening at a deficit, and we’ll run at a deficit until we can increase the number of children we serve. What we need is money to finance high-quality programming and make sure we get through this.”

Other providers say the same thing.

Between March 13 and June 5, when they reopened, “we lost $330,000,” said Susan Kavchok, CEO of Childspace, a center with locations in Mount Airy and Germantown. The first round of PPP loans covered $269,000 of that, and Kavchok tried to fundraise for the rest. And some families also paid the April tuition even though the center was closed. “A lot of our parents were very understanding,” she said.

Childspace, which first opened in 1988, didn’t lay off any teachers and asked them to do virtual teaching from home, but as a center that serves a combination of private pay and subsidized clients, it was tough to make ends meet. In some ways, centers in which most of the students are subsidized were better able to survive, because the state continued to pay the subsidies. Some centers also laid off more staff members so they could collect unemployment benefits, so they didn’t have to use the state money to meet payroll.

And some centers feel they have to hire additional teachers to make sure they can maintain staffing ratios and their high state ratings, in case of illness. Then there are the additional cleaning costs, for materials and staff. Childspace spent $2,500 on supplies and $1,500 on a cleaning service.

“If we get sick, we’re not cutting classrooms down,” Kavchok said. “We hired three additional staff to do that.” The CDC recommends this, and parents expect it, “but on a financial level, how viable can that be beyond July and August?”

She doesn’t want to think about what will happen in the fall if students are not in school full time.

“What I’m finding unbelievable is that there is no discussion of what families are going to do if these kids are not in school,” she said. “I’ve heard this, that school is not day care, but the fact is that many parents rely on school so they can work. I don’t know how the economy will reopen if we can’t get these people back to work.”

Smaller, home-based centers are also uncertain about the future.

Kimrenee Patterson runs a center out of her West Oak Lane home that, at its peak, accommodated 10 children. The younger ones were full time and a contingent of older siblings came after school. The group includes some of her nieces and nephews. She was able to stay open for much of the time since March because several of her parents are essential workers with a few children.

Patterson worked hard to attain high-quality status from the state’s Keystone Stars program, earning the maximum four stars. Keeping that status during the pandemic has been daunting.

“It’s a lot more work,” she said. Student-staff interactions follow a whole different rule book. “It’s not a typical day with a lot of instruction. And it’s very different compared to our day where we do a lot of affection, can’t do any of that right now.”

Then there are the safety guidelines. “The staff is mandated to keep masks on as much as possible,” she said, adding that in the heat, that can be “overwhelming” but the rules are rigid about it when it comes to diapering, naptime, “and anything where we have close proximity. Handwashing is constant, wipe-down is constant, there is twice as much sanitizing of toys. One thing I stress to parents and staff, I want to take the ‘f’ out of fear. We don’t want to put fear in the children, but we want to make sure we put healthy practices in place.”

Patterson, who opened her business in November 2017, has consulted a nutritionist and has put more fruits and vegetables in the children’s diets to boost their immune systems. She asks parents to be careful where they go so they don’t expose their children, and therefore the staff, to additional risk. She even lets parents drop off the children when they go on supermarket runs to minimize their contact with others. Toys are sanitized after the children use them, and sheets are washed after every nap.

“The most important thing during this time is trust,” she said. “Our families have been with us since we opened. We don’t have high turnover, so it’s easier to talk about the realities of what we’re all going through with parents.”

Financially, due to the pandemic, she said, “I’ve lost 25% of my income.” But she has been scrimping and saving to make it work. Like the others, she has no idea what will happen if students only attend school occasionally in the fall and are expected to spend a lot of time doing schoolwork virtually.

“The parents want to know will [the older children] be able to come here with their computers full time, and if we can help them with their assignments,” Patterson said. “I told them I didn’t know, I would find out as we move along.”

Parental decision-making

Parents are doing their best to make the right choices in an ever-shifting landscape. Laura Nikoo and her husband, both administrators at the University of Pennsylvania, are faithful Childspace parents. Of course, they want to do what is best for their family and their children, but they also worry about the future of the industry.

“I think that this issue of child care sits at the nexus of all of the intersectional competing issues during COVID,” Nikoo said. She and her husband were both able to work from home, and they appreciated spending more time with their three children, who are 1, 3, and 6 years old.

But even if work habits change permanently and parents spend more time at home – and despite some concerns about safety – Nikoo wanted her children to return to Childspace.

Laura Nikoo and children Anna (left) and Simon on their first day back at Childspace. (Photo: Dale Mezzacappa)

“We knew we wanted to support the health and vibrancy of a community that has supported our family for six years,” she said. “The people and teachers there helped us raise our children.”

When it closed in March, they continued to pay the center in April “without question,” she said.

She and her husband carefully weighed the risks and benefits of sending the children back, doing research, and going through what she described as a “roller coaster of emotions.” Ultimately, the benefits won out. She took her 3-year-old and 1-year-old back to Childspace on July 2, the day her 6-year-old started his summer camp.

“Anna [the 3-year-old] was most articulate about that,” Nikoo said. “She said, ‘I miss my teachers and my friends.’ We had real concerns about whether we were making the right choice ethically and through a public health lens, and we decided the pros outweighed the cons. We want them to be playing and coloring and running through the sprinklers.”

Childspace impressed her with its “comprehensive plan” for reopening and how the center “balanced safety concerns for the children and all staff and teachers with an eye toward what it means to be a child in this moment.”

Regarding St. Mary’s, the Jackells went through a similar process in making their choice to send Adrian back.

While Rob Jackell wants his son “to get back on track for reading and writing and everything else,” he said, he thinks that “the most important thing right now is for kids to remember what it’s like to be with other kids, how to play and function and socialize. That’s number one. As much as I wish it were academics … it takes a back seat right now.”

The city should be “prioritizing child care and schools,” said Mara Jackell. Rob adds that as important as business is, Philadelphia should not be opening up its bars and restaurants, especially because they can accelerate the spread of the coronavirus.

“Prioritize getting the numbers down low enough that we can safely open schools in September. And honestly, they need to spend some money on it – we can’t be having budget cuts right now,” he said.

Both agree that the mayor and governor need to do more to support child care and early childhood – it’s tough given the pandemic’s impact on tax revenues, but necessary, the Jackells assert.

“The mayor and the governor both have emphasized what people have to do and very little about what they’re going to do to help us,” Rob said. “The economy can’t function without health care and education.”

At St. Mary’s, amid all the technical and procedural challenges, staff members say they’re trying to keep the warm and loving attitude that puts children at ease.

“I just stay positive, keep an open mind,” said teacher Andre Houslin. “Keep it very simple, relating to the kids as best I can. … This pandemic has been a lot for them, so getting them to talk about their emotions and how they feel is one of the biggest things to me.”

St. Mary’s teacher Andre Houslin in his newly organized classroom. (Photo: Bill Hangley)

His colleague, teacher Genevieve Abaara, added that the center will do its best to balance strict social-distancing rules with the need to make kids comfortable. Staff are replacing hugs with jolly waves and greetings, she said – and as long as the kids feel the love, they don’t mind the change.

“The fact that we’re still interacting the way we normally do, even though we’re not in close contact, that’s big for them,” said Abaara. “We’re not isolating them.”

Childress, St. Mary’s director, knows the challenges have just begun, but she hasn’t lost faith. She tells her staff that if they stay honest and open, the center and its kids can ride out the storm.

“I keep saying to my staff, our approach is to be transparent,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ll make it through this year, but we’ll do our best.”

The Notebook’s coverage of early childhood education is funded by the William Penn Foundation.

Emergency fund to save local child care gives out $1.5 million in grants

2020-04-28T22:10:12+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The city’s Reinvestment Fund has begun disbursing aid designed to save Philadelphia’s child care and early childhood education sector, which has been decimated by the shutdown caused by COVID-19. It has given $1.5 million in grants to 120 organizations, ranging from home-based providers to large day-care centers.

The grants come from the $7 million Philadelphia Emergency Fund for Stabilization of Early Education (PEFSEE) program, which is largely underwritten by the William Penn Foundation and Vanguard’s Strong Start for Kids Program™.

The application process opened April 6, and within the first weeks, it had received 418 responses. The grants range from $5,000 to $20,000, depending on a center’s size and the number of children served. The goal is to help them meet payroll, rent, and mortgage obligations so they will be positioned to resume operations as soon as it becomes safe to do so.

“We’re looking for thoughtfulness and understanding how people can best position themselves to open on that day, whenever it is, with staff in place,” said Bevin Parker-Cerkez, the fund’s managing director for program services.

“This is an essential service,” Parker-Cerkez said, necessary to the reopening of the economy. “When people go back to work, kids need a place to go.”

Many centers are retaining their staff and paying them with state and federal subsidies, which for now are continuing to flow. However, some sources of income have stopped, including co-pays and fees paid by parents themselves.

“We have to maintain the overall goal of the program, which is retaining high-quality capacity in a sector that we have worked so hard to build,” Parker-Cerkez said. Priority in the first rounds of funding is to maintain the diversity of providers and to shore up providers in locations that are “easily accessible to the most vulnerable populations.”

The Reinvestment Fund compiled a “gap analysis” that measured the availability of high-quality child care in different areas of the city. It also prioritized communities with high concentrations of families whose incomes are less than $32,000 for a family of three (150% of the poverty level) and those with a big proportion of jobs that pay less than $15,000 per year.

Recipients include all types of providers: 46% of awardees are single-site centers; 21% are multi-site providers; 12% are home-based family providers; and 12% are group providers. Of the total awardees, 85% are women-owned organizations and 71% are owned or led by people of color.

In addition to helping the organizations to maintain their staff and keep their locations, the grants can be used for “the temporary enrichment of parent and child needs,” Parker-Cerkez said.

Some centers are providing diapers and formula to families, and some are purchasing educational kits for children to use at home. Many families don’t necessarily stock up on crayons, glue sticks, construction paper, and other materials needed for learning activities.

Like local schools, many of the centers are attempting virtual learning by conducting circle time and other social meetings through online platforms, and teachers stay in regular contact with families.

“That is so crucial to maintain those lines of communication with families in this increasingly isolating world that we’re in,” Parker-Cerkez said.

While many of the centers also qualify for the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) that is part of the federal stimulus package, that application process is cumbersome and time-consuming. It also was overrun with applications, and there is a huge lag time before any award is sent.

This program “was easy to apply for, received quickly, and does not have to be repaid,” said Aliya Johnson-Roberts, executive director of the Bustleton Learning Center, which has two sites in Northeast Philadelphia. Johnson-Roberts noted that the child-care providers need the help right now.

Mary Graham, executive director of Children’s Village near Chinatown, which serves 425 children and has 116 employees, most of them full-time, said that she used her grant to pay her full-time kitchen staff of five, whose salaries would not be covered by the continued government subsidies. The federal food program, administered by the state, pays school districts and other participants based on the number of meals served – which has dwindled to zero during the pandemic.

Children’s Village reimbursement for the food program is usually $38,000 a month, she said.

“This fund is a godsend,” she said. “While the state is still paying part of the child-care fees to providers, they’re not paying the parent copays and not getting the fees from private-pay families.”

Of her grant, she is using $17,500 to pay the food service workers so they will stay and $2,500 to send a gift package to every child that includes arts and crafts materials and books.

“That is not necessarily just to give children something to do, but it’s important in maintaining relationships with families,” she said. The total cost of the gift packages is $6,000, and part of that cost is being subsidized by the school supplies company Charles J. Becker & Bros.

The Reinvestment Fund is continuing to make awards on a rolling basis, and organizations that have not received an award yet have not been denied. A list of the awardees is available here.

The Notebook’s coverage of early childhood education is funded by the William Penn Foundation.

Modern, resource-rich classrooms, more academic direction — it is a new day for kindergarten

2020-04-06T15:49:16+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Notebook prepared this report on the District’s kindergarten modernization effort for our spring print edition before the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We have posted the stories from the print edition online over the past week along with updates from the providers and advocates we featured. As far as kindergarten modernization, it is hard to say what will happen with the schedule to add new schools this summer given the crisis. “The plan is to continue with the modernizations in the summer, but if the construction industry isn’t able to provide the resources…it could be that these projects are delayed,” said a District spokeswoman via text. “We are playing it by ear and monitoring as best we can day to day.” Kindergarten registration is proceeding as planned: early registration is open until May 29 for all students who will be 5 years old by Sept. 1.

When kindergarten started in the 2018-19 at Webster Elementary School, the teachers were just as excited as the students — if not more so.

Bernadette O’Brien, a 30-year teaching vet, remembers thinking, “OMG, best thing ever!” as she looked around her refurbished room in Webster’s Little School House, a self-contained, 2001 addition to the 60s-era Port Richmond school.

She looked at the new teal and gray paint on the cinder block walls and the big round tables that have plenty of room and little indents that spaced out the children evenly on their red, blue, and purple chairs. She spied the yellow stools that acted as balance balls for children who might want or need to work on their gross motor skills.

In the center of the teal wall was a huge computer screen, compatible with the new classroom iPads, better and more interactive than the old whiteboard. There was a reading and writing nook full of books, a LEGO station, Play DOH, brightly colored cubbies, bins with blocks and math manipulatives, drawers full of letters attached to key rings, a big white rocking chair next to the reading rug.

All in all, everything a kindergarten teacher could want. The children, too, when they arrived, she said, were wide-eyed with wonder.

Prior to the modernization, O’Brien and other kindergarten teachers, with just $100 a year allotted for supplies, had to buy materials themselves or repurpose their own children’s playthings.

In the old days, “you had to pack up your entire room, everything you own,” said Maria Binck, Webster’s reading specialist. When she was a classroom teacher, “five different times, I had to put it all in a truck and drive it home. I know how expensive it is.”

Over the last several years, the School District of Philadelphia has invested heavily in modernizing its kindergarten through third grade classrooms, part of a concerted push toward improving early literacy across the District. In particular, the goal is to help all students reach the important milestone of reading proficiently by the end of third grade.

The modernizations started in 2017, and cover anywhere between seven and 10 schools a year. So far, 232 classrooms have been upgraded, and when the project is done at the end of the 2020-21 school year, the total will be over 500.

Which schools to prioritize is based on those that have been on the lower end of third grade test scores, and where the buildings are in good enough condition for a new investment.

Besides the modernizations, the District has also adopted a “comprehensive literacy framework,” which offers a checklist and timetable for activities, including in a daily, required two-hour “literacy block” that involves students participating in different reading activities. In addition to the District’s literacy coaches, some schools have coaches from Children’s Literacy Initiative, which specializes in teacher coaching and creating language-rich classrooms.

No mistake, the literacy block is not about the teacher doing “stand and deliver” in front of the classroom, but combines whole group reading with small group and individualized instruction. Some students write, or act out stories with puppets, or curl up in the reading nook with a book color-coded so students can pick out ones appropriate for their level.

“Early literacy goes all the way from birth to third grade,” said Diane Castelbuono, the District’s deputy chief of early learning. “How kids learn can be traced back to early language and brain development in their earliest years.”

That document also undergoes periodic revisions to keep up with the latest research in the science of reading. One is due in time for the next school year.

“I would say in previous iterations, we’ve been probably less focused on phonics and phonemic awareness in the lower grades than we should have been,” said Castelbuono.

Playing and Learning

While doing that, the District has also worked to maintain a healthy balance between maximizing young children’s most effective means of learning — which is play — with activities involving words and letters that are more structured.

“Playing and learning are not separate, ever,” Castelbuono said. “Kindergarten is all about learning through play.”

The idea that there is somehow a conflict between children learning their letters and being able to play is misplaced, she said.

“They are not mutually exclusive things,” she said. “It does make me a little exasperated when we get asked about learning vs. play. They are interrelated. A good kindergarten curriculum will never discount play.”

Xavier Hernandez, a kindergarten student in O’Brien’s class, on the 100th day of school. Photo by Dale Mezzacappa.

She points out that the modernized classrooms have arts centers, a puppet stage for acting out stories, and a kitchen area.

There are anxieties, however, that the increasing emphasis on structuring time makes it harder for kindergarten teachers to try out new things and to address the widely varying skill levels in classrooms that can have as many as 30 children. For instance, while writing — and its precursor, drawing — is part of the framework, it can be given short shrift.

O’Brien, for instance, said that “it’s definitely going in the direction of more academic vs. traditional play, like the housekeeping centers used to be. “Personally, I’m a little sad there isn’t as much playing with dolls and in the kitchen.”

She isn’t really complaining, though. “I can incorporate it in other ways. In the reading tent, they can role-play. I’ve learned to adapt, and the kids are enjoying it and benefiting from it. In math and literacy, they are more advanced than they ever were.

“They think everything is play. It hasn’t hurt them.”

And while adults might want to draw a sharp line between activities that specifically promote reading and writing, for the kids the line is pretty blurry, especially in the hands of a skilled teacher with the latest in equipment and materials, working in a cheerful room.

In the LEGO center, they are learning about characters; they have cards depicting settings, like a farm, on which to arrange their people and animals. “It’s not like the traditional activities that we did, but it’s great, and they are learning so many things,” O’Brien said.

One of Webster’s other veteran kindergarten teachers, Kayla Gusst, has been doing this for 29 years. The modernization, she said, “is amazing, it gave us so many good things.” She especially praises the extensive professional development for the teachers, offered after school and on some Saturdays, organized by Paula Sahm, educational facilities planner in the Office of Childhood Education.

Gusst said at the trainings, teachers come from “all over the city” to share ideas. “I’ve been thrilled,” she said, especially at the Saturday book club, in which they study the latest literature on reading best practices and discuss classroom issues and strategies.

The iPads connect to the new smart board, and Gusst can project and underline words and letters for emphasis. Before, she would have students crowd around her iPad; now all the students have access to their own.

Gusst loves it. “I learned a whole new way of using technology at the Apple store,” she said.

Like O’Brien, she is a little nostalgic for some of the traditional practices and says that the District is definitely pushing kindergarten in a more academic direction. Still, “The reading center, the listening center, the writing center, they absolutely love,” she said. “Everything is beautiful, the children love it and are happy to be in such a beautiful environment.”

She adds with a wink, “Not that my room was so bad before.”

O’Brien added that the best thing that happened in Webster was principal Sherri Arabia’s decision to use discretionary funds in the school’s budget to hire an extra kindergarten teacher and reduce class size to 20.

The smaller class size allows her to spend more time with students in small groups and individually to discern their strengths and weaknesses. Plus, she said, behavior is better with 20 rather than 30 students.

“That’s the most beneficial thing,” she said. “We have five kindergartens this year. Last year, there were four. Now I can help more kids, it’s beautiful. I pray it continues.”

Webster teacher Bernadette O’Brien on the 100th day of school. Photo by Dale Mezzacappa

On Feb. 11, Webster students and those across the District were celebrating the 100th day of school, and many of them dressed up as if they were 100 years old. They also, with help from parents or guardians, made posters with 100 items on it.

Jeremy Hernandez’s mom helped him with a poster that had 100 fake coins along with Mario and goombas from the Mario Bros. video game. Jeremy, who was wearing a paper moustache and had gray in his hair, said his mom came up with the idea.

Jayden DiGiorgio was proud of his poster, which had 40 cupcakes and 100 beads that formed the number “100.”

“I helped cut out the cupcakes,” he boasted, while eyeing Jeremy’s poster, displayed next to his. “I like this one,” he said, adding “those coins are fake.”

Parents were clearly involved in making the posters. Binck said that not many of Webster’s parents have books at home, but that the student iPads include apps on which they can download books for when they are in the reading center. If parents have devices at home, they can also use the apps.

“They are able to get that reader, and the child at home reads with the parent,” she said.

In addition, there are professional development sessions for parents as well; each school decides how to do it.

At Webster, they are made available once a month. “As a reading teacher, it’s imperative to do that,” Binck said. “We’ve tried to be strategic when we have them.” They hold “student of the month” celebrations for all who meet certain criteria, “and when parents show up, I hold them captive and have a parent workshop. We keep it short and sweet, 30 minutes.”

Waiting for upgrades

There is not quite a world of difference at Pollock School about seven miles up Rte 95. But it is different. Helena Griffin’s classroom at Pollock hasn’t had its makeover yet — it is due to happen over the summer, in time for next year.

Pollock’s kindergartens are in trailers, older and more primitive versions of the Little School Houses that now sit in several school parking lots in areas that needed more space. Griffin is in her ninth year teaching kindergarten. She also taught first grade, second grade and sixth grade, and when she started out as a literacy intern, she was in third grade. All but the first few months of her tenure in the District has been at Pollock.

Pollock kindergarten teacher Amanda Kane on the 100th day of school. Photo by Dale Mezzacappa.

During the 100 day celebration, some of her students were counting 100 beads onto a string. Two boys were putting number cards in order from 1 to 100. She looked at their work. They were doing fine until 13, but then put 41 and 51 instead of 14 and 15. “Look to see which number comes first, “ she prodded gently. They quickly realized their mistake, and it was easy from there.

In the room, there were tables with 100 cups, 100 LEGOs, 100 fruit loops. She asked them to write something about how they are 100 days smarter since they started school.

The big difference from Webster: just about everything in this room, except for the furniture, she bought herself, spending way more than the $100 annual allotment for supplies. The LEGOs that two boys are carefully stacking 100 bricks high (or long) were once her own children’s. There is a smart board, but not one hooked up to iPads and projectors where she can draw and write on it, and manipulate different software programs, and where the kids can do it also.

Instead, two ancient iMacs sit unused in one corner of the room. With children who are accustomed to smart phones and tablets, the desktops might as well be papyrus and quills.

When asked about the impending updates to her classroom, she said, “I’m thrilled. I have chills thinking about it. It’s a lot to keep five-year-olds engaged.”

With the new smart board and individual iPads, she noted, she will be able to prepare lessons at home.

At the same time, Griffin thinks it is fine to use explicit lessons to teach reading and spend a lot of time on activities like cutting out and coloring letters and words. “We still need to work on phonics skills,” she said. “I feel like if they learn to read before they leave here, they’re going to be successful. If they know their letters and sounds, they’ll be more successful than if they did not.”

She is looking forward to how the iPads and interactive smart board will help with math skills. But she is also looking forward to the puppet center and the center for dramatic play.

“I can’t wait to go to professional development to get started,” she said — which will be in March for teachers like her whose classrooms are due for makeovers over the summer.

Regardless, all the students looked to be enjoying themselves. She and the other teachers all mentioned Fun Fridays, when the kids can pick their center and “relax” with their friends.

Over the years, she said, different leaders had different emphases, and under some, “We weren’t allowed to do certain things.” When schedules were rigid, 10 minutes for this, five for that, “it was really hard, the kids were engaged, and you’d say, time’s up, sometimes you needed five minutes more.”

Now, she said, the curriculum is still structured, there are timelines, there are literacy and math blocks, as well as established times for science and social studies. “There’s so much packed in a day,” she said.

But there are also “brain breaks” and exercise and singing. The blocks are longer, with 20 minutes shared reading, 30 minutes writing, for example. The 100 day celebration was a lot about math, but it also provided some freedom and a lot of fun.

“I feel that children are more engaged when they have time to incorporate play into the centers,” said Griffin. “I had a kitchen center, it was also a literacy center. They had menus and grocery store fliers and took food orders. They were playing, and they were learning, reading print and writing.”

Amanda Kane leads the other kindergarten located in the portable space. It’s her third year teaching at that level. She has also taught “every other grade” through eighth, she said.

“This is where I’m meant to be,” she said. “It’s where you see the biggest growth. They are so eager. When they get to play, they are able to naturally learn certain skills, like social-emotional ones, how to share, how to work together. Instead of me telling them, they learn together.

“I think they’re able to learn more if they express themselves through play. They build a tower of blocks, a parking structure, and apartment building, they can talk about where they live,

Does she like the literacy blocks? “I feel, sometimes, we work to put pressure on kids in a certain way, and it hinders their ability to come to their own way of learning.” It’s better, she said, that “they come to their own conclusions instead of us telling them what to learn.”

The 100 day projects, for example, were a big learning experience as well as a way to involve parents. Some of the projects “were so good that they asked if they could clap for their classmates. “I said, ‘of course you can clap.’”

As far as the updated classroom, “I cannot wait. I have been in the school district 17 years and to have a modernized classroom blows my mind. I think it will help students learn when they see new things, and feel our own excitement. We’ll be able to open things up to them and they’ll share in the excitement. Even if we’re just getting an interactive smartboard. But we’re getting new tables, chairs, manipulatives…it’s a new day.”

Read by 4th prepares littlest learners for a life of reading

2020-04-02T13:15:45+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Notebook prepared this report on early childhood education in Philadelphia for our spring print edition before the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We are posting the stories from the print edition online this week along with updates from the providers and advocates we featured. The Read by 4th team has continued to focus on helping families support learning at home. They have created a new Family Resources page on our website, where they’ve pulled together some of their favorite online activities.

On a sunny Saturday morning children’s librarian Christina Holmes took a seat and began reading to the moms, dads and tots clustered around her in the infant/toddler corner of the Lucien E. Blackwell West Philadelphia Regional Library.

“Open them, shut them, give a little clap, clap, clap,” said Holmes, as parents helped tiny hands open and close. “Open them, shut them, give a little clap, clap, clap.”

The youngest in the crowd was about six months, the oldest about two. For 30 minutes, the children absorbed rhymes, sounds and stories as well as the babbling and chatter of the toddlers and grownups all around them.

The weekly event, called Read, Baby, Read, is among a wide variety of efforts – of both small and large scale – that make up the initiative known as Read by 4th.

Read, Baby, Read is two years along at two libraries in the city, Blackwell and Richmond – and expanding to 10 other locations over the next three years.

Another library-backed program, Literacy in Early Learning Spaces, which promotes early literacy best practices in child-care centers, started two years ago in two impoverished Philadelphia zip codes – and expanded to four, with plans to reach seven parts of the city next year.

And yet another program, ParentChild+, which trains parents at home in ways to promote literacy and numeracy in young children, started in North Philadelphia, expanded to West Philadelphia and South Philadelphia – and plans to expand yet again, to Southwest Philadelphia.

The focus on the early years is intentional.

“We’ve got 85 percent of cognitive development happening in the first five years of life,” said

Christine Caputo, chief of youth services and programs at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Both Read, Baby, Read and Early Learning Spaces are programs that seek to promote early literacy among parents and caregivers. The question, said Caputo, is “How can we set kids up for success with all those early literacy and language development skills and practices, so that they are not starting out behind when they enter kindergarten?”

The initiative to bring early-childhood literacy specialists to child-care providers aims to make a big, lasting impact. The specialists visit child-care centers, family child-care homes and group child-care homes in neighborhoods (identified by zip code) with high populations of young children, numerous child-care centers, lower literacy levels and higher poverty levels plus a neighborhood library.

To date, the specialists are reaching 31 programs, where they help set up a reading area in the

classroom and outfit the space with books, shelving, rugs and soft seating. More books arrive monthly.

“The books are high-quality, diverse and representative of the children attending those centers,” said Devon Laudenslager, who runs the program.

Providers receive coaching “around literacy and language development” twice a month and attend four professional development sessions a year at the local library. “Our teachers are gaining so much confidence around what they’re doing,” Laudenslager said. “We’re seeing classroom environments that are really changing and becoming literacy rich.”

The Read by 4th campaign launched in Philadelphia in 2015 and has more than 100 partners including foundations, the School District, the Free Library and the city as well as nonprofits, other government agencies, corporate partners and volunteers.

Building home libraries, and training teachers and parents are among ongoing initiatives, said Jenny Bogoni, Read by 4th’s executive director.

Philadelphia is part of the national Campaign for Grade Level Reading, which supports efforts at the local, state and national levels to raise awareness. That group cites research showing that students need to be proficient readers by the end of third grade to master more complex subject matter beginning in fourth grade. Yet two-thirds of fourth graders and four out of five low-income students need reading help.

The Campaign, based in Washington, has support from a wide swath of education-related groups.

A ripple effect for the whole family

Where the Free Library’s Literacy in Early Learning Spaces seeks to train child-care providers, the ParentChild+ program seeks to coach parents, in their own homes, in ways to promote literacy and learning about numbers – numeracy – with their very young children.

The initiative at multiple sites in Philadelphia, with support from the GreenLight Fund, is part of a national program, four decades old, that seeks to increase school readiness, decrease the need for special education, and improve high graduation rates by supporting reading and play activities for young children in the home.

“It’s the two-generation strategy,” said Omar Woodard, GreenLight’s executive director. “We can do a lot of work with young people by themselves but children exist in the context of families. We want to boost the capacities and possibilities of parents. We don’t believe it’s trickle-down, we believe [the support] has a ripple effect for the whole family. Improving parent-child interaction isn’t good for just one child, it’s good for the rest of the family as well.”

The program opened four years ago in partnership with the Philadelphia Housing Authority and Public Health Management Corporation in the Sharswood/Blumberg neighborhood in North Philadelphia. A second program opened in the Mantua neighborhood, with yet another set to open in the Bartram neighborhood.

The home-visit specialist works with the family over two years. “We’re seeing better interactions between parents and the child, we’re seeing higher literacy and numeracy scores, and we’re seeing 100 percent being signed up for quality pre-K slots. Over the last four years this has been incredibly effective and transformational investment,” Woodard said.

Other Read by 4th initiatives are far smaller in scale.

The Art Sphere Inc. nonprofit “uses art and music, mindfulness and movement” as a means of promoting literacy in its school and library programs. For young children, Art Sphere offers a lunchtime series on Tuesdays at the Fishtown Library branch.

“Parents and kids come to make art and make music centered around books,” said Director Kristin Groenveld. “Our staff reads books, but they make it more interactive with art and music projects. We’re engaging all the children’s senses so they’re learning spatially as well as auditorily, as well as visually.”

The preschoolers learn about book making, “they do singalong, they do nursery rhymes” so that when they begin to learn to read “they’re actually very familiar with the process through song,” Groenveld said.

At the Read, Baby, Read session at the Blackwell library branch, Kimberly Braxton and her 15-month-old toddler Clifton have been regulars since before he turned one. “He likes to come and track with the other babies and toddlers,” Braxton said.

Besides story time, the Braxtons planned to check out children’s books featuring food, colors and animals – “things he likes right now,” she said.

Yahala Fisher, with her son Semaj, almost one, have been visiting story time “since he was three months old,” Fisher said. Read, Baby, Read “helps him learn new words and meet new people and become interested in reading. That’s what I want.”

And that’s the point, said Naisha Patterson, who runs the program. Read, Baby, Read and other library programs seek to “support emergent literacy, language development and purposeful play” for the city’s youngest patrons and their parents. Parents, Patterson said, “are basically the child’s first teacher.”

Drexel teams up with family ambassadors, child care providers to promote learning

2020-04-01T12:50:57+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Notebook prepared this report on early childhood education in Philadelphia for our spring print edition before the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We are posting the stories from the print edition online this week along with updates from the providers and advocates we featured. We asked them to explain what they – as well as the city, state, and federal governments – are doing to keep the industry alive so that when normal business resumes, the sector will be prepared. You can read about that here.

Since the pandemic closed schools and most child care centers, the program Action for Early Learning has continued to work with families in its West Philadelphia neighborhood. As luck would have it, on Martin Luther King Day, AFEL volunteers assembled bags of supplies that included items that are now in short supply, including disinfectant wipes, hand sanitizer, tissues, band aids, and paper towels. They added items for children including crayons, construction paper, glue sticks and childrens’ scissors – helpful to have on hand while children are staying home. “We have been able to respond to the needs of our families during this crisis by distributing these resource bags through our civic groups within the Promise Neighborhood.” A total of 100 bags were distributed, along with donated books. Much of this was made possible through the Vanguard Foundation and PNC Bank corporate volunteers.

The program continues to share information on free meals and activities with families, and keep providers current on state and city payments. Via Zoom, it is continuing to train its Ambassadors/Navigators and helping families with online kindergarten registration and online activities.

Most of providers in the neighborhood have closed their doors, but two sites received waivers to remain open: YSI Baring House, because it is a 24-hour crisis nursery, and Xavier’s, because they have multiple parents who work in health care.

Donna Drain works full-time as a cook at Philadelphia’s Lamberton Elementary School in the city’s Overbrook section. But her part-time job is back where she lives, in West Philadelphia’s Mantua neighborhood, where she talks to parents, grandparents and other family caregivers about the importance of high-quality childcare and early childhood education.

“By the time they are three years old, 90 percent of the brain is already active,” Drain explained as she mingled one recent evening with some 150 West Philadelphia residents who filled a dining hall at Drexel University’s Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships at 35th and Spring Garden streets.

Drain, a grandmother and African American, has lived on 37th Street in Mantua for 50 years. She is one of 40 community residents who work part-time as “family ambassadors” in an innovative Drexel project that aims to ensure all children in the surrounding neighborhoods – a federal “promise zone” – are ready for kindergarten and reading at grade level by the third grade.

The ambassadors, who typically work weekends and nights, are paid $12 an hour to spread the word about just how important early education is for a child’s success in school and later life. They take community surveys, meet with family caregivers, distribute free books and even go into homes to help parents and grandparents acquire the skills they need to promote learning at an early age.

Family ambassador Donna Drain. Photo by Huntly Collins.

The idea is that trained parents and grandparents, reaching out to other family caregivers who live in the same neighborhood, will be more effective advocates for early childhood education than professionals from outside the community.

“I show the parents how they might interact with their children,” Drain explained. “If they are making spaghetti, for instance, they might say to the child, ‘I can’t find the spaghetti. Can you help me find the spaghetti?”

Even that kind of basic association between a word and the object it represents helps put very young children on the path to reading, she said.

Called Action for Early Learning (AFEL), the Drexel project, which is supported by federal and foundation funding, has drawn the attention of both national and local child welfare advocates. The program is part of the city’s Read by 4th initiative.

“AFEL has demonstrated that parents and early childhood staff have a thirst for learning how to best support the healthy development of their children,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth, a Philadelphia-based advocacy organization. “What’s especially inspiring is that they’ve taken the time to train parents to learn the theory of healthy child development so they can help others in their neighborhood learn from trusted messengers.”

Cooper said the benefits will likely “last a lifetime” because knowledge about how to get young children ready for success in school will be passed on from one generation to the next.

Action for Early Learning is just one part of a broader Drexel initiative aimed at alleviating poverty in the neighborhoods around the university. The early learning project has two main components – an alliance of 26 childcare providers in West Philadelphia whose workers receive training and other assistance to boost the quality of the programs, and the cadre of family ambassadors who are trained to advocate for early childhood education among neighborhood residents.

“If we improve the quality of childcare programs and nobody comes, it’s not going to benefit the children,” said Maria Walker, AFEL’s director.

Tiffany Cleveland, a single mother of four children, has served as a family ambassador for more than two years. She said the training in early child development provided to AFEL ambassadors has not only helped her become a strong advocate for early learning but also improved her ability to parent her own children. At last month’s dinner, she cradled her month-old daughter while keeping her eye out for new families in the dining hall who might need to know about quality childcare. “Most of the families really appreciate the information,” Cleveland said.

Like a number of other ambassadors, Cleveland has parlayed her ambassador training into a full-time job in the child-care field.

Reaching for the STARS

About 1,100 children, almost all of them from low-income African American families, are enrolled at the 26 childcare sites. Some providers are home-based, others operate out of centers. A majority benefit from government subsidies for free or reduced-cost care provided by federal, state and local dollars, including the revenue raised by Philadelphia’s soda tax for PHLpreK.

More than half of the 26 providers are considered “high quality” under the Keystone STAR rating system used by the Pennsylvania Department of Education to evaluate childcare programs. AFEL regards the others as “rising STARS” and works intensely with them to boost their ratings.

The ratings, which take into account such factors as the ratio of teachers to children, range from 1, the lowest rating, to 4, the highest.

The family ambassador component of Drexel’s approach to early learning isn’t the only thing that distinguishes it from other programs in Philadelphia. Unlike most other early learning initiatives, AFEL is university-based, making use of Drexel’s enormous educational resources including its schools of education, law and medicine. Another difference is that AFEL focuses on the education of children from birth to age eight; by contrast, other programs tend to focus on only one age cohort – infants, toddlers, or pre-kindergarten children. And, unlike traditional programs, AFEL aims to reach children in a specific geographic area.

The target area, designated by the federal government, is bounded by the Schuylkill River, 38th Street, Girard Avenue and Sansom Street. It includes all or portions of eight neighborhoods – Mantua, Powelton Village, West Powelton, Belmont/West Belmont, Mill Creek, Saunders Park and East Parkside. These neighborhoods have some of the city’s highest poverty rates and some of the lowest literacy rates. In Mantua, the poorest of the neighborhoods, about half the residents live below the poverty line, almost twice the rate for the city as a whole.

Under the leadership of John Fry, named Drexel’s president in 2010, the university set out to forge public-private partnerships that would stimulate both economic development and poverty reduction in the immediate neighborhoods around the university while also pushing back against gentrification that would drive out low-income residents, some of whom have called West Philadelphia home for half a century or more.

In 2014, President Barack Obama named the neighborhoods adjacent to Drexel as one of 22 national “promise zones.” While the designation didn’t bring with it any federal funds, it gave “preference points” to public-private partners within the zone when they applied for federal grants to alleviate poverty.

By then, Drexel was already working with Morton McMichael Elementary School in Mantua to save it from threatened closure due to low enrollment and generally poor performance on state tests. With Drexel’s help, the test scores improved and the school, a fixture at the corner of 35th Street and Fairmont Avenue since 1892, was saved.

“The school then came back to us and said, ‘Our children are not starting school kindergarten- ready. What can you do to help us?’” recalled Walker.

The William Penn Foundation, along with the Lenfest Foundation, stepped forward with a planning grant to help launch Action for Early Learning. The vision was to mobilize existing resources in the neighborhood, including grassroots groups, to improve early childhood education in the catchments for McMichael and five other public schools in the area.

In 2016, the effort paid off: the U.S. Department of Education awarded a $30 million grant over five years to Drexel, the lead partner in a community revitalization effort. The funding, made possible by its “promise zone” status, was not just to go toward education, but also housing, legal assistance, medical care and other needs.

The model, based on New York City’s Harlem Children’s Zone, was audacious. What could a university best known for its engineering and technology programs do to improve the education of the youngest children in a predominantly African-American area where 65% of some 40 childcare centers were ranked as low quality under the Keystone STAR system?

A lot, it turns out.

In 2014, when AFEL began its efforts, fewer than 50% of the area’s 2,000 children under the age of five were in high-quality childcare, as measured by the Keystone STARS system. Today, the figure is 77 percent. Over the past six years, AFEL’s family ambassador program has organized a book-drop up and down Lancaster Avenue that has recycled more than 25,000 children’s books to give to area residents. Across 10 AFEL-affiliated childcare programs, average pre-literacy levels rose from the 31st percentile in 2014 to the 44th percentile in 2017.

Pre-literacy is measured by a standardized test in which children are asked to associate words with the appropriate picture.

Although AFEL started with an emphasis on literacy, it has now expanded to include the social and emotional development of the child. AFEL also has become a driver of jobs, job training and black entrepreneurship in West Philadelphia.

Twenty-three of the family ambassadors have gone on to full-time employment in the childcare field, and many of the childcare providers in the alliance have increased their STAR rating, becoming successful small-business owners.

A high-achieving home-based program

Xavier’s Family Childcare occupies the first floor of a three-story, red-brick row home in Mantua. It opens at 6 a.m. and closes at 6 p.m. five days a week. At 9:30 one morning in early February, nine children between the ages of 1 ½ and 5 had already had their breakfast and were engaged in an activity to promote social and emotional development.

They sat in a circle on the carpeted floor in a dining room repurposed as a classroom. Children’s books, alphabet posters and other educational materials filled every corner. One by one, the children stood and made their way around the circle, each introducing themselves by name to each of the others and asking how they wanted to be greeted. “Good morning, my name is Naleyah, would you like a handshake or a pat on the back?” After Naleyah, who is four years old, the others took a turn: Sarah, 5; Kamari, 3; Aava, 4; Nadir, 4; Kennedy, 4, and several others.

Two workers – Miss Terrie, who tends to the infants, and Miss Monica, who works with the older children – kept close watch. Through AFEL, these and other workers, most of whom live in the neighborhood, get help in earning accreditation as child development associates. Miss Terrie already has her accreditation, and Miss Monica is working on hers. The accreditation, offered through a course at Drexel’s Dornsife Center, gives childcare workers a national stamp of approval that they are qualified to work with young children in daycare and early childhood centers.

Dancing at Xavier’s Family Childcare. Photo by Huntly Collins.

When the Xavier’s children completed their round of introductions, Janelle Golden, who owns and directs the home-based program, turned to her Google Home Box. “Hey, Google, music, please!” Soon, the children were up on their feet and happily bobbing around the room as they danced to the Hokey Pokey and other songs. After that, it was time to settle down and read.

Golden, who is a youthful looking 50 years old, is the fifth generation of her family to live at 436 North Prescott, a quiet street with row homes on both sides. A graduate of West Chester University where she majored in elementary education, Golden said she had always been interested in the education of young children. In 2006, she converted the downstairs of the family home into a childcare facility. “I just keep giving the children what I can,” she said.

Through the Drexel partnership, Golden is able to give her students much more than the typical home-based program can provide. The children learn Spanish, not just English. They dance at the nearby Phil-A-Danco studio. On weekends, the children and their families get to attend educational programs at the Academy of Natural Sciences, which is affiliated with Drexel.

Not surprisingly, Xavier’s has a Keystone STAR rating of 4, the highest possible.

Officials who monitor Philadelphia’s new soda-tax-funded PHLpreK program have taken note of what’s happening at Xavier’s. “It’s fantastic what they are doing here,” said Lisette Rivera, a PHLpreK coach, who visited Xavier’s on the morning I observed.

As part of her job with the city, Rivera monitors 12 early childhood education sites, visiting each two times a month to make sure they are meeting quality standards. In order to get city funding, PHLpreK providers must have a Keystone STAR rating of 3 or 4. Rivera noted the many puzzles and LEGOs available for children at Xavier’s. “We’re going to have a lot of engineers!” she commented.

A few blocks from Xavier’s, Taylor’s Learning Academy, another AFEL-affiliated early childhood education program, enrolls 65 children from three months to 12 years old. It’s located in a modern, low-slung building at 631 Holly Mall, right next door to a Philadelphia Housing Authority complex, Mt. Olivet, that provides subsidized housing for low-income people aged 55 and older. Some of the residents of the complex have grandchildren who are enrolled at Taylor’s.

Taylor’s has a Keystone STAR rating of 3 and hopes to move to 4 through ongoing training of some 11 staff members and stepped-up parent engagement. During a recent visit, the pre-kindergarten students, all wearing dark- and light-blue school uniforms, read in small groups, with a teacher and an aide, while babies received one-on-one attention in the infant room.

Felicia Taylor, 50, and her daughter Felicity, 16 at Taylor’s Learning Academy, which is family owned. Photo by Huntly Collins.

Felicia Taylor, whose family has owned and operated Taylor’s Learning Academy for more than 15 years, is the director.A number of years ago, she wanted nothing to do with the state’s Keystone STAR rating system. She thought it involved too much paperwork and provided too little support. But AFEL convinced her to participate.

“At first I wasn’t going to join,” she said. “But once I started going to meetings, I saw how it would benefit the children.”

At 50, Taylor is now handing off day-to-day operations at the academy to her daughter, Mariah, who is 25 years old. And ready to step up when it’s time is Taylor’s 16-year-old daughter, Felicity, who is completing a high school program that will give her a certificate in early childhood development by the time she graduates. In the program, she earns high school credit by working 10 hours a week as a volunteer at her mother’s academy.

A community of partners

A team of five people, headed by Walker, administer AFEL. The project partners with other organizations that manage different elements of the program. The 26 childcare sites, for instance, are managed by First Up, formerly known as the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children. The ambassadors program is managed by the People’s Emergency Center, a West Philadelphia organization that knows the neighborhoods well because of its longtime work on homelessness and housing. The list of other partners is long.

Walker characterized the collaboration as a “systems approach” that is sustainable because it draws on resources already in place in the community. “Our vision is that everyone has something to bring to the table,” she said. “The community has something to offer. We are not just bringing something to the community.”

As it moves forward, AFEL faces some significant challenges. One is how to retain teachers. Like the best childcare programs across the city, AFEL works hard to train teachers at its 26 sites only to see them hired away after they are trained because public schools and other employers can pay them more. To address that issue, experts agree that annual salaries for childcare workers – which typically range from $16,000 for a teacher aide to $27,000 for a lead teacher – need to be dramatically increased. The only way that can happen is if federal and state governments step up with increased public funding.

As it expands its reach to kindergarten students, AFEL must also navigate a complex web of kindergarten feeder patterns. Every year, some 350 children from the West Philadelphia area enter kindergarten at about 40 different elementary schools, some of them far outside the promise zone. “That’s a challenge to make a connection,” said Jordan Wilson, AFEL’s data manager, as he displayed a map that had red lines running in every direction to show all the different elementary schools that area children attend.

Another major challenge is how to keep AFEL’s low-income families from being driven out of the neighborhood by gentrification. As part of the 2017 tax-reform legislation, Congress created “opportunity zones” in poor areas, including West Philadelphia. If real estate developers invest in these zones, they can delay capital gains taxes and avoid federal taxes altogether on the profits they earn from their new development.

Drexel officials say they are not seeking any opportunity-zone funds for development around the campus, a decision that pleases neighborhood activists who have been fighting gentrification.

For many years, Drexel has advocated for “equitable development” – development that provides new jobs for neighborhood residents while also offering support for longtime homeowners and renters.

Among other collaborative initiatives, Drexel helps local residents stay in their homes by providing assistance with critical repairs and by helping owners untangle difficult title and foreclosure issues. It also assists those who are displaced with finding affordable rental housing in the area. On the job front, the university is part of an initiative that prepares workers for the many new jobs emerging in University City. And at its Dornsife Center, the university offers adult education, high-school completion courses, career counseling, job fairs and job training to members of the community.

AFEL ambassadors like Drain, who has worked in the program for four years, are well aware of the role that early education plays in equipping West Philadelphia youth for success in school so they will qualify for the 21st century jobs emerging around the Drexel campus and elsewhere in Philadelphia. Children who don’t get an early start often fall behind in school and never catch up, Drain said.

She recalled the story of Rakeem, a third-grader who was too ashamed to admit he couldn’t read. “I just set him down and told him, ‘Don’t you be embarrassed. If you don’t tell nobody you can’t read, you won’t get no help.’” Slowly, Drain got Rakeem to open up to her. She began showing him words she had written on notecards. First two-letter words, then three-letter words.

Soon, Rakeem was on his way, a little late, but taking his first steps toward reading.

The Notebook’s coverage of early childhood education is funded by the William Penn Foundation.

City and District seek to expand pre-K and align services

2020-03-31T13:53:38+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Notebook prepared this report on early childhood education in Philadelphia for our spring print edition before the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We are posting the stories from the print edition online this week along with updates from the providers and advocates we featured. We asked them to explain what they – as well as the city, state, and federal governments – are doing to keep the industry alive so that when normal business resumes, the sector will be prepared. You can read about that here.

As we have already reported, the crisis presents an existential threat to child care and early childhood education in Philadelphia and beyond. Whether for-profit or non-profit, most child care centers operate like small businesses. They rely on government subsidies for low-income users as well tuition from private-pay clients. They need both to survive. As this article explains, the sector has always operated with low margins, and even before the pandemic was facing daunting challenges arising from its fragmented public-private nature. If nothing else, the pandemic is making everyone more aware how a robust child care sector is necessary to the continuation of commerce and the functioning of society.

The Black History Month celebration is underway at Wonderspring Early Education, and Helena Walton is beaming. She doesn’t just see children getting ready for school. She sees them getting ready for life.

“For me, and a lot of other parents that are here, this is the place,” she says. “It’s like a family learning together. They’re really teaching things.”

Walton is part of a packed house of parents and grandparents who have come to this child care center in Powelton Village to see their children celebrate African American achievement. Boys and girls of every color have dressed up as famous role models – Harriet Tubman, Jesse Owens, Barack and Michele Obama – to imagine themselves as doctors, artists, athletes and civic leaders. As proud families watch, the children sing, dance, giggle and applaud each other, happily acting out a future in which they star as striving heroes.

Walton glows as she watches, the timeless smile of a grown person watching children thrive. She has spent 30 years in this neighborhood, and she knows Wonderspring – until recently Montgomery Early Learning Center – well.

“It’s been a big change over the years,” Walton says when the show is over. “In the beginning you’d have children come here to just get watched over. There was not the learning experience, the social skills. Not the drive to have them do good, or be about something, or know their worth.”

As Wonderspring’s offerings have evolved, she says, the children have flourished: “Being able to speak out, being independent, being proud of what they’re becoming, being motivated.”

Quality: reading, writing, curiosity, confidence

Ask Philadelphia’s educators and public officials what distinguishes “quality” pre-K from day care, and they’ll talk about structure and rigor. Effective early education, they say, carefully and steadily builds specific learning skills. It relies on a well-planned curriculum, qualified professionals, and age-appropriate classroom settings. The “Keystone Stars” system Pennsylvania uses to rate quality measures everything from staff training and curriculum to hygiene and signage, and few would challenge the value of those metrics.

But ask parents and grandparents what makes a “quality” preschool, and talk will quickly turn from the academic to the social and emotional.

Wonderspring students at their Black History Month performance. Photo by Bill Hangley.

Lynn Dyches, another Wonderspring client, is one such grandparent. Like Walton, she was delighted by the confident and creative Black History Month performances. Her grandson and his classmates are “learning to encourage themselves,” she said, “to be wonderful people as they grow.”

That’s invaluable in a city like Philadelphia, Dyches said, where dangerous streets and overworked families can leave many young children cripplingly isolated.

“It shuts a lot of people down when they have to engage with others. And in this setting, they’re learning so early to engage,” Dyches said. “It gives them their voice. They won’t be so shy and closed in. It’ll help them deal with pressure, because they’re not so bottled up in their own heads.”

Wonderspring Director Elissha Mattheis said classroom teachers value pre-K’s social and emotional aspects as much as parents do.

“All the kindergarten teachers ask us is, ‘Can they sit in a chair? Can they regulate their emotions?’” Mattheis said. “They don’t care about the ABCs. They want that child to be able to regulate themselves, as a person.”

Educators and officials agree: the need for pre-K is most acute in Philadelphia’s lowest-income neighborhoods. But they also agree that children of every walk of life need support during the 0-6 years. High-quality preschool should be universal, they say, even if Philadelphia’s growing pre-K system still isn’t.

“There’s this concept of universal pre-K, but … we’re not really at a universal pre-K model,” said Diane Castelbuono, the Philadelphia School District’s deputy chief of early education.

In Philadelphia, pre-K services are funded and provided through a variety of state, local and federal sources, each with its own eligibility requirements and subsidies. City-funded pre-K is free for anyone. State-funded pre-K has income requirements. No single point of contact can tell parents everything that’s available. A parent walking into a place like Wonderspring might find a free slot, a low-cost slot, a full-price slot, or no slots at all.

“We have different providers, who aren’t on the same platform, who can’t share information with each other, and who are somewhat in competition with each other,” Castelbuono said.

City and District officials are working “really closely” to make it easier for families to easily access all their options, she said, but the job has just begun.

“We’re making some good headway,” Castelbuono said. “But it’s not easy to do.”

Parent needs: convenience, affordability, & reliability first

The value of pre-K is by no means universally understood. Researchers are continually discovering new facets of early development, revealing more and more about the importance of the earliest learning years.

“We’re learning so much more about the brain,” said Castelbuono. Much has been studied about what’s happening for three- and four-year-olds, she said, but “we’re learning now that 0-3 is maybe even a little more important.”

But if the science is moving fast, parents of all walks of life can still fail to understand the importance of early learning – including Castelbuono herself, who said she had to be taught not to treat pre-K like a babysitting service.

“I was always pulling my kid out of pre-K, and here I am an educator!” Castelbuono laughed. “And they were like, ‘No.’ That was really good for me.”

Pre-K providers say that parents like Castelbuono are common. Among providers’ basic challenges is to get the message across that pre-K isn’t just day care, and that parents have a responsibility to treat it like school.

“It all starts with that first phone call,” said Mattheis. “We emphasize that we need them to be involved, that you need to read to your child every day, that you need to work with your child at home … if we say that we have a concern, we need them to follow up.”

Getting parents on board with the concept can take some effort, providers say.

A basic obstacle: parents don’t always know when their child is lagging developmentally. A child that plays happily at home may act out in ways that the parent has never seen when challenged by the unfamiliar world of a pre-K classroom.

“Parents love their children more than anyone in the world, and they will overlook what we see as obvious. The famous line from a parent is, ‘He doesn’t do that at home,’” said Lisa Smith, director of the Amazing Kidz Academy in North Philadelphia. “And if the parents don’t know, they don’t know how to correct it.”

But the flip side, providers say, is that parents will quickly see the results of a quality pre-K program. After a day at Wonderspring, Walton said, her grandchildren “come home and ask questions, tell me things they learned during the day – a different culture, or some type of music, or science. They love science.”

“It’s regular schooling – it’s a school environment,” she said.

But officials know that for families, the top priority for child care is not usually its academic rigor. Whether it’s day care, pre-K, or something in between, what parents value most are safety, affordability, convenience and reliability.

Anything less is a deal breaker, officials say.

“They want quality. But they also want convenience. They need convenience,” said Castelbuono. “No one wants to be driving or riding a bus for a long time with a three year old. It’s a bigger challenge the younger the child is.”

Cynthia Figueroa, just installed as the newly-hired leader of Mayor Jim Kenney’s newly created Office of Children and Families, echoes the point.

“Unfortunately, in underserved communities, the academic offerings or the [Keystone] quality rating isn’t the first thing that ‘s being asked,” she said. “It’s, ‘Is my kid safe to walk there? When I walk in does it feel physically safe?’”

In addition, families need child care that fits their work schedules and other life demands. Figueroa spent many years running the North Philadelphia nonprofit Congreso, where she said she learned that accessible, affordable care is “critical” to family stability.

Without it, parents can stay stuck in a bad job or worse, she said. “Women couldn’t actually flee abusive relationships if they didn’t trust that there was [child care] access and stability for their kids,” Figueroa said.

So the stakes around child care are very high, she said, with accessibility, affordability and safety trumping developmental rigor. But Figueroa said that her time in North Philadelphia also showed her how badly such communities need high quality preschool. The area is full of day-care options, she said, many of them affordable and nurturing, but lacking in academic focus. That leaves too many children, particularly Spanish speakers, starting school ill-prepared.

Amazing Kidz Academy Director Lisa Smith shows signs of a quality classroom: clean floors, visible lesson plans, and welcoming, organized spaces for play and learning. Photo by Bill Hangley.

Amazing Kidz’ Lisa Smith sees those kinds of children come through her doors all the time.

“They don’t know how to line up. They don’t have patience. They don’t know how to wait their turn. They lack the social skills,” she said. “Maybe they don’t know how to write their first name or hold a pencil.”

But Smith has also seen how the pre-K curriculum helps most children close such deficits in a matter of months. In just a semester, she said, children who initially act out when frustrated can learn to work patiently on projects, play in groups, be creative or follow instructions as needed.

“They start to act like the other children – they learn,” said Smith. Out of a hundred or so children who attend Amazing Kidz in a given year, she said, only four or five have to be referred elsewhere because of behavioral problems.

The others usually thrive, she said – and families notice. Once parents see children making progress, Smith said, their expectations rise quickly. Getting parents to visit and volunteer is one of her main strategies for building demand, she said.

“When they come in and see how attentive the children are, they like that,” she said. “They get to go back to the dinner table and say, ‘at Amazing Kidz they do this and that’ … They observe everything. They talk to each other. Word of mouth is the best advertising in this community.”

City, District: expanding offerings, aligning services

To get more quality service to more young children, the challenge for City and District officials is twofold: first, to increase the availability of high-quality options, and second, to boost awareness and demand for the service.

It’s a steep task that involves aligning several major programs that operate with different funding sources, eligibility restrictions, and reporting requirements. “In government, we’re very good at confusing people sometimes,” said Figueroa. “What we’re trying to do is create some efficiency … We are at multiple tables, planning around various different [funding] streams.”

The City and District each run separate pre-K networks, and officials say that each is following separate strategies to build out their pre-K capacity.

The city’s PHLpreK program is expanding its soda tax-funded offerings. The city programs aim to serve about 3,300 children a year, currently using 138 providers. Among the Kenney administration’s pre-K priorities is to help improve low-rated centers in poor communities. Officials say they’ve helped 39 providers in “priority” communities improve from one or two Keystone Stars to the three- or four-star level.

Eligibility for the city’s programs is simple: any Philadelphia resident qualifies for free pre-K, regardless of income. A good sign for the city is that the 2019-20 cohort filled 96% of its funded slots, and served a demographically representative group: 61% African American, 12% white, 5% Asian, and 20% multi-racial or “other.”

“We feel very good about the race and ethnicity breakdown. It mirrors the census tracts,” said Figueroa.

Meanwhile, the District’s pre-K is funded by a mix of state and federal dollars, including Head Start funding. The District serves more children than the city, but has more eligibility restrictions, and less capacity to boost provider quality. About 11,000 three- and four-year-olds get served in about 160 District-run sites, said Castlebuono, and 67 of those sites are in one of the city’s 150 elementary schools. The others are in “partner sites” that include nonprofits and private providers.

In-school programs are currently staffed by District teachers, but Castelbuono said private providers could soon be working in District buildings.

“What I’m pushing for is [to] boost the number of pre-K kids in the school buildings without it actually being school operated,” she said. “You could take a provider and say, here’s your four classrooms, with your staff.”

City and District efforts are hard to coordinate, officials say, because reporting and eligibility requirements are so different. But Figueroa and Castelbuono say the two sides are working together to help “align” their efforts.

Figueroa, who was just hired this winter, said this collaboration between the city and District is just getting started. Her office will be the point of contact between the Kenney administration and Superintendent William Hite’s team, she said, and she’s begun to schedule key meetings. But city officials don’t want to ask too much too quickly, she said.

“We’re very sensitive about how best to support them, because there’s so many different moving parts for them,” Figueroa said.

One form of collaboration is already underway: the city’s health records turn out to be the best way for District officials to find children under six. For the past two years, District officials have used the city’s immunization database to send 30,000 letters annually to households with three-year-olds, informing them about pre-K and kindergarten registration.

That collaboration solved a very basic problem for the District, Castelbuono said. “We don’t know who’s out there! How would we know?” she said. “Everybody thinks it’s an easy problem to solve, but it’s not.”

And just as it’s hard for the District to know where the young children are, it’s hard for parents to find out exactly what the city and District can offer.

Currently, parents can visit the city PHLpreK website to find out what’s available for free. They can go to the District to find out what’s available with a subsidy through the state-run “PreK Counts” program. But no single place tells them everything. Castelbuono said that a priority is to develop a one-stop “portal” that connects parents to everything available, no matter who funds it.

“In this day and age we should be able to get there – we have the technology,” she said. “It’s not going to be easy, it’s not going to be quick.”

In the meantime, providers end up being the first point of contact for parents. It’s there that families often find out what’s available and how much – if anything – it will cost.

“That’s our job,” said Sheila Bonner, a supervisor at Wonderspring.

Among the challenging dynamics Bonner deals with: families on public assistance often have caseworkers or other connections that help them navigate the system. Working families who aren’t tied into public systems often have little idea of what’s available – and little time to figure it out.

“Hard-working people – they come in, and they don’t know,” said Bonner.

At Wonderspring, learning to learn

Bonner is an education veteran who has seen the change in early learning practices firsthand.

A former District employee, Bonner has spent 13 years at Wonderspring, watching the whole operation shift from a day care to pre-K mentality. It’s the right move, she said; she only wishes things moved faster.

“PhLpreK is wonderful for working parents,” said Bonner. “It’s just sad we only have 10 slots.”

The trend towards preschool goes back years, Bonner said – well before Mayor Kenney made it a priority. Interest among parents began rising as far back as the 1990s, she said, when work requirements first started kicking in for public assistance recipients. That got a lot of mothers out looking for quality child care, and started Wonderspring on its pre-K path, Bonner said.

But many parents still don’t know what real quality is, she said.

“A lot of day care has changed so much – we’re a learning center,” said Bonner. “We have to make parents know that we’re more than babysitters. We have to go to school and get degrees to do what we do. Some parents think they can just drop the children off, and they come in the next day and say, ‘She used this big word that I’ve never spoken before!’ And then they realize that we’re more than they think we are.”

Wonderspring staffer Sheila Bonner (left) with parent Rachel Hayes. Photo by Bill Hangley.

As she speaks, Bonner is sitting in the sunny office at Wonderspring, munching a muffin as the last of the Black History Month guests trickle out. With her is Rachel Hayes, a mother whose twin boys are in pre-K here.

Finding Wonderspring was a big relief, said Hayes. “Some day cares I’ve been to – pheee-ew! It wasn’t good.” The signs of low quality are easy to spot, she said: runny noses, dirty diapers, grumpy staff. “They were lazy. The quality wasn’t there,” she said.

Even costly care can be shoddy, Hayes said. “Some of these horrible day cares are still $200 a week,” she said. “And they’re licensed!”

But since she found Wonderspring, Hayes said, her boys have been thriving. They have fun at pre-K. They learn, they make friends, they come home happy. One son “used to cry all the time when we dropped him off. I came to visit him the other day, and he just ignored me and kept playing,” she said.

And slowly but surely, she said, the boys are becoming students.

“They’re counting to 20 already. All their colors, animals, basic shapes,” Hayes said proudly. “My grandmother will compare them to the little girl next door and say, ‘She doesn’t do all that!’”

The Notebook’s coverage of early childhood education is funded by the William Penn Foundation.

Complex early childhood education system is costly, challenging for families and providers

2020-03-30T00:33:29+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Notebook prepared this report on early childhood education in Philadelphia for our spring print edition before the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We are posting the stories from the print edition online this week along with updates from the providers and advocates we featured. We asked them to explain what they – as well as the city, state, and federal governments – are doing to keep the industry alive so that when normal business resumes, the sector will be prepared. You can read about that here.

If nothing else, the pandemic is making everyone more aware how a robust child care sector is necessary to the continuation of commerce and the functioning of society. The effort to keep it from collapse is a harrowing story.

Many thanks to the William Penn Foundation for supporting our coverage of this vital topic.

Early childhood education in Philadelphia — and throughout the state and country — is a hodgepodge of public and private options that is very difficult for families to navigate.

It is marked by a confusing patchwork of funding and a regulatory system that emphasizes compliance rather than quality — not to mention that expenses for families are dizzyingly high even though most workers in the field, virtually all women, barely make enough to live on.

While the issue of affordable child care is getting some mention in the presidential race, starting with Elizabeth Warren, it hasn’t received front-line attention despite its impact on nearly every American family.

In terms of understanding the importance of early learning and the ultimate benefits of high-quality child care on the economy, the U.S. is not only at the bottom of developed countries, “but worse than some developing countries,” said Ann O’Brien, director of Wonderspring, a major early childhood provider in Philadelphia and Montgomery County.

Wonderspring, formerly Montgomery Early Learning Center (MELC), has 10 sites that serve 700 to 800 children every day, including centers in West and Southwest Philadelphia.

Some of the sites serve infants through school age from “a wide range of socioeconomic families,” said O’Brien. By contrast, many centers are largely segregated by race and income, because they are drawing from the neighborhoods in which they are located. Like all providers, Wonderspring must negotiate a array of funding streams and subsidy programs in order to make ends meet.

There are federal grants through Head Start and Early Head Start, the state PreK Counts program, PHLPreK in the city, as well as state child care subsidies. Eligibility criteria for families also vary depending on the program; Head Start families must be at or below 100% of the federal poverty level, while PreK Counts goes up to three times that amount. PHLPreK has no income limit, but it contracts with providers mostly in underserved and low-income neighborhoods.

“The streams of revenue are so fractured, they are very difficult to manage,” O’Brien said. And the total amount of government support is not enough. Plus, it is funneled through an intermediary, most commonly the local school district.

Having private paying families as well as low-income ones is what keeps Wonderspring fiscally solvent, O’Brien said, but other centers aren’t in that position.

Programs also have different requirements for caregivers. In PreK Counts, teachers must be certified, but not in PHLPreK, where only an associate’s degree is necessary. Centers taking PreK Counts money must have 3 or 4 stars under the state’s Keystone STARS rating system, while for PHLPreK 2 stars is acceptable as long as the center is working toward attaining star 3 within a certain period of time.

The paradox of child care is that while it is expensive, and can be prohibitive for families who don’t qualify for any subsidy, caregivers barely make a living wage.

O’Brien said Wonderspring has a teacher with a master’s degree and 47 years of experience who makes $39,000 annually.

Hard to make ends meet

“All of us balance our budgets on the backs of teachers,” O’Brien said. “Revenue is insufficient from every source. We can’t charge what it really costs.”

Government subsidies for low-income families are not sufficient, but even charging private pay families $17,000 a year doesn’t fully cover costs, she said.

Ideally, there would be an integrated pre-K through 12th grade education system that aligned curriculum, she said. Right now, this isn’t happening in Pennsylvania. Even better would be a system that considered the crucial infant care component, since so much of brain development occurs in those years — not to mention the importance of quality care to families with infants and toddlers.

“The younger the child, the more important it is to offer expertise and services with robust oversight,” said Christie Balka, who helped with the launch and development of PHLPreK. Such an ideal system would be “holistic” and attend to the health, social-emotional development, and cognitive needs of children. “It’s a public responsibility,” she said.

At the same time, putting such care under the aegis of the local school district is not necessarily the best approach. This happened in New York City, resulting in the monitoring of centers by people who knew little or nothing about infant and toddler care.

The Philadelphia School District’s Office of Early Childhood Education is led by Deputy Chief Diane Castelbuono, a veteran of the field. She pointed out that Pennsylvania has long had an infrastructure based on private providers. Other states like Oklahoma that moved in the direction of universal pre-K, integrated it into the school system, but this is not an option for Pennsylvania, she said.

“We would have put local providers out of business. That was one of the challenges,” she said, at the same time acknowledging that what exists now is complex, confusing, and overly bureaucratic.

When Mayor Kenney made PHLPreK a centerpiece of his administration, he couldn’t put it in schools only or put it solely under School District jurisdiction. “We had a robust and quality private system with a good quality rating system,” she said. “It’s a real economic and business development area for local folks. We don’t want to put them out of business. It has to be a diverse-provider system.”

At the same time, there are ways to improve what exists now to use the varying funding streams more efficiently and more easily increase the quality of all centers. A good first step would be to increase government subsidies to stabilize the workforce by increasing salaries, she said. As it stands now, teachers certified in early childhood education leave the private centers for jobs in the District, where they can teach through fourth grade and make more money with good benefits. The District directly runs some of the Head Start centers, and contracts out others.

All this is a function of how far behind the U.S. is in treating early childhood and infant care as a public responsibility.

“Other countries believe in paying taxes and allocating money for the right things,” Balka said. “They believe families should be supported to raise children well, and that there is a social and economic benefit to investing in children and families at the beginning of the life cycle. These investments are minimal compared to what is spent later on behavioral health, preventable chronic illness, special education, and all the consequences that follow.”

And the scarcity and turnover of teachers is only likely to get worse in this economy. “Nobody is going to take on debt to become an early childhood teacher,” said O’Brien. She noted that child care workers at or near minimum wage can — and do — quit jobs in early childhood centers for jobs at Target that pay more and come with less stress and fewer responsibilities.

Plus, education schools haven’t caught up to the need for training people in best practices for infants and toddlers, reluctant to invest in preparing people for such a low-paying career.

An issue in the presidential race

The issue is getting more national attention in this election year.

More than a year ago, Elizabeth Warren became the first candidate to address the issue, proposing a plan that would, essentially, expand and build on the current system. To address affordability, quality and low wages for workers, she would create a new federal subsidy — underwritten by a wealth tax — that would be available to state and local governments as well as nonprofits, schools and other partners to create a “network” of options available to all families.

With the federal subsidy, families earning up to 200% of the federal poverty cap would pay nothing for care, and those above would pay no more than 7% of their income.

Last summer, Warren also introduced legislation in the Senate that would implement this plan, allocating $70 billion in federal money for child care and capping expenses for any one family at 7% of the average annual income rate.

Just after the Nevada caucuses in anticipation of the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday, Bernie Sanders released a plan that would not be means-tested, providing a “guarantee” of free child care and pre-K to every family “regardless of income.”

He said that the plan would be paid for by reversing the Trump tax cut that mostly benefited corporations and wealthy individuals.

His plan would also guarantee full-day kindergarten to all students, something that is not now universally available, including in Pennsylvania where many districts offer only half-day options. (Gov. Wolf has proposed making full-day kindergarten mandatory.)

Sanders, demanding that the wealthy and corporations “pay their fair share of taxes,” said a tax on the “extreme wealth” of the top 0.1 percent would raise $1.5 trillion over the next decade to invest in free, universal, quality child care and early education for all. Like Warren, he emphasized that this investment has a later economic return. In addition to helping parents, especially mothers, maintain stable employment, it has a role in launching students on a path to academic success that leads to them needing fewer social services growing up and paying more taxes as adults.

Former vice president Joe Biden has proposed universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, as part of his education plan. He has not released a comprehensive child care policy, but has spoken in favor of child care tax credits and 12 weeks of paid parental leave.

Under the Trump administration, federal child care subsidies increased by $2.4 billion in the 2019 budget. Due to the increase, Pennsylvania got $70 million more in federal child care funds — but the Republican-dominated legislature responded by cutting state subsidies by $36 million, according to Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth.

“Instead of seeing this as a political opportunity, they cut the state spending to meet an arbitrary budget mark instead of matching it,” Cooper said. “We think the state should match [federal] increases dollar for dollar.”

For the 2020 budget, the federal increase for child care was $550 million, with Pennsylvania’s share of that amount being $15 million.

Trump’s budget for 2021, unveiled in February, is proposing a $1 billion one-time investment in childcare infrastructure to increase the number of child care centers, including those run by corporations and faith-based organizations. States would apply for a share of the funds, but would have to agree to a regulatory rollback that many proponents of the issue said could compromise safety.

That budget does not address the level of subsidies for providers or families. And some advocacy organizations have labeled Trump’s proposal as a “hoax” because it doesn’t address the issue of subsidies for families or payments to providers.

Cooper said that Trump’s interest in child care is driven in part by daughter Ivanka and by the knowledge that it is an issue for the suburban female voters that he is seeking, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania.

“Trump and Ivanka came to Delaware County and did an entire press conference about child care,” Cooper said. “They know what they’re doing,” adding that in her opinion, “they don’t care about any of this, it’s all orchestrated for reelection.”

She also noted, though, that political alliances on the issue are shifting. Business groups like the Chamber of Commerce are also starting to speak out in favor of improving child care services as a way to alleviate a shortage of workers.

Women bear the burden of the country’s inability to grapple successfully with this issue, since mothers are the most likely to limit their employment options and earning potential to take care of young children. In addition, the low-paid child care workers are almost exclusively women.

Another public policy that could favorably impact the quality of early childcare is more widespread family leave. But in the U.S. that is also limited and sporadic, depends on the employer, and is not encouraged or supported by the federal government.

Politically, “We pay lip service to children and families,” said O’Brien of Wonderspring, “but one could say that we care less about the fetus once born.”

Child care and early education childhood industry asks for bailout from the state

2020-03-29T23:32:41+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Updated 3/30 2 p.m

Child care and early childhood centers are asking the governor and legislature for “swift, limited and critical action” to save the state and city’s “rapidly fraying early childhood education infrastructure.”

The coalitions Start Strong PA and Pre-K for PA want the Commonwealth to continue to pay child care subsidies even though the centers are closed under orders from Gov. Wolf. They also are asking for nearly $200 million in state funds to shore up the industry and help centers to open as soon as the shutdown order is lifted.

They want $100 million from the state to make up for two-months’ tuition not being collected from private-pay clients. They also as asking for $17 million that they are losing in co-payments from families subsidized by the state’s Child Care Works program. While the state is continuing to send subsidies to the centers, it is so far not replacing the lost money from families.

The package amounts to “a state bailout of child care,” said Ann O’Brien, executive director of Wonderspring, which operates child care centers in Montgomery County and Philadelphia. The funds will allow the centers to continue to pay their employees as if the centers were still operational. This will ultimately save unemployment dollars, but it also assures that the centers will be able to open as soon as the crisis is over without having to staff up in an industry that has both high requirements and high turnover.

“This threatens the very life of our industry, and our teachers are already living on the edge,” O’Brien said. “This is a very scary time for us.”

The providers are also seeking $50 million to extend early childhood programs through the summer to stem learning loss among children unable to attend their centers now. And the coalition wants legislation, as well as a $10 million fund, to protect centers from tort liability and insurance rate hikes that could arise out of the coronavirus shutdown.

Finally, they propose a requirement funded by $10 million in state dollars to provide free training for all providers “on the practices needed to sanitize all spaces in which children and staff are working before programs can be re-opened.”

UPDATE On Monday, the William Penn Foundation announced it was launching a new Philadelphia Emergency Fund for Stabilization of Early Education with its own 5 million grant and $2 million from Vanguard’s Strong Start for Kids Program™, which will be administered by The Reinvestment Fund.

Grants will be awarded on a weekly basis. Licensed childcare, family childcare, pre-k, and home visiting programs in Philadelphia are eligible to apply for assistance for basic expenses, new methods to support families during this closure, and needs relating to reopening.

“We can’t let these important learning opportunities for children disappear as a result of this crisis,” said a statement from the foundation, which noted that over the past five years the city has increased its capacity to 10,000 more families for quality early learning. END UPDATE

Gov. Wolf has ordered child care centers and some home-based providers to close, with exceptions for those centers that care for children of first responders or that offer off-hours care. In a statement, the child care groups said that while the closures are clearly necessary to preserve public health, “the requirement to temporarily halt operations…imperils the financial viability of the entire child care system.”

Without ways to cover basic costs and loans through the crisis, they write, “there is strong likelihood that a significant share of providers will not be able to re-open when the closure orders are lifted.”

The $2 trillion federal stimulus legislation enacted by Congress and signed by President Trump last week includes $5.3 billion for direct payments to child care centers, and about $100 million of that will come to Pennsylvania. However, there is as yet no clarity on how that money will be distributed and for what specifically it will be designated. In the past, the state has made it a practice to use federal dollars to replace, rather than supplement, the state investment.

The groups made their announcement early last week.

Since the shutdown, individual providers have had to make decisions around whether to continue to pay their teachers and other workers, many of whom already make barely more than minimum wage in an industry that operates at very low margins.

Wonderspring, O’Brien said, is continuing to pay its teachers through the shutdown, although not all providers are in that position. Many teachers, from there and elsewhere, are continuing to work remotely, contacting their families through online platforms and trying as best they can to engage children in activities.

Deciding to pay staff “was a $500,000 decision for us,” O’Brien said, but necessary “as both a business decision and a moral one.

“If the governor says we’re opening on a Monday, I want to say to teachers, ‘report to work on Monday,”’ she said. “I also would have them know we are an employer who did that for them, that’s what we’re what able to do, and what we want to do. But the decision is not without financial pain.”

She said that right now, the state and city are continuing to pay subsidies for the Pre-K Counts and PHLpreK programs — as long as teachers are kept on the payroll — based on enrollment as of March 13. But they are not covering any of the costs that come from parents themselves. The state and city have committed to paying through April 30.

The groups estimate that 75% of the capacity of the child care system is supported by payments made directly from parents rather than by the government. Most of that amount comes from families who pay full tuition, but 14% is in the form of co-payments from parents who receive subsidies from the state through the Child Care Works program.

As part of its effort to stay viable, Wonderspring has told its families who pay their own way that they will not refund any part of March’s tuition, even though the centers closed in the middle of the month. The organization got very little pushback, O’Brien said. For April, they will prorate the cost depending on what days they are actually open – if any.

Wonderspring, until recently called the Montgomery Early Learning Center, is doing everything it can to weather this.

“We are negotiating with every vendor and landlord asking for forgiveness or deferral of payment,” O’Brien said. “We have asked families able to pay tuition to please consider doing so and several have. We launched a fundraising campaign on Friday as well. We will revisit our plan for May as we better understand what public revenues may continue and what relief may be provided.”

She suggested that regulations assuring quality of care in the wake of the pandemic – such as one-to-one infant to caregiver ratio and more requirements around sanitation – are likely to “look different when we go back,” adding further to cost pressures.

She added: “It’s a terrifying ride.”

The Notebook’s coverage of early childhood education is funded by the William Penn Foundation.

Child-care sector facing potential collapse without new policies, advocate says

2020-03-19T00:22:36+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The head of one of the region’s leading child advocacy groups says the Greater Philadelphia child-care sector, already vulnerable, is being dangerously disrupted by the ongoing coronavirus crisis and faces potential collapse without a substantial influx of cash and an updated set of policies.

“If they can’t continue to get payments, like the schools, their businesses will close,” said Donna Cooper, head of Public Citizens for Children and Youth (PCCY).

Cooper spoke after hosting a large conference call with regional child-care providers and public officials. The call raised a growing list of concerns, she said, including short-term questions about payments and policies, and broader concerns about the financial and ethical challenges posed by a long-term shutdown.

With schools nationwide extending their closures from weeks to months, the sector is starting to ask how it can survive without major new subsidies, said Cooper.

“People were very concerned with, ‘How will we know if this will get extended, and can’t we start planning now in case it does?” she said.

Pennsylvania officials know what’s at stake, she said. “The state is extremely interested in maximum liquidity for child-care providers,” Cooper said. “They know we need the sector up and operating for when people get back to work.”

But the child-care sector is very vulnerable to disruption, Cooper said. Centers typically rely on multiple funding streams, including government payments to families and providers in low-income areas and unsubsidized “private pay” customers, most of whom have been told to stay home from work.

With those private-pay dollars draining away, providers could easily be forced to close their doors if the shutdown grows lengthy, Cooper said.

Because the government is paying so little toward child care compared to its real cost, “nobody’s got any margin here,” she said. “Providers have no idea how they’re going to pay their staff or pay their rent if any [customer] in the center was private pay. That’s the income that covers the last dollar needed. Remember, nobody’s getting rich running a child-care program.”

System in flux

The goal of PCCY’s conference call was to enable child-care providers and officials to discuss the fast-developing coronavirus situation and the impact of the state-ordered shutdown of all but “essential” services.

Providers were grateful to be brought together to share questions and concerns, Cooper said.

Like business owners everywhere, child-care providers are trying to grapple with the profound implications of an unprecedented event, navigating a rapidly changing and often unclear situation.

The questions for providers involve more than finances.

“What if you’re open and a child or adult contracts the virus? There’s a business liability,” said Diane Barber, executive director of the Pennsylvania Child Care Association, in a recent interview.

Most Pennsylvania child-care centers have been ordered to close, but exceptions have been made for home-based centers and those serving the children of “essential” workers, such as police, firefighters, and health-care workers. State officials have promised to reimburse centers for some revenue lost to the shutdown.

About 125 child-care providers from the five-county area took part in the PCCY call, Cooper said, including home-based providers. A handful of state and local officials also took part. For many, it was the first chance to hear in detail from colleagues and put questions to officials.

Much of the conversation concerned what Cooper called technical issues that have sprung up as the various coronavirus closures have shut down much of the nation’s economy and public life.

A typical question, Cooper said, is whether centers will be reimbursed for the number of children who were signed up before the shutdown or the number who actually showed up after it began to take effect. Providers want to know whether the government will pay subsidies based on “the number of people who were enrolled last Friday, or the number who attended. … That’s a big difference, because nobody came last Friday,” Cooper said.

Providers also have questions about reimbursements for children of essential-service providers, alternative jobs for laid-off staff, and the impact of rising unemployment costs. Day-care centers forced to cut staff due to the virus could find themselves socked with rising unemployment insurance payments – a problem that could affect businesses of all kinds, she said.

“Every employer in America will have to figure unemployment costs going through the roof because of the virus,” said Cooper.

Providers’ ethical dilemma

But the situation also presents ethical questions unique to the child-care sector.

Child-care providers are both independent businesses and providers of an essential public service. The twin responsibilities can put them in a bind, Cooper said, because staying open may be good for business, but it carries risks to the provider and the community.

The home-based providers in low-income communities who still have the option to stay open now face a profoundly difficult choice, Cooper said. “Independent of their business operations,” she said, providers must ask themselves, “what’s right and what’s wrong right now?”

Providers who care for the children of police officers, EMTs or other essential workers are adding to their own exposure risk – and that of their staff and children, Cooper said. Wednesday’s conference call revealed that some find themselves caught between wanting to offer as much child care as possible to keep neighbors working and wanting to close up shop in order to protect those same neighbors and their children from the potentially deadly coronavirus.

“They want to help the kids of these essential workers, but they could affect their families,” Cooper said. “It’s a complicated thing.”

One provider on the PCCY call described wanting to keep her facility open so that her clients could work, but struggling with the fact that one of those clients works in a nursing home.

“The chance of that [client’s] kid being a carrier is pretty high,” said Cooper, which leaves the provider to wonder: “What do I do for my family and my kids?”

It’s wrong to ask child-care providers to untangle that kind of question, Cooper said.

“We have shifted ethical decision-making down to the most vulnerable part of the child-care system, home-based providers. We’ve said to those women and men, ‘We couldn’t make that decision for you, but best of luck.’ This is a horrible position to be in,” she said. “That’s kind of a core function of government, to make that call for you.”

For the time being, Cooper said, providers are on their own to sort out these questions, with state officials “deeply mired” in the immediate demands of the sudden shutdown. On Wednesday, the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services released a list of “Operational Recommendations for Child Care Providers,” which include only such basic guidelines as, “exercise and promote hygienic practices,” “report all suspected cases of COVID-19,” and “follow state and federally issued guidance.” The new guidelines also note that some of the state’s child-care subsidy policies will be modified, including continuing payments for children enrolled in Child Care Works.

Cooper expects the state to begin developing longer-term plans that could give providers more substantive guidance soon.

“I would hope by maybe next week, or eight or nine days, they’ll be convening the right players,” she said.

The length of the shutdown

Long-term planning is essential because providers are increasingly concerned about the possibility that the shutdown could last months, Cooper said.

They see school closures being extended elsewhere – Kansas has cancelled classes for the rest of the school year, and Ohio and California could soon do the same – and they worry that Pennsylvania will be next, she said.

And although there are many steps that could be taken to protect the child-care sector from disruption, perhaps the single biggest question is whether and how the government will cover the sector’s lost private-pay dollars.

Almost every child-care center depends on those customers for critical income, Cooper said, and if they’re laid off, those payments disappear.

For a provider, private pay “could be 10 percent of your income, or it could be 50 percent,” said Cooper. “Even if it’s 10 percent, these centers operate on a shoestring. If you lose that 10 percent, the state isn’t making that up, because they never did.”

Getting the Pennsylvania legislature to approve such spending would be a heavy lift, she said.

Reimbursing child-care providers for lost private customers would require “an extraordinary amount of money – think of all the suburban private-pay child-care centers,” Cooper said. “But if you want to have an operating child-care structure, some money’s got to flow to those places, too, so they can pay their rent.”

In the final analysis, the cost of supporting the child-care sector has to be balanced against the cost of losing critical capacity during the shutdown, said Cooper.

“If it collapses, people can’t go back to work,” she said. “That’s the most important message here.”

The Notebook’s coverage of early childhood education is funded by the William Penn Foundation.

‘Fronts for private management’: Wolf takes aim at charter schools in state budget

2020-02-04T17:27:39+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

In the annual state budget address, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf hit many of the education talking points he’s covered in previous addresses: more funding for public schools, a push for universal kindergarten, and expanded pre-K, to name a few.

But there was one education issue atop the governor’s agenda, an issue Wolf has sidestepped in prior speeches: charter schools.

In his previous five budget talks, Wolf hadn’t even uttered those words — despite 20 years of debate over how the state should fund and oversee this growing part of Pennsylvania’s public-school profile.

That changed Tuesday, when Wolf laid out a plan that would reduce the amount of money school districts must pay when one of their students decide to attend a charter school. The proposal would save traditional school districts approximately $280 million annually, according to Wolf.

The governor didn’t mince words in his budget address. He said that some charter schools were “little more than fronts for private management companies, and the only innovations they’re coming up with involve finding new ways to take money out of the pockets of property taxpayers.”

“Our charter school system is in desperate need of reform,” Wolf added. “It’s time to close the loopholes, it’s time to establish real standards, and it’s time to level the playing field.”

Over the summer, Wolf laid out a charter-reform agenda that included caps on charter enrollment and other measures that the charter-school community has long opposed.

The governor’s increasingly aggressive posture on charter schools comes as House Speaker Mike Turzai (R-Allegheny) — a staunch charter-school advocate — announces he won’t seek re-election. It’s not yet clear when Turzai will relinquish his role as speaker.

In Tuesday’s budget presentation, Wolf also revived several education proposals from last year’s budget request.

They include a plan to raise the state’s minimum teaching salary from $18,500 to $45,000 — a move that would affect roughly 3,000 teachers, mostly in rural school districts.

And as he’s done in every year of his governorship, Wolf will ask the legislature to budget more money for K-12 public schools.

His administration wants the state to spend $100 million more than it did last year on basic education and $25 million extra on special education. Compared to Wolf’s precedent, those are modest requests. Last year he asked for double in both categories.

Wolf also focused attention on early education, an area where he’s long prioritized in budget requests.

The governor wants to require that all school districts offer full-day kindergarten, one year after he proposed an “impact study” to examine the merits of universal kindergarten. Right now, 72 districts offer half-day kindergarten, according to the governor’s office. Wolf’s administration estimates that this mandate will shift 22,000 students from half-day programs into full-day programs.

Under the governor’s plan, all school districts offering half-day programs would have to instead offer a free, full-day option. Districts can, however, apply for a “hardship waiver” if they can prove there are legitimate capacity issues that prevent them from immediately establishing a full-day option.

It’s unclear how much this proposal would cost the 72 districts who do not yet offer full-day kindergarten.

Last year, the Wolf administration said it would do an “impact study” on universal, full-day kindergarten. But that report is not yet ready, the administration says.

The move to universal, full-day kindergarten comes one year after the administration unsuccessfully lobbied to lower the compulsory education age in Pennsylvania from eight to six. Wolf will not wage that fight again this year, it appears.

Elsewhere on the early education front, Wolf is seeking $30 million in new money for pre-K programs. Most of that money — $25 million — will go toward the state-run Pre-K Counts program.

Charter reform

Wolf’s budget proposal on charter schools includes two main prongs.

The first is a tweak to the way charter-school funding works for special education students.

Right now, school districts make a flat-fee tuition payment each time a special education student leaves for a charter. That flat fee is specific to each school district, but is calculated based on the assumption that 16 percent of all students in a given school district need special-education services.

And the fee does not fluctuate based on the actual services needed by a given special-education student, leading to accusations that some charters target special-education students with lower-cost needs so that they can use the excess money elsewhere in their budgets. Overall, one study found, charters tend to enroll disproportionately more students with disabilities such as speech-impairment and fewer with more costly disabilities such as autism and emotional disturbance.

Wolf’s proposal — based on recommendations made by a commission that studied special-education funding in traditional school districts — would group students into one of four brackets, based roughly on how much it costs to educate students with their kinds of disabilities. This system, Wolf said in his budget summary, would “better align Special Education Funding with actual costs of providing services.”

But charter advocates say this move is a cash-grab by school districts who’ve lost students to charters and see them as a fiscal threat. And they believe this proposal will especially hurt schools that serve the most vulnerable students.

“The governor’s actions today show that this ‘reform’ plan is only to appease his political allies, who want nothing more than see charter schools close and reinstate school districts’ monopoly on public education,” said Ana Meyers, who heads the PA Coalition of Public Charter Schools.

Advocates lodge similar complaints about the second part of Wolf’s proposal, which would change the way school districts compensate cyber charter schools.

School districts pay a tuition fee each time a student living within their boundaries goes to a cyber charter school. That fee is based on the amount of money a district spends on its own students.

As he has in previous years, Wolf wants to establish a flat rate of $9,500 per student, regardless of where that student lives. It’s a proposal rooted in the notion that payments made to cyber charter schools far outpace the actual cost of educating students — an idea championed by many school-district administrators.

Cyber charters have come under heavy scrutiny recently for poor test scores and a perception that they’re sucking dollars out of traditional school districts.

Wolf did propose an education budget cut may draw the ire of Republican lawmakers. He’s recommending the state pare down a recently introduced program that doles out school-safety grants to districts and charter schools.

The governor wants to take the $60 million in the School Safety and Security Fund and slash it to $15 million. Administration officials say that the initial investment — which came after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida — was mostly for new safety hardware. After two rounds of funding, Wolf’s staff believes districts can now pick up the tab for their own upgrades.

Although it’s not a direct budget item, Wolf on Tuesday reiterated his call for the state to borrow $1 billion to remediate lead, asbestos, and mold in public schools. Wolf wants to expand a state-run grant program called the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program to generate this infusion of cash.

The governor says it would be politically impractical to budget the amount of money necessary to remove toxins from the state’s public schools.

“No parent wants to hear that there just wasn’t room in the budget to make sure her child is breathing clean air or drinking clean water,” said Wolf. “That’s why it’s time to stop playing numbers games with our children. Instead of chipping away at this problem bit by bit, let’s make 2020 the year we act decisively to repair our school infrastructure.”

EDUCATION HIGHLIGHTS FROM WOLF’S NEW BUDGET

Wolf wants a new funding formula for charter schools that would take around $280 million currently ticketed for charters and put it back in the coffers of traditional school districts.
Could full-day K become a requirement? Wolf wants to mandate that all districts offer free, full-day kindergarten. Right now, 72 districts offer half-day kindergarten. The move to full-day could impact 22,000 kids, and it’s unclear how much it would cost.
As he’s done every year prior, the governor wants more money for basic and special education — the two biggest pots of state subsidy for K-12 education. The ask this year is relatively modest: $100 million for basic education and $25 million for special education.
Money for school safety could be on the chopping block. Wolf wants to budget $15 million for a school-safety grant program that historically gets $60 million a year. Expect Republicans to fight this cut.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

New website offers tips on ‘conquering’ kindergarten with 14 life skills

2020-01-29T19:34:45+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

The Philadelphia School District has unveiled a new tool to give both teachers and families specific strategies to help children acquire the social and emotional skills they need to succeed in kindergarten.

The tool, announced during a ceremony Wednesday morning at Morton McMichael Elementary School in West Philadelphia, is a colorful, easy-to-navigate website that officials hope will be used both by kindergarten teachers and the families of kindergarten children.

The website anchors a new School District initiative dubbed Conquering Kindergarten. It can be found at www.CKPhilly.org and on Facebook and Twitter at @CKPhilly.

The 14 skills promoted on the website include such things as the ability to listen, the ability to work cooperatively with others, and the ability to work independently. The skills have been on Philadelphia’s kindergarten report card for more than a decade, but with the new website, the District is giving teachers and families specific strategies to teach the skills for the first time.

For instance, the site offers four steps that families can use to help children learn how to resolve conflicts. The first step is to get the child to calm down. To do that, the site suggests that the parent might respond by saying something like this:

“I see that you are very upset. Take some deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth. Pretend you are filling up a balloon very slowly. Now push the air out of the balloon. Keep going until you start to feel a little better.”

Similar scripts are provided for the three other steps, which include defining the conflict and eliciting the child’s feelings about it, brainstorming ways to resolve the conflict, and agreeing on a solution that is fair and acceptable to everyone.

In addition to such practical exercises, the site also provides reading lists of age-appropriate books for each of the 14 skills. To learn about resolving conflict, for example, the site suggests Bernette Ford’s 2004 book Don’t Hit Me! as well as three books by Cheri Meiners: Talk and Work It Out (2005), Forgive and Let Go (2005) and Cool Down and Work Through Anger (2010).

Elliot Weinbaum, program director at the William Penn Foundation, which is funding the initiative, said promotion of the 14 skills will set up children for success throughout their lives, particularly in reading. He noted that the website has “none of the jargon or research-speak” that characterizes many other learning materials.

The new website – which is formatted to work on computer screens and mobile screens – was developed by the District in consultation with the University of Pennsylvania’s Child Research Center. Katie Barghaus, the center’s director, said the strategies for teaching social and emotional skills are based not only on educational research, but also on input from Philadelphia public school teachers, community leaders, and families themselves.

At McMichael, which enrolls about 40 kindergarten students and 35 children in two Head Start classes, parents will play a key role in encouraging families to make use of the website to complement the social and emotional skills that teachers are promoting in the classroom.

Dwayne Walker is one such parent. Not only did he attend McMichael as a child, but so did his three children, his grandson, two nieces, and one nephew. Walker now works as a “family navigator” for Action for Early Learning, a nonprofit established by Drexel University as part of the West Philadelphia Promise Zone. His job is to promote early childhood education among low-income families living in four neighborhoods of West Philadelphia.

At Wednesday’s launch event, Walker vowed to “get the word out” about the new website. He said he knew from his own experience just how important it is for family members – parents, grandparents, and others – to get involved in the education of young children.

The 14 social and emotional skills that are on the kindergarten report card and explained on the new website are:

Accepts responsibility for choices and actions.
Can work independently.
Completes work on time.
Demonstrates consistent effort.
Handles conflict appropriately.
Listens and follows directions.
Makes appropriate movement between activities.
Organizes self, materials, and belongings.
Participates in group activities.
Respects rights, diversity, feelings, and property of others.
Respects the school environment and materials.
Shows a positive attitude toward learning.
Strives for quality work.
Works and plays cooperatively with others.

The Notebook’s coverage of early childhood education is funded by the William Penn Foundation.

Having hard conversations with children about race and difference

2019-06-10T13:42:42+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Lindsay Edwards was delighted when her 4-year-old son, Grey, came home from school wanting to talk about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“He was killed because people didn’t agree with what he was saying,” said Grey, who attends the Cooperative Nursery School (CNS) in West Mount Airy.

“And people disagreed with him because he had black skin. People should have just said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t agree with you,’ rather than shooting him. He was shot because he had that color skin.”

Grey still asks his mom to visit King’s gravesite so he can say, “Hi, and I’m sorry.”

For Edwards, who is white, the conversation was proof that the school’s diversity efforts, highly unusual in a preschool, were having an impact. (Read the first part of the story about diversity efforts by CNS here.)

She found it a breath of fresh air because when she was growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, “Racism wasn’t discussed in our family.” And in school, ”I was never taught proper history.”

Current research indicates that children as young as 2 years old show awareness of racial differences and may express racial prejudice by age 4.

By kindergarten, they may mirror racial attitudes they see at home or elsewhere in the adult world.

There is also some research indicating that although black or Latino children show no preference for particular groups by age 5, white children tend to be biased toward their own group.

And between the ages of 3 and 5, said Linda Hawkins, co-director of the Gender & Sexuality Development Clinic at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), they “begin to have an innate sense of their gender identity.”

“Around this time, they also start to pick up on the subtle and not-so-subtle gender expectations in their family, their day care, their church, and their community,” she said.

The 2017 National School Climate Survey conducted by GLSEN, a national organization advocating for LGBTQ students, found that only 13 percent of students attended a school that had a comprehensive anti-bullying/harassment policy that covered LGBTQ issues.

Kerry Goldman sorts books in the CNS library. Photo: Paul Jablow

The goal of CNS is nothing less than changing the way the children talk about race and gender, both among themselves and with their parents.

The philosophy is that not discussing race just leaves a vacuum for children to draw their own conclusions, for better or for worse.

“It’s about having those tough, awkward conversations,” said CNS parent Jasmine Miller, the school’s diversity committee chair.

“We try to create different opportunities and spaces to have conversations about diversity. And because cooping parents and caregivers are present on a daily basis, the workshops help all the adults have a common language when interacting or addressing issues with the children.”

School director Leah Corsover points out that for teachers and parents, “When a kid says, ‘I don’t like people with brown skin,’ you have to deal with it right at that moment.”

Deidre Ashton, a licensed clinical social worker who has led parent workshops about race at the school, said that this is a skill parents have to work on.

What to do when a child expresses insensitivity

If a child makes an insensitive remark, she said, “We need to do more than say, ‘That’s not nice.’ We need to help them make a better choice.

“But then our own stuff comes up and we get paralyzed.”

Although much of the current dialogue about racism involves power relationships, this may be a difficult concept for young children to grasp.

But Ashton said it’s more easily approached through the lens of justice.

“When kids are young, they’re concerned about what’s fair,” she said. “They might not talk about power.

“They do notice that villains in books tend to be darker, heroes might be white. There are subtle ways in which the world devalues darkness.”

Beyond celebrating diversity

“To end racism,” she said, “we have to educate children to see race,” beyond just celebrating diversity.

“It’s beyond personal bias. It’s a system. It’s helping them name what they see and giving meaning to that,” talking in terms of groups rather than just individuals.

By starting earlier with discussions of race, she said, as the children get older, “that conversation becomes richer and more complex.”

For white people, in school settings or elsewhere, she said, the issue goes beyond recognizing bias. They must also recognize, accept and deal with the privilege that their skin color gives them.

So when talking to children about the absence of people of color in literature, she said, it’s important to discuss “what that absence means.”

“Biracial and multiracial families,” she added, “also face challenges as they work to embrace all aspects of their identity, both privilege and marginalization.”

She said that when she works with children of middle or high school age who have skills and competency in talking about race and racism, they tend to talk about adults who discussed race with them at an earlier age.

At CNS, she said, she talked to parents and teachers about what messages about race they received early in life and how those messages affected them.

Ashton describes an exercise using an incident that actually happened in the classroom with a white student and a white teacher, in which the white student assumed that a Latino man caring for a private garden was hired rather than the homeowner.

“When a child says something that’s racially harmful, you don’t want to devalue that child,” Ashton said. “You want to engage in a learning opportunity.” That involves unpacking what happened and talking about empathy.

In the workshop where this incident was used as an example, she said, “We role-played talking to the child, focusing on holding the child in positive regard, exploring the child’s thinking and presenting an alternative meaning.

Samantha King leads a workshop at the Cooperative Nursery School. Photo: Paul Jablow

“Kids are ready for these conversations if you approach them at the proper level.”

Samantha King, education coordinator at the CHOP clinic, recently held a workshop for the diversity committee at CNS on how to create a school atmosphere that is gender-inclusive.

“I go to spaces where people haven’t even heard the word transgender,” King said.

The stakes are higher in this area than most people realize.

King cites statistics indicating that 40 percent of transgender adults have attempted suicide in their lives, 10 times the rate of the general population. And transgender children as young as 5 or 6 have been known to express suicidal thoughts.

School support is a major plus, she said. “It’s a huge buffer against depression.”

Teaching about gender is, of course, more difficult, King said, because the gender a person identifies with is not always visible on the surface.

And the school tries to increase tolerance of different types of family groupings. An article in a recent newsletter was titled, “Don’t assume it’s Mommy or Daddy.”

“It’s fun watching how kids learn to use the language” about gender, King said.

Edwards, Grey’s mom, calls the school’s teaching of diversity “a vital, but unfortunately, unique experience.”

And she is aware that when Grey goes off to kindergarten, there may not be the same sensitivity about issues of race and gender as he found at CNS.

But she hopes that she can be a force to spread its philosophy of inclusion.

“We as parents,” she said, “are going to have to keep advocating.”

The Notebook is one of 19 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the city’s push toward economic justice. Read more at https://brokeinphilly.org and follow us on twitter @BrokeInPhilly.

Mt. Airy early childhood center works on increasing diversity

2019-06-06T23:08:02+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

It was the paint or clay on the little white girl’s hands that first drew Aquilyah Muhammad’s attention that day in 2015.

As she sat in the Allens Lane Playground in West Mount Airy while her 2½-year-old daughter, Carlisle, played nearby, Muhammad thought to herself: “The girl seems so happy. I want my kids to go someplace where they’re fully immersed in what they’re doing.”

The girl’s mother told Muhammad that her daughter was enrolled in the Cooperative Nursery School (CNS) nearby, but when Muhammad visited there, she quickly noticed that “there weren’t a lot of children of color there.” And she wanted Carlisle and her younger brother “to be around people who looked like them.”

Still, the school’s volunteer admissions coordinator was black. Muhammad enrolled Carlisle, then took that job herself, arranging open houses and distributing flyers throughout the Mount Airy and Germantown area.

Concerned about the lack of diversity at their school in a neighborhood nationally known for being integrated, the school was about to make a top-to-bottom commitment. Their approach was twofold: change the racial makeup of the school, and help parents and students deal with diversity issues.

It was a highly unusual step for a preschool, but rooted in solid ground: Research indicates that children’s attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and gender start forming well before they are ready for kindergarten.

The school’s diversity efforts have included:

Forming a diversity committee that meets monthly.
Stepped-up efforts to recruit students of color.
Seminars for parents and staff on how to talk to children about diversity issues.
Introducing more books dealing with diversity in the school’s library.
Including a diversity feature in each issue of the school’s bi-weekly newsletter.

Aquilyah Muhammad

The school, founded in 1967, is located in a stone cottage on the wooded grounds of the Unitarian Society of Germantown. With a play area under large shade trees, it has the feel of a rural enclave in the city. The current enrollment is 39.

School leaders say the diversity effort has been aided by its cooperative structure, which leads to a more unified school community.

Families are required to help in the school at least once a month, participate in cleanup days, and do everything from setting tuition policy and fundraising to serving snacks to the children and cleaning toilets.

Silvia Diaz, CNS board chair, traces the start of the effort to the resignation of virtually the entire five-person faculty two years ago and the need to quickly hire replacements.

Faculty has remained unchanged

There was no single reason behind the resignations, Diaz said. But when the hiring process yielded four white women for the four open positions, school leaders saw this as a troubling sign.

“We were pretty disappointed,” Diaz said in an interview. “We were trying to sort out, ‘How did we end up here?’ We wanted the school to look more like the community in which it’s situated.

“It perperetuates itself if you’ve had more white people over the years.”

Leah Corsover, the newly hired school director and lead teacher, said that although the school community had always thought of itself as valuing diversity, it “quickly saw the need for diversity efforts in admissions.”

“If our admissions were by word of mouth,” she said, “we were going to get the same body of students. We needed to push our networks out into the [neighborhood]. It was being more honest with ourselves as a community, in practice and not just in name.”

Silvia Diaz, Community Nursery School board chair. (Photo: Paul Jablow)

So the school started setting up information booths at area festivals and added a second open house.

It has also been seeking partnerships with nearby after-school care providers to make CNS more attractive to parents who can’t pick up their children when the school day ends.

Meanwhile, Corsover, teacher Kerry Goldman and other members of the diversity committee started setting up programming for both children and parents.

Two workshops on talking about race with young children were facilitated by Deidre Ashton, a licensed clinical social worker long active in the field.

A workshop on gender diversity was recently held for the diversity committee by Samantha King, education coordinator for the Gender & Sexuality Development Clinic at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

And Maggy Williams, biracial author of the book I’m Mixed, spoke at the school, leading students in an activity exploring their own skin color.

“Some of the conversations were challenging for everybody,” said Diaz.

Parent Lindsay Edwards, who is white, said the discussions were often challenging because the children are encouraged to talk about differences that they obviously notice, not to pretend that they don’t exist, which is the case in some schools.

In her book, Williams speaks about having to decide whether to identify as white, black, or multiracial. She decided on multiracial.

In the library, the new “Family and Diversity” section includes titles like When They Ask if You’re Black or White, The Colors of Us, It’s OK to be Different, and Marvelous Me.

In Red: A Crayon’s Story, Michael Hill discusses transgender identity by using the metaphor of a blue crayon wrapped in red paper.

Goldman has also removed some books from the library, and Corsover drew up an Amazon wish list of titles she would like to add. To make the books’ lessons more real, Goldman has children mix paints showing their own skin color.

The school’s online application was reviewed last year to incorporate inclusive language and self-identification options, Corsover said. And “our marketing materials, admission policies, and mission statement were reviewed and adapted this year.”

Last year, 13 of the school’s students were non-white or mixed race. This year, 16 of the 39 students are of color.

But the mostly white faculty makeup — there has long been one black assistant teacher — remains unchanged, because there has been no turnover. That, said Diaz, “is still pretty much a work in progress.”

And changing the face of the school is just one part of the diversity effort.

“We’re trying to give the kids the values we want,” she said. “A lot of our work has been about how to talk race to our kids.”

Next: Talking race and gender to preschoolers

Your baby’s brain: If you want to build a better mind, tell stories

2019-05-09T21:30:47+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

How do we help children thrive and stay healthy in today’s world? Check out WHYY’s Modern Kids series for more stories.

Maybe your toddler knows something you don’t know. Every night, she insists she isn’t sleepy, and she wants you to read one more book …New research using functional MRI shows your little one is right. Reading, storytelling, looking at pictures, counting the bears, showing Mommy what the caterpillar ate or telling Daddy what color Pete the Cat’s shoes are — the more of it, the better, neurologists are finding. These activities furiously direct white matter, the neuron fibers to those places in her brain where the magic of language develops.

The interaction between you is helping to establish her vital, lifelong neural groundwork — things like memory development, attention, information processing, decision making, and more. It’s setting one of the habits that might help establish how healthy your child becomes as an adult, too.

And the earlier you interact, the better, the research shows. Much of the evidence is not just with toddlers, but also with infants whose umbilical stumps are still attached.

Read the rest of this story at WHYY news

Reading Captains lead the way to early literacy

2019-03-11T20:31:34+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Jasmond “Jazz the Barber” Schoolfield has been around too long and seen too much to have illusions about the challenges life poses in the North Philadelphia neighborhood where he earns his living cutting hair.

“We’re witness to a lot of stuff – drugs, crime,” said Schoolfield, 42.

But there is an alternative universe, one where an alligator worries about turning pink after swallowing a watermelon seed and where green eggs go best with ham, no matter what Sam thinks.

It’s that world that youngsters visit when they stop by Schoolfield’s shop, Creative Image Unisex Hair Salon on the corner of 28th Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue. In North Philadelphia, Jazz is a “Reading Captain,” one of many programs partnered with Read by 4th, a nationally acclaimed citywide campaign to attack poverty by boosting early childhood literacy.

At Jazz’s place, the children and their grownups can pluck kids’ books like the “Watermelon Seed” and “Green Eggs and Ham,” from well-stocked book nooks to read there or take home.

“Statistically speaking, scientists and psychologists study this, so they know, if you don’t have an education, you can’t get a job, and you are going to have to resort to doing things on the corner like selling drugs or other things that are inappropriate,” Jazz said during one afternoon at his shop. “You could wind up in jail. So reading is important.”

That’s it in a nutshell, or maybe, in a watermelon seed.

The idea behind Read by 4th is simple, which is why it has been so widely embraced in Philadelphia. The city is considered a leader in the grade level movement, which has programs in 360 U.S. communities.

Read by 4th is based on the theory that children learn to read in kindergarten through third grade. After that, from fourth grade to Ph.D., they read to learn in all subjects, from science to social studies. Research shows, educators say, that a child who cannot read on grade level by the end of third grade is at increased risk of falling behind in school and dropping out. The consequences spiral down from there–poorer job prospects and economic struggles, sometimes for generations.

“We’ve got to take on generational poverty,” said Ralph Smith, a former University of Pennsylvania law professor who, as managing director of Washington, D.C.-based Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, is considered the founder of the national movement. “That’s the moral imperative of our time.”

Reading on grade level, he said, is a pivot point.

Smith served in Philadelphia School District leadership under Superintendent Constance Clayton from 1983 to 1990 and under Superintendent David Hornbeck from 1994 to 1996.

Reading Hero Jasmond “Jazz the Barber” Schoolfield reads to his 5-year-old granddaughter, Harmonee Schoolfield. Photo by Jane M. Von Bergen.

Read by 4th’s annual Mayoral Summit for its partners, on March 5, honors particularly its “Reading Captains” like Schoolfield who distribute books and promote early literacy resources in neighborhoods.

Its Reading Captains are part of what makes the Philadelphia campaign nationally known, said Michael English, executive director of Turn the Page, a similar program in Kansas City, Mo. The Philadelphia campaign, he said, “has a great reputation for a very well-thought out strategic campaign, but also as an innovator. At the same time, they have, more so than any other community, really pressed the academic community” to make sure new teachers are learning the best reading science.

Read by 4th has pushed hard to involve St. Joseph’s, Temple and Drexel universities in promoting “Knowledge and Practice Standards of Teaching Reading” as an integral part of teacher education.

Judging by test scores, Read by 4th’s efforts are beginning to pay off. The campaign launched in July 2015. Initial test results from the spring 2016 PSSA tests showed that 70 percent of the city’s third-graders were reading below grade-level with 30 percent reading at or above grade level.

By the spring of 2018, PSSA scores improved–third-graders reading at or above grade level improved to 35 percent and those below grade level fell from 70 percent to 65 percent.

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” said Diane Castelbuono, the District’s deputy chief for early literacy. “We didn’t get into this problem overnight. But we have steady progress that is sustainable. We’re building capacity in our schools, in our communities and our neighborhoods.”

In Philadelphia, the Read by 4th campaign was spearheaded by Donna Cooper, the executive director for the advocacy organization Public Citizens for Children and Youth, and Sharmain Matlock-Turner, president and chief executive of the Urban Affairs Coalition.

Together, funded by an innovation grant from the Barra Foundation, they assembled 110 partners–the School District, nonprofits, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the city, advocates, the District Attorney’s office, the probation department and the health department. Now there are more than 130 partners who deal with all facets – some are involved with tutoring, some provide books, some design programs for parents, some sponsor workshops.

Cooper said that she and Matlock-Turner decided from the start that the partners weren’t going to sit around and commiserate. “We can’t walk out of here without a strategic plan and who is going to do what,” Cooper said. They insisted on signed contracts, and committing dollars and manpower.

Then, “we needed someone to run it,” Cooper said. The Free Library of Philadelphia was the best choice, she said, because the Library’s mission was clearly aligned and lacked the political baggage attached to the city or School District.

Jenny Bogoni, a no-nonsense nonprofit veteran, was hired to be the executive director. “I honestly, in my core, feel we have the right ingredients to crack this problem,” she said.

The ingredients are:
• Improving and expanding quality pre-K, now underway.
• Improving attendance with a marketing campaign and attendance ambassadors in schools.
• Reading Captains and Reading Heroes to bring more books to the community.
• Building home libraries. Nearly 1.1 million books have been distributed and 785 book installations have been created.
• Training for parents at 590 workshops so they can learn techniques for reading to their children and for building reading into everyday experiences such as food shopping. An app with tips now has more than 1,500 subscribers.
• Training for teachers. In the first three summers, 2,000 teachers were trained in the latest science for teaching reading. Schools have reading coaches to help teachers put into practice what they’ve learned. Funding for the $7.5 million effort came from the William Penn and Lenfest foundations and others.

The School District, Castelbuono said, didn’t experience the resentment that sometimes ensues when outsiders parachute in with their ideas, however well-intentioned. From the start, she said, the Read by 4th partners focused on helping each other, without blaming each other.

“It was a large-scale movement where everyone started to see their piece of the puzzle,” said Castelbuono. “It wasn’t like this is just a school problem, or just a parent problem, or just a community problem. We’re all in this together and we all have a role to play.”

After hearing complaints, school board approves contract for early literacy coaching

2019-01-18T04:08:41+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Despite objections from several speakers at Thursday’s meeting, the Board of Education approved a $17 million contract with the Children’s Literacy Initiative and two other organizations for teacher coaching in the early grades to help students learn to read.

Lisa Haver of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools (APPS) said some teachers had told her that “while CLI used to be a good program, it is not any longer.”

Haver and other speakers, most from APPS, said that coaching provided in some classrooms by CLI, which has worked with Philadelphia and other districts for three decades, no longer provides high-quality help in all classrooms. They said that some coaches are inexperienced and the “one size fits all” model that CLI uses is not appropriate for everyone.

But the board voted without dissent to proceed with the contract, in which CLI will work with two other organizations, American Reading Co. and Scholastic, on a model and approach that board member Christopher McGinley said he believed was “sound.”

“I’m not a fan of outside contracts, but I will support this one,” said McGinley, a former District principal and suburban school superintendent.

Board member Mallory Fix-Lopez questioned the $17 million cost, but said she was willing to approve it for one year while looking for evidence of its effectiveness.

Before the vote, Superintendent William Hite urged approval and cited gains in reading proficiency in the early grades. The Caucus of Working Educators (WE) tweeted that “correlation is not causation” and said those gains weren’t enough to conclude that the CLI coaching was the cause.

In 2010, CLI received an “investing in innovation” grant from the U.S. Department of Education to implement its model in districts around the country, and subsequent studies demonstrated that it had an impact at that time.

But Haver and the others said it would be preferable to invest the money in reducing class size and providing other supports for teachers.

Many of the same speakers also urged the school board to stop approving new charter schools because they drain funds from District schools and don’t provide a substantially better education. But parent Stacey Sellars, who has two sons at Mastery-Thomas Charter, described the school in glowing terms and said her children were thriving there.

A group of teachers from the WE Caucus and another Philadelphia group called the Melanated Educators Collective urged the board to offer its official support to Black Lives Matter week in February. They said the District should also invest in anti-racist training for teachers and in curriculum that affirms students of color.

Students should be “proud of their history,” said Angela Crawford, a teacher at Martin Luther King High School.

Teacher Dana Carter, now at Julia de Burgos Elementary School, said that she saw students be “transformed” when they learned about historical figures like Harriet Tubman.

The board did not take action on the Black Lives Matter week request.

Several educators from the District spoke highly of a professional development program for teachers of English learners that was scheduled to be voted on this month, but delayed after questions arose about it in the board’s committee on academic achievement. McGinley said he expected the program, called QTEL, to be voted on next month.

City celebrates two years of PHLpreK

2019-01-04T21:45:26+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

On the second anniversary of the launch of PHLpreK, the soda-tax funded initiative to provide free early education to children around the city, Mayor Kenney hailed the program as an investment “that will continue to pay off for years to come.”

“For the last two years, 4,000 children have received high-quality pre-K at no cost to them,” Kenney said, speaking at a center in Southwest Philadelphia where 42 children are enrolled under the initiative. The remaining 46 children at the center are in the District’s Head Start program.

City Council member Kenyatta Johnson called the program “a bold investment in the young people” of the city.

“We talk about the school-to-prison pipeline, we talk about the school-to-college pipeline,” he said. Programs like this are “a pathway out of poverty” because they lay the foundation for a successful education.

In Philadelphia, the poorest of the nation’s big cities, children often fall behind before they enter kindergarten and find it hard to catch up. Studies show that students who aren’t reading proficiently by 4th grade are much more likely to drop out of high school.

The Mayor’s Office of Education released a checklist showing that, currently, there are 2,250 city-funded seats in 85 locations; the goal is to reach 5,100 seats by September 2022.

At Your Child’s World in Elmwood, which is housed in a former roller-skating rink, Kenney visited several classrooms in the sprawling center. He scrunched down into tiny chairs at little tables, ate pretend food, discussed his ice cream preferences, and debated Donald Trump with 3- and 4-year-olds.

Mayor Kenney eats pretend food with students at Your Child’s World. (Photo: Dale Mezzacappa)

“Are you a grandpa?” one child asked.

“Not yet,” the mayor replied.

“How old are you?”

“Sixty,” Kenney said. “That’s 6 with a zero.”

Among the children at Your Child’s World is Trent Felder, 3, the son of Margaret Cobb, a SEPTA trolley operator. She said that the program has saved her close to $800 a month while providing a better experience for her energetic son than his old day-care center had.

“There was more playing over there, and more learning over here,” said Cobb, who wore her SEPTA jacket as she talked to reporters. “He likes it here.”

She said that before PHLpreK, her son was in a center that cost $185 a week. She had been getting a child-care credit through the state, but when she got the SEPTA job, she was caught in a conundrum: She was earning too much to continue to qualify for the subsidy, but not enough to afford the child care.

Then her son’s aunt told her about PHLpreK, and when she went online to investigate, she found Your Child’s World. It is located just three blocks from her home and has been a godsend for her, she said.

Although there is no income test to participate, the city’s report said that 75 percent of the enrolled families earn less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level ($50,200 for a family of four), and 41 percent earn less than 100 percent, or $25,100. And five neighborhoods are no longer “child care deserts,” which are neighborhoods where the supply of affordable, quality pre-K does not meet the demand.

“Even without the income restriction, the program is serving those who can benefit the most,” said Julie Beamon, who directs the program for the city.

Children in PHLpreK are enrolled only in high-quality centers, with three or four stars under the state’s Keystone Stars rating system. Your Child’s World is one of 35 centers that increased their Keystone Stars rating in order to participate in the program.

A PHLPre-K student at Your Child’s World in Southwest Philadelphia. (Photo: Dale Mezzacappa)

A 2015 report found that there were 17,000 3- and 4-year-olds in the city who needed quality early education but weren’t getting it, Beamon said. The aim is to continue increasing access by expanding seats, improving the quality of existing centers, and making sure parents know about the options.

The city report also said that PHLpreK has created 278 additional jobs and that parent surveys show high satisfaction with the program.

“Children who started with us two years ago are now in kindergarten and 1st grade,” Kenney said. “We’re proud of our students and proud of our students’ accomplishments.”

Kenney told one of his favorite stories about attending a first day of kindergarten, which can be chaotic with children hanging onto their parents as they try to leave. At this school, he said, there were five students sitting quietly at their desks. Later, he asked the children which of them had been to pre-K, and those five raised their hands.

“I knew right then and there, they were ready to learn.”

‘You have to have hope:’ Sotomayor brings messages for children to Free Library

2018-09-06T21:20:25+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was growing up in a Bronx housing project, her mother called her an aji — a kind of hot pepper — because she would never sit still.

It’s still true: Her conversation on Wednesday evening at the Free Library of Philadelphia with 6ABC news anchor Tamala Edwards turned into a walking interview as she strolled the aisles of the library’s auditorium shaking hands, paying particular attention to those extended by children in the audience.

At one point, a man on the other side of a handshake asked whether she would bring the current presidency to a “swift and peaceful conclusion.”

Sotomayor moved on without response.

She also did not address the tumultuous hearings now happening in Washington over whether Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed as a fellow Supreme Court justice.

Instead, Sotomayor stuck to her new book — actually, two new books, both of them versions of My Beloved World, her previously published autobiography. One of them, The Beloved World of Sonia Sotomayor, is for middle-grade readers, and Turning Pages: My Life Story is a picture book.

Read the rest of this story at WHYY News

Campaign for Grade-Level Reading conference comes to Philadelphia

2018-07-25T18:44:55+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Rachel Honore is a foot soldier in Philadelphia’s campaign to get all children to read on grade level by the time they reach 4^th grade.

She is a “family navigator” for Action for Early Learning, an initiative led by Drexel University that brings together social service agencies, schools, and community members in the 19104 zip code, which includes parts of West Philadelphia. It is one of the partners in Philadelphia’s Read by 4th campaign, a three-year-old effort to promote early literacy.

As a navigator, Honore, mother of a 6-year-old, mobilizes her neighbors to advocate for more governmental and private resources in literacy and to model reading for their children and keep books in their homes.

“We want a reading captain on every block,” she said.

Honore was a featured panelist at a national convening of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, where more than 700 educators, funders, and policymakers gathered at the Logan Hotel in Center City to reiterate the importance of early literacy and share strategies.

“The goal is to mobilize educators, public agencies, leaders of government, parents, funders, partners, and everyone to really focus on moving the literacy needle,” said Rhonda Lauer, the president and CEO of Foundations Inc., a New Jersey-based nonprofit that partners with organizations and school districts to enhance educational experiences. Foundations Inc. is one of the main organizers of the conference.

“The conversation and the discussions are: We know how to teach kids to read, we know what to do. The big question is, how do you do this at scale for all kids? No large urban area has been able to come up with that answer,” said Lauer, a former Philadelphia principal and administrator.

Philadelphia is aiming to be the first to find an answer through the Read by 4th campaign, which has 120 partners, said Janet Haas, board chair of the William Penn Foundation, a major campaign funder. Read by 4th is organized through the Free Library, which Haas said is the “backbone” of the initiative, with programs and outreach at its 54 locations.

In Philadelphia, 42 percent of 3rd graders read at grade level (District, charter and Catholic schools are included in that figure). In District schools alone, it is 35 percent, which is up 5 percent from the year before.

That is an improvement over the last several years, but still far from enough, said Jenny Bogoni, who is directing Read by 4th for the Free Library.

Bogoni reminded the group that Philadelphia is the poorest big city in America – 25.7 percent of the population is living below the federal poverty line, including 37 percent of the children.

In addition, she said, 40 percent of the adult population is considered “low literacy,” meaning that they “struggle to fill out a job application and read a prescription.”

That’s a major reason why a multi-generational, comprehensive approach is needed, she said, one that seeks to update a fragmented city bureaucracy while also employing people like Honore to literally knock on neighbors’ doors.

On the first full day of the conference, which runs through Friday, Philadelphia showcased its campaign. It mobilizes everyone from merchants to barbers to clergy members and, through its partners, it stresses the importance of school readiness, daily attendance, quality instruction, and out-of-school learning experiences.

The goal is nothing less than to overhaul systems and change behavior, Bogoni said, a point reiterated by other speakers, including Mayor Kenney.

“Everyone owns this,” said Sharmain Matlock-Turner, president of the Urban Affairs Coalition, in a film dramatizing the effort that was shown at the conference. Matlock-Turner and Donna Cooper of Public Citizens for Children & Youth were the driving forces behind the launch of the Philadelphia campaign.

Superintendent William Hite has made reaching 100 percent literacy by grade 4 one of his “anchor goals” for improving achievement in the District. With foundation support, the District has revamped curriculum and instruction in kindergarten through grade 3 to support this objective. Over three summers, several thousand teachers were trained in best practices, and each classroom received “leveled libraries,” in which children could easily access color-coded books that matched their reading level.

Colleen Bowen, principal of Clara Barton Elementary School in Feltonville, said that the percentage of students reading at grade level in 4th grade is “completely unacceptable,” adding that the District’s early literacy push is aimed at creating “real and lasting cultural change.” Principals have been re-trained along with the teachers, she noted.

But changes in the School District are not enough. City Managing Director Michael DiBerardinis said the movers and shakers behind Read by 4th “kicked my butt to get me around this whole idea,” and now the Philadelphia Housing Authority, the Departments of Human Services and Parks & Recreation, and others are focusing on the issue through collaboration, sustained funding, and deeper community attachments to focus holistically on the needs of families.

The conference will include panels and seminars on trauma-informed practices, because many children enter school suffering from trauma, a frequent side-effect of growing up in poverty.

The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading is the brainchild of Ralph Smith, who started the work while he was executive vice president at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Smith has also worked as Philadelphia School District chief of staff and as a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The campaign now encompasses more than 380 communities in 44 states, with 23 new sites joining just this week.

Speaker after speaker, including Gov. Wolf and Kenney, stressed that commitment is the key. Focusing on early literacy makes both “moral and practical” sense, said Kenney, who has made expanding high-quality preschool a hallmark of his administration.

Children who get a good education have a better chance of avoiding incarceration, getting a good job, and paying taxes, he said. Plus, improving the education system will keep young millennial families in the city when their children reach school age instead of having them leave and then return as empty-nesters “to buy tax-abated condos.”

“We are bringing literacy to life in laundromats, grocery stores, barbershops, homeless shelters, and other places in our community,” Kenney said. “…We are moving full speed ahead to give our students opportunity in life they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Honore, whose son Jonathan is thriving at Locke Elementary School, came to the work simply. Several years ago, as the parent of a toddler, she said, “I was trying to navigate organizations and programs that would assist my child’s literacy growth and development. I realized that within my area, they were far and few between.”

A graduate of Bodine High School with a business degree from Peirce College, she hooked up with Action for Early Learning, part of the federal Mantua Promise Neighborhood initiative and one of the partners in Read by 4th. There, she speaks with other parents “so they may make informed decisions about their child’s education and [be reminded] how important it is to be consistent.” For parents to know they have a voice “is huge,” she said.

“We want a child going to Grandma’s house to pick up a book like they pick up a cell phone,” she said. “We want the culture and the family dynamic changed.”

This story has been updated to reflect that the percentage of children reading on grade level in District schools is 35 percent.

The SRC years in review – full list of charts and data

2018-07-10T20:36:08+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

A look at Superintendent Hite’s record on meeting his anchor goals

2018-07-10T20:35:34+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Updated 7/16/18: this article now uses per-pupil spending and revenue data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, adjusted for local inflation and presented in 2018 dollars.

In the summer of 2012, Superintendent William Hite took charge of the Philadelphia School District. It was a year after Mayor Michael Nutter asked Superintendent Arlene Ackerman to resign after complaints about a lack of accountability over school violence and unethical contracting practices.

When Hite took over, he created Action Plans that set goals for the District. Action Plan 2.0, released in 2014, outlined a series of ambitious “anchor goals,” and in most areas, the District has made at least some progress: More high school students are graduating, more 8-year-olds are reading at grade level, and the District has balanced its budget.

But this was at the tail end of the term of Republican Gov. Tom Corbett (2011-14), who cut roughly $1 billion in state funding for public schools, with hundreds of millions coming out of the District’s operating budget. So where did the District get the money it used to fund these goals and balance the budget?

Some came from the city, and when Gov. Wolf, a Democrat, was elected, he restored part of the state funding lost during the Corbett years. But it wasn’t until this year that Wolf even proposed enough additional education funding to restore the amount lost under Corbett.

Data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

While the District invested more in an effort to increase high school graduation and promote early childhood literacy, it was saving millions on labor costs in a contract stalemate with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers that resulted in its members getting no raises for five years. The District also saved money when it outsourced substitutes, although the original contract with the company Source4Teachers turned out to be a disaster that left schools far more in need of substitutes then under the old unionized system. The District has since hired another company, Kelly Services, which has improved the substitute fill-rate.

In the final year of the contract stalemate, the District said it had relatively few teacher vacancies. But the union pointed out that there were also 181 vacancies in support positions and conducted a survey finding that there were 613 classes with more students than the contractual limit, which depressed the actual teacher-vacancy count.

These practices made it hard, if not impossible, to reach another of the anchor goals: All schools having great principals and teachers. That’s not to disparage the teachers themselves, but working conditions depressed recruitment and affected the quality of instruction teachers could provide.

And these savings on labor costs came after the District closed a deficit in 2012, caused by Corbett’s state aid reductions. Nearly 5,000 positions were slashed, which was 25 percent of total staff positions at the time. This resulted in roughly 3,800 layoffs.

The same 2014 District document that outlines these layoffs, the Financial Supplement to Action Plan 2.0, describes saving money on labor costs as “paramount” to accomplishing the action plan’s goals. It took three years after that document was released for the teachers’ contract to be settled.

The goals related to labor, however subjective, do not seem to have been prioritized. Considering the lack of a teachers’ contract, it’s hard to imagine that the District was able to “improve recruitment and hiring practices to attract the highest quality candidates,” let alone “strengthen the principal and teacher pipelines.” The District did not “retain and promote high-performing staff,” because the lack of a contract made teachers unable to earn raises at all, let alone the promotions they were owed for earning higher credentials.

But Action Plan 2.0 had far more objectives than the ones labeled anchor goals. Most are vague and hard to quantify. But some can be measured objectively.

There are some that the District undoubtedly accomplished: improving student nutrition, reducing violent incidents in schools, promoting project-based learning and Career and Technical Education, creating and launching new school models, and implementing a new school evaluation measure in the form of School Progress Reports.

As the accompanying charts show, progress on standardized test scores increased under Gov. Ed Rendell (2002-10), roughly correlating with increases in state funding. These positive trends on the PSSAs reversed by 2012, roughly correlating to when Corbett began cutting state funding. The numbers seem to continue to decline, though some of this is because of the higher PSSA standards, implemented between 2013 and 2015, that made it more difficult to score proficient and easier to score below basic.

Since 2015, the year the standards were finalized and newly elected Gov. Wolf began restoring Philly’s education funding, PSSA scores either leveled off or improved slightly, depending on the grade and subject. Eleventh-grade reading and math scores improved the most.

For a handful of goals, the District’s progress is debatable. One example is using the Renaissance school turnaround program to “make poor-performing schools better” by turning them over to charter operators while keeping their neighborhood catchment areas. The Renaissance program has not technically been abandoned, but it has been two years since the District used it.

Many of the Renaissance schools made initial gains, but then leveled off. In 2016, the SRC overruled Hite and awarded Wister Elementary in Germantown to Mastery Charter Schools, despite the fact that the school had made enough academic improvement that it did not qualify for turnaround. Wister’s School Progress Report rating under Mastery declined slightly the next year.

The SRC turned over 21 schools to charter operators through the Renaissance initiative, though since 2016 it has voted to close two of those schools due to questionable financial practices: Stetson and Olney, run by Aspira. The charter office also recommended the closure of Universal Vare, but the SRC last month renewed the school’s charter with conditions that include automatic charter surrender if it doesn’t meet stringent conditions after four years. Universal’s Audenried High School has also been recommended for non-renewal by the Charter Schools Office, but the SRC declined to take a vote.

Since 2016, the District has relied instead on internal turnaround models that don’t involve charter operators.

Another goal was to “ensure all charters are good school options.” Although the District has some high-performing charters, the SRC has lagged in pursuing closure recommendations from its charter office for any but the most egregiously poor-performing schools. A minority of Philadelphia’s charters received a passing academic score from the state, a point mentioned in the District’s Action Plan 2.0.

The explanation of that goal states the District will “actively seek the non-renewal and revocation of the lowest-performing charter schools.” The included financial document states that the District will “aggressively seek to close the lowest-performing charter schools.”

But the District has only closed a few charter schools in the years since. And dozens of charters are operating under expired contracts — a situation that would cause any other contractor receiving taxpayer dollars to cease operating.

These schools are allowed to continue collecting state funds as their dispute with the District over the terms of their operation remains unresolved. At its last meeting, the SRC only voted to close one charter school. Some others signed agreements after initially balking, but 25 continue to hold out.

In fact, another part of that goal was to “ensure all charter schools have signed charter agreements” – something that has clearly not been achieved.

Another goal was to “implement effective, aligned business processes.” But the District was recently sued by a bidder for arbitrarily awarding a contract to a favored company, and the District’s response to the lawsuit was to maintain that it has no obligation to follow city or state law or its own procurement procedures. The bidder has also filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education.

Another goal was to “provide a clean and comfortable building environment in all schools,” which would include “executing a more aggressive preventative maintenance plan.” The action plan cited research finding that students did better academically in buildings in “standard” rather than “poor” condition.

But since then, the District has found unsafe lead levels in at least one drinking water outlet at 53 percent of schools. After pushback from activists and community groups, the District arrived at a remediation process that involved faster testing, more thorough methodology, and the installation of filtered water fountains in every school. City Councilwoman Helen Gym’s office organized public hearings in Council on the issue and authored the legislation that Council ultimately passed.

The District also had mold outbreaks last summer, largely due to malfunctioning HVAC systems that caused excess humidity in school buildings, including Munoz-Marin and J.B. Kelly Elementary Schools.

All this prompted the Philly Healthy Schools Coalition, along with City Councilman Derek Green, to demand that the District publicly disclose its school-level environmental data on matters concerning public health.

Earlier this year, the District had to reboot a lead-paint stabilization project after the union’s environmental scientist found that workers were not fully cleaning up the dust left behind after sanding down the flaking paint. The project was started after a 6-year-old at Comly Elementary was found eating lead paint chips. The shoddy work wasn’t discovered until parents invited the union’s environmental scientist to inspect rooms at Jackson School. At that point, work was already underway in 16 other schools.

“Whether it’s lead paint or mold or asbestos, every month it feels like there’s another incident. Munoz-Marin in August, and then J.B. Kelly closes for a week, but those schools had problems for many years and the reaction was only triggered when some teacher posted something on Facebook,” said David Masur, director of Penn Environment that organizes the Health Schools Coalition. “Then you get Comly, and now Jackson. We shouldn’t be dealing with this like the Dutch boy putting his finger in the dam. We don’t have to live our lives this way.”

As a result, the District was called before City Council to explain how they would reform the process going forward to be more thorough in the scope of work and involve the community in advance as the project continues in the 46 schools needing stabilization.

A bill in City Council would require the District to make environmental test results publicly available and inform parents and community members in advance of such projects — the very thing that the Healthy Schools Coalition is demanding. It was introduced by Councilman Mark Squilla and is co-sponsored by Council members Derek Green, Helen Gym, Cindy Bass and Bobby Henon.

Wolf proposed that the state will split the cost of a $15 million emergency cleanup measure this summer that will remove asbestos, lead, mold, and other environmental hazards in 57 schools.

The District had a specific goal in skimping on maintenance. It ran up the deferred maintenance list to nearly $5 billion – though former City Controller Alan Butkovitz told City Council that his office found the real number to be $10 billion.

The District repairs its buildings by issuing bonds. But bond issues under Hite have been relatively austere, because one of the District’s highest priorities has been to earn a higher credit rating. It worked, saving the District money. The District did this by keeping annual debt service payments below 10 percent – in other words, by issuing fewer bonds each year to make repairs than were issued under previous administrations.

“We have to continue to balance the needs the District has for facilities investment with the need to not have our annual debt service cost eat up our annual operating [budget],” Uri Monson, chief financial officer for the District, told the Notebook last year.

Click for the full list of graphs and sources

Notebook interns Hannah Mellville, Sam Haut, and Alyssa Biederman compiled the data and graphs for this article.

Classroom upgrades: District tackles early literacy with center-based learning

2018-04-03T16:19:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Philadelphia School District officials hosted a visit to Locke Elementary in West Philadelphia to show off one of the modernized classrooms that they hope will boost early-childhood literacy – and to announce that dozens more will soon get the same treatment.

“Even the little stools – they’re rocking stools, so the kids don’t have to keep still. They wiggle! So the kids really like those,” said principal Katherine Carter with a smile, as she stood in one of her newly painted, brightly lit 1st-grade classrooms.

The classroom upgrades aren’t just cosmetic, said Carter, but designed around a “center-based” instruction model. The modernized rooms feature iPads and other new materials, clusters of modular desks, and dedicated spaces for small groups to work on reading, writing, and math.

“I’ve seen improvements in their reading levels,” Carter said. “The instructional centers are much more rigorous, and the students are much more engaged … it’s amazing.”

(Photo: Bill Hangley Jr.)
Locke is one of eight schools in which 80 classrooms were upgraded this year as part of a District push to use its capital investments to boost literacy among young readers.

Next year, Superintendent William Hite announced, the District will modernize an additional 162 classrooms in 11 more schools. This year’s cohort saw all classrooms from pre-K through 2nd grade modernized; next year’s group will have 3rd-grade classrooms upgraded as well.

Hite said that the improvements would help the District achieve its “anchor goal” of getting all of its 8-year-olds reading at grade level and that they reflect Mayor Kenney’s priorities as well.

“This is how the mayor’s recommended budget for the School District is operationalized,” said Hite. “We’re going to continue that investment until we work through as many schools as we possibly can.”

Definitive data isn’t yet available to measure their impact, but Hite and Carter said that students and teachers alike are excited and engaged by the new spaces – and that the early academic returns are encouraging.

“The centers are more instructionally sound and skill-based … as opposed to just games the teachers found on the internet or Pinterest,” Carter said.

And teachers received not only new material, she said, but also plenty of training in how to use it.

“[If] you don’t know how to use the materials, what is the point? But Apple was here to show them how to use the iPad not just as a learning tool, but as a teaching tool,” said Carter. “Or the smartboard, how to be more interactive with it … not just use it as a glorified projector.”

Dara Messing, a 1st-grade teacher whose classroom hosted Tuesday’s visit, said she was delighted with the new setup, which she said was unprecedented in her decade with the District.

“I did Donors Choose a lot,” she said of the crowdfunding website. “But we’ve never had anything like this. We have a more literacy-rich environment, we have iPads which are really engaging – just having the space to have a writing center, a listening center, a library, makes it a lot easier.”

Messing’s classroom includes an extra high-tech bonus: an audio system called Activate that allows her to listen to all the small groups as they work. Cell-phone-sized speakers sit on each center’s desk, and Messing wears a headset. As she works with students in one part of the room, she can use an app on her phone to check up on students in other parts of the room without disturbing them.

Messing said that using the Activate system has confirmed what she long suspected: Just because kids aren’t sitting quietly doesn’t mean they’re not learning.

“If I look over at the library and see three kids looking at the same book together, I can tune in and hear what they’re doing – ‘Oh, they’re really talking about the book, and not just playing together,’” said Messing. “It can look like they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, but they are. That’s what most studies are showing – kids don’t need to be sitting down to learn.”

In addition, students can use the same system to talk to the teacher without disturbing their classmates.

“I was asking the children [about it],” said Hite, “and they said, ‘We can raise our hand, ask a question … and we don’t have to get up and make a lot of noise.’ And I thought, ‘That’s a pretty good explanation.’”

So far, only Messing’s class uses the $2,000 Activate system, but District officials – who originally discovered it while looking for ways to help hearing-disabled students – say they’ll keep an eye on the data to see whether it’s worth spreading around.

But for now, upgraded classrooms will feature the combination of iPads and other materials, new furniture and storage, paint and lighting, and the center-based layout that dedicates spaces for both small-group and whole-group learning. Teachers will get about 20 hours of training to make the most of the new spaces.

Hite said that the most important numbers have yet to come in, but that for now he is “banking on” the enthusiasm he sees translating into better reading scores.

“We don’t have hard data yet, but the data we do have is that more children are attending at these schools,” he said. “More children are engaged [and] teachers are a lot more active in terms of what their children are doing in the classroom.”

This year’s cohort of elementary schools with upgraded classrooms includes Locke, Stearne, Pennell, Lea, Duckrey, Gideon and Meade, as well as Haverford Learning Center.

Next year’s cohort of elementaries will be J.H. Brown, George Childs, Anna B. Day, Louis Farrell, William Hunter, Morton McMichael, J. Rhoads, William Rowen, Steel, John Taggart, and John Webster.

State: Philadelphia violated rights of at least 800 young students

2017-10-23T17:07:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania education officials have ruled that the Education Law Center was right when it charged that the School District of Philadelphia violated the rights of about 800 students with disabilities who did not get needed services after entering kindergarten or 1st grade.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education has ordered the District to take corrective action to provide compensatory services for all children who were denied a free and appropriate public education due to the District’s delay and inaction.

The Education Law Center applauded the department’s findings and intervention, but said that more is needed.

“The department’s decision represents an important first step towards ensuring that all young children with disabilities receive the critical special education services they need from day one and are not forced to languish in kindergarten or 1st grade without the programming and support to which they are legally entitled,” said Sean McGrath, an attorney with the Education Law Center.

“However, we also believe that further and more specific corrective action is also necessary to ensure that each child receives the services and supports they need,” he said.

The District disputed some of the Ed Law Center’s contentions in a written statement.

“The information provided by the Education Law Center does not portray all the circumstances in which services are provided for transitioning students, and they have a basic misunderstanding of the diligence and professionalism of our staff who work with our students and their parents,” the statement said. “Although the District may have some delays in compiling a re-evaluation report for some students, data is gathered in many different ways. … At times, parents and families are unreachable for various reasons, and our teams of professionals work to gather the necessary student information. The District has and will continue to work closely with the Bureau of Special Education to improve the delivery of special education services for incoming Early Intervention students.”

The District will have to demonstrate that the children received those compensatory education services by filing an education plan with the state for each child who was denied services.

The department’s complaint investigation report found that, of the 836 children transitioning to the School District of Philadelphia who required re-evaluations, the District completed only 36 — or 4 percent of special education re-evaluations — within the 60-day time limit set by federal regulations.

Re-evaluations for 313 children still had not been completed by the time the report was issued on Oct. 6.

The report further found that, for those children who eventually received re-evaluations, only one-third received an Individualized Educational Program meeting within the 30-day timeline required by federal law.

When the report was filed, five weeks after the school year began, the District still had not completed the IEP process for the remaining two-thirds.

“It is our hope that the [state] bureau will take all the necessary steps to ensure an adequate remedy for children and that the District will undertake needed reforms to ensure that every child enters school with appropriate programming and services in place as required by law,” McGrath said.

In its statement on Monday, the District also put out a call for more psychologists to join the school system to help keep up with the workload.

“Our Office of Talent is addressing the need for more psychologists, in fact we are currently hiring at our District website, at www.philasd.org/jobs. These psychologists are a critical piece for our youngest learners and we are here to support them and their families.”

A copy of the original complaint and complaint investigation report can be found here.

Selling Fox Chase: One kindergarten open house in the era of school choice

2017-03-14T10:25:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Robert Caroselli isn’t a button-up type of guy.

The principal at Fox Chase elementary, a K-5 school in Northeast Philadelphia, only wears a tie to work twice a year.

"The first time you’ll see me in a tie is today," he likes to tell parents. "And the next time you’ll see me is when your child graduates in six years."

The "today" he’s referencing is Fox Chase’s kindergarten open house, an annual showcase to attract the next generation of families. As the rare necktie indicates, Caroselli takes this task seriously. Since he arrived four years ago, the young principal has made it his mission to market this school of 490 to the middle-class communities that surrounds it

"The objective here is that parents can feel that this is a place that they want to send their children to," said Caroselli. "And not because they have to because it’s the neighborhood school."

Kindergarten pre-registration runs March through May in the School District of Philadelphia. And the mere mention of it brings two types of schools to mind.

There are the ultra desirable city schools — often located in tiny swaths of Center City — where families clamor to get through the doors. Then there are schools in the city’s declining pockets, where the ability (or inability) to lure new families may someday determine their survival.

Read the rest of this story at NewsWorks

For one family, enrolling in District kindergarten is a lesson in frustration

2016-08-09T18:01:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Angela and Corey Battle have one immediate goal, and that is to get their 5-year-old son into kindergarten in a public school in Philadelphia.

So far, no luck.

The Frankford couple can’t understand this – especially given the city and the District’s emphasis on the importance of early childhood education and Mayor Kenney’s determination to provide access to universal pre-kindergarten.

“We didn’t know our local school didn’t have to accept our son, and now we’re stuck,” Battle said. “It’s August, and we have no idea where we are sending our child.”

How could this happen?

There are myriad reasons. First, kindergarten is not mandated in Pennsylvania, so the cash-strapped District is not obligated to provide it, although it does. For two decades, in fact, it has provided full-day kindergarten; many suburban districts are still offering half-day kindergarten.

But because the District is always facing tight budgets, it doesn’t automatically add classes at a school if the kindergarten demand exceeds the supply, as it does for upper grades. For more than two decades, state aid hasn’t been tied directly to enrollment increases, so adding an extra teacher would be costly.

Then there is the planning issue. School budgets are prepared well in advance, but many parents wait until the last minute to register. The city’s population is very mobile, and it is always hard to predict how many students will show up.

And even if a principal could manage to squeeze an extra teacher into the budget at the last minute, the recent massive downsizing of the system – more than two dozen schools have been closed since 2013, and more have been converted to charters – has made space scarce at many schools.

As one District veteran put it: “We were directed to make the highest and most efficient use of space, so we can’t open up a new classroom on a dime. We were so efficient in the use of space, there are no classrooms left.”

A student who shows up at the local school for kindergarten after it is full is put on a waiting list and is also offered a space in a nearby school. But in Philadelphia, kindergarten children are not allowed on school buses, so families must provide their own transportation. This doesn’t work for many families, who might give up on sending the child at all if travel is required.

Second, the policy of turning over schools to charter organizations to improve them – the Renaissance schools initiative – means that for many neighborhoods, the local school is a charter. This is the case for the Battles, and that complicates their situation.

Although some parents don’t want to send their children to charters at all, that is not an issue for the Battles. They tried to enroll their son in the Philadelphia Charter School for Arts & Sciences at H.R. Edmunds, because they live in its catchment area.

Angela Battle went to enroll their son Camal there in June, shortly after the District started touting kindergarten pre-registration. But she was told kindergarten was already full.

As a Renaissance charter school, Edmunds is required to accept all neighborhood students before accepting students from outside the catchment area. That is emphasized on its website and confirmed by a person answering the phone at the school who said she helped parents with registration but did not want to be identified by name.

She said that Edmunds, run by String Theory, starts enrolling students for kindergarten in October and was full by May. She said she hates turning families away; one, she said, lived right across the street.

“Our only option is to tell parents to go to the School District. They have to find a school for them,” the employee said.

Angela Battle said she didn’t know that registration started so early at Edmunds.

Her next option was to try to get Camal into Shawmont, way up in Roxborough. Her 5th grader, Coby, is bused there every day.

He attends Shawmont because five years ago, when Coby was starting 1st grade, the Battles received a letter from the District informing them that because their local school – then Edmunds, under District control – was underperforming, they had a right to transfer their child to a better school. This letter was required under No Child Left Behind, the federal law that required school districts to take aggressive action around so-called “failing” schools.

They chose Shawmont, and Coby has been there since. Battle said she asked the principal about Camal attending Shawmont as well, and she was fine with it. The Battles were willing to drive him there.

But Battle said they were told that they had missed the deadline for applying for such a transfer for Camal (such a transfer is still possible, but not under No Child Left Behind, which has been replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act).

“I was told that if you want to transfer your son out of the neighborhood school, there is a process for that, and it ended months ago,” Battle said. (At the very bottom of the web page on kindergarten registration is a sentence saying that the deadline for such transfer requests was Nov. 13 of last year.)

Angela Battle said she is reluctant to send Camal to another school in Frankford; she has done her research and says they are underperforming compared to Shawmont.

They have also tried two other charters in the area and are on waiting lists there. They have even looked into Catholic school options.

As Angela Battle sees it, “We can’t get into our local school, and they won’t let us go to the school where our other son is attending and the principal is on board.”

Their effort to find a school for Camal has proven to be far more difficult than it should be in a city that is putting a high priority on early childhood education, she said.

The District is required to provide Camal a spot somewhere. The Battles are still hoping they can get him into Shawmont. Corey Battle has a meeting Wednesday morning with the Office of School Placement to discuss the options.

Kindergarten pre-registration opens

2016-01-19T13:43:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

Kindergarten pre-registration for the 2016-17 school year opens today and will last until May 31.

The District encourages families to pre-register, because it allows the District and schools to prepare for incoming students — ensuring that every child will have a seat and that all classrooms are staffed and supplied with adequate materials.

“Just as it is important for children to be ready for school, we want our schools to be ready for children,” said Diane Castelbuono, the District’s director of early childhood programs.

Early registration also “gives our teachers and principals a chance to get to know you and your child, so that the first day of kindergarten goes smoothly,” Castelbuono said. Many teachers like to prepare their classrooms with personalized items to welcome the children.

The earlier a child is registered, the more likely he or she can attend the neighborhood school, she said. If the neighborhood school is oversubscribed, the District offers places in nearby schools, but does not provide transportation.

Kindergarten is not mandated in Pennsylvania. The District wants to get as many eligible children as possible to attend. Kindergarten participation (and good pre-K) is known to improve a child’s chances to stay on track in later grades .

Kindergarten is most important for students who come from impoverished backgrounds. The District’s kindergarten registration page offers information in 10 languages: English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Khmer, Albanian, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Nepali, and French.

The District is trying to combat late registration, which can work against getting more children into kindergarten classrooms.

Next year, she said, the District is hoping to start a mobile, online registration portal that will make it easier for parents to pre-register, said Castelbuono.

In 2015, 40 percent of families pre-registered by May, which was about 1,000 more families than usual. Almost 7,000 families didn’t enroll their children until September, and many families registered their children on the first day of school and later.

Kindergarten typically serves about 11,500 students each year, Castelbuono said. She added that there are usually 12,300 1st graders.

“What’s unclear is whether the gap between those numbers are kids who skip kindergarten or go to a private kindergarten, or something else,” she said.

Pre-registration also helps teachers make better use of classroom time. With late registration, teachers often remodel their classrooms to meet the influx of new students on their roster and must take time to get the new students acquainted with classroom rules and procedures.

For preregistered students, parent-teacher conferences occur before the start of the school year. For latecomers, they must take place during classroom time or after school.

“Our goal is always to get as close to a 100 percent pre-registration rate as possible,” said Castelbuono.

Parent advocate prioritizes fight for adequate funding

2015-02-17T13:06:00+00:00

This article was originally published in The Notebook. In August 2020, The Notebook became Chalkbeat Philadelphia.

It was the districtwide budget cuts in the spring of 2011 that led Philadelphia parent Rebecca Poyourow to start reading the Notebook.

“When I was scrambling to find out information about the District and about public education politics in the state when the budget cuts hit, [the Notebook] was the obvious place to go,” Poyourow, 46, said.

She recalled an article on the Notebook website that year which clinched her decision to become a member of the nonprofit: about the move to make Martin Luther King High School a Renaissance charter school and the School Reform Commission’s decision to award the school to a provider not chosen by King’s School Advisory Council.

Behind the decision, the Notebook uncovered a tangled series of maneuvers that prompted a city ethics investigation and ultimately ended with King remaining District-run as a Promise Academy. Poyourow said the impact of the Notebook coverage was significant to her so she wanted to contribute financially.

“I know it’s hard as an independent journalism outlet to survive, [so] I wanted to support the [Notebook]. It’s really an incredible resource that people should value and support.”

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, during the 1970s, Poyourow remembers attending public school during a period of intense budget cuts. She said she still received a great education. After earning her bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. in American culture from the University of Michigan, she moved to Roxborough in 2002 and began work at the University of Pennsylvania in higher education administration.

Poyourow wears many hats. She has two children in Philadelphia public schools and is an active parent at Cook-Wissahickon Elementary School. She is a blogger for Cook-Wissahickon Home and School Association, the Democratic committeewoman for the 21st Ward, and a public education activist for Parents United for Public Education.

Though she has many commitments, it’s her advocacy for fair, quality public education that takes center stage. When the District made severe cuts in 2011, Poyourow said she and other parents experienced a “wake-up call.”

“If you didn’t realize it before, you realize that your advocacy, support of the school, could not only be fundraising clubs, but it had to be lobbying for funding,” she said.

“It had to be activism at the city level, [and] looking at priorities, where the insufficient funds we had were spent.”

Poyourow said there was a moment “where all of the successively larger contexts became visible,” so she joined Parents United and with over 1,000 parents, many with students at Cook-Wissahickon, traveled to Harrisburg to lobby for funding.

Working with Parents United, Poyourow said she has been a part of many public education campaigns statewide. She said that getting the Notebook’s daily news roundup, “Notes from the news,” and reading other content on the website helps her stay informed.

“There is so much to do, there’s so much to pay attention to … but you can’t forget about the neighborhood school, because that’s the glue that holds people together, and that’s what makes it all worth it at the end of the day.”