NEWS SPECIAL REPORT
Fight against poverty focuses on the youngest
Literacy experts believe joint initiative will more effectively lift kids out of poverty
The seven children are riveted. Sitting on brightly colored mats inside a Wyoming Avenue day care center, they watch with absorption as a woman holds up a picture book.
In unison, the children repeat the author’s name. They buzz loudly to show the noise bees make and moo like cows. Then, they try a few more difficult concepts.
“What’s this?” asks Cynthia M. Russell, director of Cyn’s Heavenly Angels. She is holding up the book, pointing to a punctuation mark.
“An exclamation point!” shouts Marcel Huggins, 3, bouncing up to his knees.
“That’s right!” says Russell. “Exclamation point!”
The day care scene is a microcosm of what’s happening in some places in the City of Buffalo, as educators and community leaders search for new and effective ways to fight child poverty here.
Right now, these efforts focus on education — specifically, on literacy skills.
And increasingly, they focus on pupils in the earliest grades or — better yet — on youngsters not yet in school.
Because poor children often have little exposure to books or literacy- rich environments — because their parents might have had little education themselves — many are already far below grade level when they arrive at school and are unlikely to ever catch up.
“You have to begin no later than age 3,” said Claity Massey, director of Buffalo’s King Center Charter School. “Early intervention is basically essential. Otherwise they come to school not ready.”
The stakes are high.
The ABCs of success
Children who know the alphabet entering kindergarten are three times more likely to read by the end of first grade than youngsters who don’t know their ABCs, said Betty Evans, Buffalo’s director of early childhood education.
And children who can’t read by the end of first grade, she said, have just a one-in-eight chance of ever working at grade level.
Several high-profile initiatives in Buffalo are built around that sense of urgency:
• The King Center Charter School, which begins formal instruction in kindergarten, works with younger children in their homes in an “early admissions” program so they are prepared for school when they turn 5.
• A promising “Read to Succeed” initiative, which captured a $4.1 million federal grant last year, includes literacy efforts that work with children as young as 6 months old.
• Initial improvements in the Buffalo Public Schools have focused on the early grades, where many youngsters have smaller classes and more instructional time than ever before, and more children are in full-day prekindergarten.
Those efforts and others show clear signs of success.
But they are just the beginning steps in a city where nearly 43 percent of children live in poverty and the four-year high school graduation rate is just 46 percent.
“I’d say we’re at the 50-yard line and it’s first down,” said Robert M. Bennett, chancellor of the state Board of Regents. “Five years ago we were only on the 20. But we’re not where we need to be.”
What’s new is the growing realization among Buffalo’s educators, community leaders and activists that fresh approaches to the problem are needed.
That’s why members of organizations all over the city — Good Schools for All, the Buffalo Public Schools, literacy groups, the public library system and more — decided to work together to develop a single, comprehensive literacy initiative.
“When we started this campaign, we said: ‘We don’t want to do 10 times more of the same thing, which isn’t working,’ ” said Helene H. Kramer, executive director of Good Schools for All, which is spearheading the “Read to Succeed” effort. “We said: ‘We’re going to create new, collaborative models. And we’re going to create new centers of excellence.’ ”
Collaboration is rewarded
That approach was rewarded with a $4.1 million grant from the U. S. Department of Education, a $400,000 grant over three years from the Peter and Elizabeth C. Tower Foundation and a $133,000 three-year grant from the Josephine Goodyear Foundation.
Initial results of the early literacy program have been very good.
• Children enrolled at five participating Head Start programs showed marked increases in letter identification, vocabulary skills, and understanding and repeating spoken language.
• At a pilot program in seven day care centers, 85 percent of the children achieved acceptable scores in three key areas of language skills after one year. Just 45 percent achieved those levels before entering the program.
• Parents of children taking part in the programs reported that they are becoming more involved in building their literacy skills: 73 percent said they are reading with their children more; 86 percent said they were talking with their kids more.
“She plays with her books,” said Katy Knopper, mother of Leah, a 15- month-old girl. “I didn’t expect that. And I have the alphabet hanging above her changing table now — and I sing it to her while I’m changing her diapers.”
Bennett applauds those efforts but said early childhood programs will need more comprehensive, independent evaluations of their results to compete effectively for public and private funds in a troubled economy.
“By 2012, [the question will be] did it make it difference?” he said. “We don’t have good enough data to prove our case.”
Empowering parents
Active parent involvement is also required when the King Center Charter School sends “home visitors” to work with preschool children and their families on literacy skills, even before the youngsters are formally enrolled in school.
“We’re empowering parents to be their children’s first teacher and their advocates in the schools,” said Lisa Alexander, coordinator of the home schooling effort.
It appears to be taking hold.
Last year, 75 percent of the King Center’s third-and fourth-graders who had received preschool instruction at home were proficient in English, compared with 52 percent of those who hadn’t taken part. And 100 percent of the youngsters who had participated were proficient in math, compared with 73 percent of the third-and fourth-graders who had not been in the early admission program.
In the Buffalo Public Schools, Superintendent James A. Williams’ reform efforts started largely in the early grades. A longer school day and school year were established at 16 elementary schools, and class sizes were reduced.
An estimated 85 percent of Buffalo’s 4-year-olds take part in full-day prekindergarten classes, and city school officials are trying to boost that figure to 100 percent.
“Prekindergarten is the most important grade level for any school district,” said Evans, the director of early childhood education. “It sets the foundation for each and every child to become a lifelong learner.”
The literacy effort is branching out beyond schools.
Circulation skyrocketing
At the East Delavan Library, a partner organization in the “Read to Succeed” initiative, circulation of books and computer use have both skyrocketed over the past year.
Month-over-month increases in circulated books from 2007 to 2008 range from 10 percent to 39 percent, said Jamie D. Smith, branch manager.
“That’s amazing. It really is,” said Smith. “It’s because we’re getting so many bodies in here — in unconventional ways, yes, but then once we have them in here we get them to pick up a book.”
Moreover, Buffalo’s efforts to change poverty by boosting literacy are now attracting national attention.
Recently, CBS news crews came to Buffalo to tape the “Early Reading First” program in action for an upcom - ing segment of a Katie Couric news broadcast, said Kramer, head of Good Schools for All.
And, she said, the national literacy conference known as “Literacy Powerline” will bring its 2009 assembly to Buffalo next June to get a closer view of what the city is doing.
“Buffalo is ahead of the curve on this,” Kramer said. “All the early indications are, it’s working — and it’s working very well.”
vogel@buffnews.com and psimon@buffnews.com
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