A Mother’s Myriad Questions Point to Need for Connected System of Early Education

On Friday, I answered five questions about children’s early years on the Inside Pre-K blog.

In one of my answers, I summarized a recent conversation I’d had with the mother of a prospective Head Start student in Alexandria, Va. Her story reminds me of why our current non-system of early care and education has so many holes to fill — and why it’s so necessary to build policies and systems that integrate, link and expand the current hodgepodge of early childhood services out there today. Here’s a recap:

Let me give an example. I met a woman at a Head Start fair in Alexandria, Va., registering her son for the fall semester. She was newly divorced and had just moved her son to Northern Virginia to be closer to family who could support her. She was looking for a job. The only reason she knew about Head Start was because a stranger on the Metro platform one day, with whom she had taken up a casual conversation, had told her about it. There’s problem number one: Finding high-quality preschool and childcare can feel like groping in the dark. Even I, with a decent level of education and membership on too many parenting listservs, felt lost when I started seeking out information on preschools and childcare centers. We need more systematic ways of getting information to parents.

Now, for the next problem: This woman I met was excited to sign her child up for Head Start. Her son, climbing over and under chairs in the registration room, kept asking when he would start. But it wasn’t completely clear that her family would actually qualify in the first place. Yes, she was unemployed for the moment, and so her income was clearly low enough to make her son eligible. But what was to happen, she asked me, when she got a job? What if the job paid too much? Where else could she go? And would she be able to find a place to enroll her son that would enable her to work full-time, until 5 or 6 p.m.? Would it be as good as Head Start at preparing her child for school? How expensive would it be? If she got a childcare subsidy to help her with the tuition payments, would she still be eligible for those discounts if she lost her job or her hours were reduced?

We don’t have good answers to these questions. Part of our work at the New America Foundation, particularly on Early Ed Watch, is to follow legislation that will, we hope, start to build better systems so that children’s education, yes starting at age 3 and 4, is continuous and interconnected between childcare centers and preschools and public schools, allowing for seamless transitions from one year of preschool to another and then from preschool to kindergarten and up through the early grades.

(Many thanks to J.M. Holland for the good questions and opportunity to answer them. Stay tuned for more from Holland in the coming weeks.)