As our country has slowly started to reopen amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools and child care centers have been weighing their options when it comes to welcoming students back. Our early childhood center, Educare Chicago, after much careful consideration, made the decision to reopen and eagerly prepared to welcome children, families and educators back earlier this month.

Educare Chicago has been a lifeline to many parents throughout this time. The school serves families from under-resourced communities by providing high-quality child care and resources to their families.

Educare staff support parents as the primary nurturers and educators of their children. That support didn’t stop when the school closed back in March. Educare Chicago teachers and staff have been with parents every step of the way, providing helpful learning resources, spare masks and messages of encouragement.

“I appreciate you all so much for all you do,” another parent said of the support she’s received from the school. We know that these early years of a child’s education are critical to their future success in school. The current health crisis has shown just how important it is for working families to have access to high-quality early learning for their children. Without early childhood centers and schools being open, the families we serve are forced to stay home due to lack of child care and are unable to go to work, making it almost impossible to make ends meet. No parent should have to choose between providing care for their children or losing needed income.

What does back to school look like during COVID-19?

Both Illinois Governor Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lightfoot determined that child care programs could reopen if specific requirements were met prior to accepting students back into the building. The safety of the children, families and educators at Educare Chicago has been paramount to the school’s leadership team and has informed their decision making every step of the way. The school established a Reopening Committee to help plan for the many requirements mandated by the City of Chicago and the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) to reopen their school. Prior to its reopening, the school also submitted a written plan to DCFS.

In accordance with state and city requirements, Educare Chicago resumed center-based school operations on Monday, August 3, and is allowed to serve a limited number of children. Educare Chicago is committed to safely providing comprehensive services for children and families. The school has had to adapt some practices due to the new rules and regulations. Several of the changes that have been put in place to ensure children, families and staff are safe include:

• Screening children and staff daily prior to entry into the school
• Limiting access to children throughout the day
• Increased cleaning and sanitation practices
• Social distancing and wearing of personal protective equipment (PPE) for staff and children over age 2
• Increased square footage of 50 square feet per child
• Excluding children and staff when there is a cough, temperature, diarrhea, rash or any COVID-19 symptoms
• 6 feet of space between cribs and sleeping cots
• Installation of protective barriers
• Updating policies and procedures

What is Educare Chicago?

Educare Chicago was founded in 2000 as an innovative early childhood education program providing comprehensive services to children and families in under-resourced neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. Educare has spawned a national network of 25 schools and has reimagined what it means to educate our earliest learners.

Educare Chicago was founded by Start Early after years of working with children and families in the Grand Boulevard community. The Start Early’s work prior to the opening of Educare Chicago provided critical insight into the Educare Model. Based on four core principles: intensive family engagement, continual professional development, high-quality teaching practices and data utilization, the Educare model has been shown to prepare children for kindergarten in multiple developmental categories.

Don’t underestimate the incredible thinking skills that young children have. Through this activity, your toddler will learn about the idea of perspective by using everyday objects and comparing their sizes.

Don’t underestimate the incredible thinking skills that young children have. Through this activity, your preschooler will collect and sort leaves by different characteristics to practice early math concepts.

From a child’s first soccer team to recreational softball leagues to rooting for your favorite team, sports hold an iconic place in our lives. And they play an equally important role in helping children’s development in the early years.

It’s easy to see how sports can help with children’s gross and fine motor skills development. Less obvious, but just as critical, is the role that sports and play-based learning activities have in social-emotional development and speech and language development.

Be a Good Sport

As babies grow into toddlers, they gradually start to regulate their emotions. Playing sports with others gives them the opportunity to experience feelings such as joy, frustration, pride and patience in a non-threatening situation. To help them develop social-emotional skills, try:

1. Naming emotions as they play. “Suzy, great job catching that ball – you must be so proud of yourself!”
2. Help your child regulate his emotions when he is upset by talking about their feelings. “Tyler, I can see that you’re upset about missing the goal – let’s talk about why you’re upset.”

As children continue to grow and begin to play on teams, they develop teamwork skills that will be invaluable on and off the field. Team sports also provide a great opportunity to encourage empathy while learning new skills and celebrating successes. Try these tips to make sure your child will win the sportsmanship award:

1. Model the behavior you want to see – cheer as loudly for all the children on the team as you do for your child. Encourage your child to be a “cheerleader” for their team.
2. Reinforce the importance of taking turns at shooting the basket or practicing on the balance beam.

Hat Tricks, Fartleks and Setter

Every sport comes with a vocabulary of its own. Which means more and more opportunities to expose your children to new and varied language! From silly to repetitious to obscure, how do you make the most of this treasure trove?

1. As your child plays, name actions and items that are involved in their sport. Kick, run, pass, racquet, ball, tee, somersault…..the list is endless.
2. Have your child put the game into their own words – ask them to tell you how the game works.

We can’t guarantee that your child will become the next Serena Williams, David Beckham, Simone Biles or Derek Jeter, but we do know that time spent playing sports in the early years will pay off in many other ways!

Recommended for Infants

Materials Needed:

• Several small, interesting toys (rattles, teethers, colorful blocks, shakers)
• Soft blanket

Developmental Goals:

• Promote gross and fine motor development that encourages them to move, reach and stretch.
• Purposeful movement of own bodies.

In the Future:

• Infants need plenty of opportunities to increase their strength and motor development to eventually be able to crawl and then walk.
• Reaching for objects is goal directed behavior; as infants become successful at obtaining objects, it will encourage them to continue to act with purpose.

Activity:

1. This activity is appropriate only for infants who are able to support their body weight enough for tummy-time activities.
2. Spread the blanket on the floor in an area where he will be protected from other activity in the room.
3. Place him on his tummy on the blanket. Show him a toy and describe it to him. Look, (Child’s Name), I have a blue and white rattle.
4. Put the toy on the blanket just at arm’s reach from your child so that he has to stretch his arm out to grab it.
5. Give him time to shake, mouth and touch the toy.
6. When he shows you he is ready for a new experience, place another toy just at arm’s reach for him to grab.
7. Encourage him to use the opposite arm by placing the toy within closer reach of the arm he did not previously use.
8. Repeat the interaction for as long as your child is interested. Pay particular attention to his activity level. It is hard work for your child to lie on his tummy and reach for toys. You may notice that he is beginning to have a hard time supporting his head and neck, he is no longer reaching for objects, or he has an unhappy look on his face. When your child shows you that he is finished or that his body is getting tired, help him change position so he can rest his muscles.

As you are playing with your baby, consider how he moves his arms and the rest of his body to reach the toy, in what ways does he grasp and manipulate the toy, and how long is he able to attend to his experience.

Don’t underestimate the incredible thinking skills that young children have. Through this activity, your toddler will compare objects and ask questions to help understand their differences in quantity.

Recommended for Preschoolers

Materials Needed:

• Not a Box by Antoinette Portis
• Cardboard boxes, cardboard tubes, other recycled materials
• Bedsheets or blankets

Developmental Goals:

• Using language to share ideas.
• Using imagination in play.

In the Future:

• Being able to express ideas through language gives young children the opportunity to strengthen their vocabulary and develop their conversational skills.
• Imaginative thinking provides children with opportunities to develop flexible thinking, strengthening their ability to problem solve, which is important when attempting later math and reading problems.

Activity:

1. Introduce the book to your child.  As with any new book, take time to allow your child to explore the book’s pictures on his own before sitting down to read it out loud.
2. As you read the book together, invite him to talk about the different things that the rabbit makes with his cardboard box.
3. After reading the story, show your child the recycled materials you have collected.  Working together, decide what you will build.
4. Allow your child to take the lead, but don’t be afraid to join in and share ideas!
5. After the play space is built, ask him to describe what he built.

For older preschoolers: have them use writing tools to record a blue print of what they want to build prior to building. This provides them with the opportunity to analyze, plan and follow through on their ideas.

When the reality of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was clear many months ago, Start Early and our partners quickly pivoted to support our youngest learners virtually, and we’re continuing to innovate and evolve to ensure our most vulnerable children and families don’t get left behind as the pandemic stretches on.

One of our strongest partnerships is with the Educare Learning Network. In 2000, Start Early developed the first Educare school in Chicago to provide high-quality care, education, and a stimulating learning environment for children birth to age 5. Since then, we have partnered to create 24 Educare schools across the country to provide children in under-resourced communities with quality early learning experiences. In accordance with CDC recommendations, 22 of the 24 operating schools within the Educare Learning Network are currently closed, with 2 schools having reopened to provide essential services at a reduced capacity. But that does not mean our early learning programs have stopped. From online lesson plans to reading and singing sessions via Facebook Lives, our educators are helping to ensure children and families have the resources they need during these challenging times.

In this blog, Kristin Bernhard, Start Early senior vice president of policy and advocacy, identifies an innovative policy solution that is addressing our nation’s child care crisis. This approach, Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships, raises the bar for quality infant-toddler care. 

Our nation is in a child care crisis — particularly for infant and toddler care — and this issue is finally hitting the mainstream. Rarely a week goes by without a new article, report, or shocking statistic drawing attention to the sad fact that in its current form, the financing for child care in America is broken. The quality of services is inconsistent at best and most state- and federally-funded programs serve only a fraction of eligible families. This broken system is failing to promote the healthy development of our youngest learners and failing to support their parents, especially those who need child care so that they can work or go to school.

What’s more, child care providers in every state make near-poverty wages, while parents, especially those earning low wages, cannot afford to pay what it costs to deliver the high-quality early care and learning that research tells us sets the foundation for academic achievement, health, and well-being later in life.

However, this crisis is not purely a money issue. Current cries for additional funding for “child care for all” are shortsighted if they do not take into account the limitations of our current market-based system and the time and effort needed to make the necessary improvements in quality in order to truly realize the two-generation impacts of early childhood education. Access to child care alone is not sufficient if attention – and funding – is not also paid to improving the quality of the care provided and reshaping the way these services interact with families.

While the federally-funded, locally-run Early Head Start model was created in 1994 to address the comprehensive needs of children under age 3, the seemingly high costs per child, consistently low levels of federal funding, and increasing rates of child poverty have limited the program’s impact. As of 2017, less than 10% of eligible children nationwide were served by Early Head Start.

That is why the Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships (Partnerships) are one promising policy solution that should merit serious consideration by those tackling the child care crisis across the country. The Partnerships launched in 2014 as a new approach to delivering the Early Head Start model by supporting traditional early childhood centers and family providers in meeting and delivering early education and wrap around supports at Early Head Start standards.

This innovative approach allowed Early Head Start to extend beyond a limited number of centers and expand to community-based providers. As part of this effort, children enrolled in a community-based program received the wrap-around supports and comprehensive services, regardless of the funding stream paying their slot. Teachers in such programs also received enhanced professional development and coaching, resources to complete postsecondary education, and support in implementing research-based curricula — all while being paid a worthy wage.

Start Early has been involved with the Partnerships since the first funding was authorized. Six years later, it is important to tell the story of the Partnerships’ effectiveness; not just their influence on families and child care providers, but also their impact on state early childhood systems that adapted and innovated to support the success of the program. To tell this story, we interviewed a variety of state leaders to understand the impact the Partnerships had in reshaping infant-toddler child care in their states.

We found that the Partnerships raised the bar for high-quality infant and toddler care, as expected, but that they also served as an important impetus for systems-level change. The full story can be found in our report, Expanding High-Quality Child Care for Infants & Toddlers: Lessons from Implementation of Early Head Start — Child Care Partnerships in States.

So what do these findings mean for our current child care crisis? There is growing momentum around finding new and innovative solutions to this problem, which is certainly cause for optimism. However, as our nation pulls together to put new solutions for child care on the table, the lessons learned from the implementation of the Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships should be at the center of the conversation.

This Giving Tuesday, we partnered with KPMG’s Family for Literacy program who matched funds raised during the day with $10,000 worth of books for children at 26 early childhood programs. We are so grateful to have such a dedicated partner like KPMG who believe in our mission to ensure our earliest learners have the best start in school and life.

Recently, we sat down with Kerri Neis, associate director at KPMG, to discuss why fighting illiteracy and supporting Start Early is important to the company.

1. Why are literacy and early education essential parts of KPMG’s Corporate Citizenship initiatives?
   KPMG’s Citizenship efforts are centered on lifelong learning, which is essential to unlocking the potential in people, building economies, and above all, improving lives. Literacy is at the foundation of lifelong learning, and access to books is necessary to build strong reading skills. Specifically, the need is profound in Chicago. We know that by fourth grade, only about 27 percent of Chicago’s students are considered proficient in reading–there is a literacy crisis we can’t ignore. And in Chicago’s low-income neighborhoods, there is only one book for every 300 children, whereas in middle-class neighborhoods, there are 13 books per child on average. The statistics are so motivating for all of our leaders, partners, and employees—who have enjoyed an education and want to give back to the communities they love.
2. What is KPMG’s Family for Literacy (KFFL) program?
   KFFL is the firm’s flagship Citizenship program with a mission to eradicate childhood illiteracy by putting new books into the hands of children in need and developing the next generation of young leaders through reading. This unique program is particularly effective because it harnesses the energy and enthusiasm of KPMG’s extended family—not only partners and employees, but also spouses, children, interns, retirees, alumni, professional golfers, and KPMG Brand Ambassadors Phil Mickelson, Stacy Lewis, Mariah Stackhouse, Maverick McNealy and Olympic gold medalist Laurie Hernandez.

   Since its inception in 2008, KFFL has distributed over 5 million new books to low-income children in 100+ communities across the United States. KFFL also translates across borders having spread through KPMG’s global network to India, Mexico, South Africa, Zambia, the U.K., Kenya, Canada and China.

3. How does partnering with an organization like Start Early help KFFL support its mission of eradicating childhood illiteracy?
   Our organization and networks allow us to raise the funds to buy books, source volunteers to pack and deliver books, visit schools and libraries, and fuel the enthusiasm to share the importance of our mission. But we count on partners in the community to connect us with the right communities in the right way, which allows us to bring the books into the communities we most want to serve. Our core competencies lie in providing Advisory, Tax, and Audit services to our clients—our KFFL partners’ core competencies lie in serving constituents in communities. Those partnerships are so valuable to us as they provide the network, trust, and connectivity to carry out our mission.

   We have been so impressed with the holistic and critical services Start Early provides to their communities, that is why we were thrilled to be able to provide books to the schools, children, and families in their network. We hope that in addition to literacy skills, these books bring families together for quality time, spark the imaginations of young readers, and inspires their children to learn more. Because that is what we are all about at KPMG—lifelong learning!