Three-year-old Azziana Osorio bounces off her mother?s lap when she finishes the storybook, washes her hands and waits patiently at a tiny table with her classmates for an afternoon snack.
Head Start program
At birth, the odds were stacked against Azziana. She was born to a 16-year-old high-school dropout. Authorities jailed her father while her mother was pregnant, and then he returned to his native Mexico. Earlier this year, Child Protective Services opened a report on the mother and child, accusing Alondra Osorio of neglecting and abusing her daughter.
At Educare Arizona, Azziana learns to take turns, recognize letters and kick a ball. She is mastering the social, academic and motor skills that will prepare her for kindergarten and beyond.
Her mother is learning, too.
?I?ve learned different ways to take care of Azziana,? Osorio said. ?I?m so young. I didn?t know.?
There are eight children and three teachers in the classroom, a ratio unheard of in other child-care settings. but it?s required under the auspices of Educare Arizona, a nationwide public-private partnership that, in conjunction with Head Start, provides early-childhood education to poor children at risk of academic failure.
The precocious preschooler is among 190 children at Educare, a tiny fraction of the state?s low-income Arizona children facing a dwindling supply of subsidized child care.
CPS frequently offers child care, among other services, to families accused of abuse or neglect. Child care can provide an immediate solution for a mother who left her young children home alone while she worked. or it can be part of a package of services to help parents regain custody of their kids.
For the lucky families who get in, research shows, Educare, Head Start and other high-quality preschool programs work. but while they are free to the families who benefit, they are expensive to operate. Head Start costs average about $8,000 per child; Educare works out to more than twice that for each child enrolled at the east Phoenix campus.
Statewide, fewer than 5 percent of eligible infants and toddlers get into Early Head Start, and roughly 40percent of preschoolers who are eligible find a seat in a Head Start classroom.
State reductions
An average of 7,500 families with open CPS cases receive free child care each month, or about one-fourth of more than 32,000 cases statewide. Though the care in these programs meets minimum state licensing standards, its quality is uneven.
The oldest and most well-researched child-care program is the federal Head Start, for 4- and 5-year-olds, and Early Head Start, which serves pregnant women, infants and toddlers.
Children in foster care, living at home with an open CPS case or who are homeless are automatically eligible for Head Start and Early Head Start, but they compete with all other low-income children for the 21,360 slots in Arizona. about 600 children involved with CPS find a spot in a Head Start program each year, and a fraction of them are placed in Early Head Start.
Early Head Start and Head Start go beyond typical child care, offering support services to poor families, from health and dental care to GED classes and job training for parents. The programs emphasize parents? roles as their child?s best teachers and require that they participate in their child?s education and development.
Children who have been mistreated, and their families, have the most to gain from comprehensive programs like Head Start, said Mindy Zapata, director of Early Head Start and Head Start for Southwest Human Development, which provides an array of early-childhood programs, including Head Start programming for more than 1,200 babies, toddlers and preschoolers in Maricopa County.
Through Head Start, ?parents learn to become consumers of their children?s education,? Zapata said. ?That?s really what?s going to change the trajectory for that child and family.?
Federal funding pays for the entire $140million Head Start program in Arizona. The state no longer funds any kind of early-childhood education, as 39 other states do. State lawmakers eliminated a $20million early-childhood block grant in 2010 to balance the budget. In 2011, they eliminated state funds for a child-care-subsidy program for low-income working parents.
First things first, the early-childhood program funded through a tobacco tax, provides $10million in matching funds so Arizona can continue to qualify for federal child-care dollars. That funding preserved the state?s child-care subsidy program, which now covers only families with open CPS cases and those coming off welfare, most of them single mothers. The sliding-scale subsidy will help an estimated 24,500 kids attend child care this year.
First things first also has paid for about 7,000 infants, toddlers and preschoolers to attend high-quality child-care centers since 2010.
Bruce Liggett administered the state?s child-care program for the Department of Economic Security in the early 1990s and now represents child-care operators.
?The state has backed off its historical commitment to helping low-income families afford child care and stay working,? Liggett said. ?The state, along with the economy, has really damaged the infrastructure for all families.?
Liggett argues that even mediocre child care is better than none if it means a mother can keep her job and feed her children. He?s concerned about giving blanket priority to CPS children, particularly if that foster child lives comfortably with a grandmother or is in state custody for a short period of time.
?Kids who are homeless and living in cars need that kind of care, too,? Liggett said.
Head Start and Educare
Head Start was launched in 1965, and Early Head Start followed 30 years later.
Research on the programs shows participants do better socially, behaviorally and academically compared with kids from similar socioeconomic backgrounds who did not complete the program. but the gains are slight and level off after first grade. The findings have put the program in budget crosshairs for years.
Head Start critics say the preschool program is required to do too much with too little and is bogged down by more than 1,200 federal regulations.
?They ask it to do way more things than it can do with the money that they give it. And that?s a huge problem,? said Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. ?The kids are just too far behind, and they?ve got too much going against them to settle for little, bitty gains.?
Short of starting over, Barnett and other early-education researchers say the solution is to supplement and reshape Head Start by paying teachers higher salaries to improve quality and retention and reaching children and families earlier.
Educare Arizona is the kind of collaboration Barnett and other experts say most benefits at-risk children and families.
One of 14 Educare centers in the country, Arizona?s year-old facility is located between a neighborhood clinic managed by Scottsdale Healthcare and Brunson-Lee Elementary School, in east Phoenix?s Balsz School District. All of the students at Brunson-Lee qualify for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program, three-fourths speak English as a second language and most do not receive consistent health care from the same provider.
Educare?s model combines national philanthropy with local donors with Head Start and a local public school ? Southwest Human Development runs the Head Start program and Balsz donated the Educare site.
Children who begin at the campus as babies can progress through the Head Start program, then to Brunson-Lee. The children and their families can get medical, dental and behavioral-health care next door at the Balsz/Educare Arizona Center for Health.
Educare requires higher educational levels for its teachers and smaller class sizes than typical Head Start classrooms. One-third of the space is dedicated to parents, who must participate in meetings, parenting classes and other events.
Even before Azziana was born, Osorio signed up for Early Head Start at her mother?s suggestion.
The birth-to-3 program began with home visits and medical care for pregnant Osorio. The home-visiting worker was a lifeline for Alondra, who was living with her aging grandfather. She taught the teen mother how to play with her new baby and watch for developmental milestones. They talked about nutrition and safety.
The Head Start worker helped Osorio and Azziana apply for Medicaid and find a pediatrician at Phoenix Children?s Hospital?s Teen Tot Clinic. between weekly visits, Osorio could text the home-visiting worker with questions.
She also told Osorio about Educare, which opened last August. Azziana, then 2, got one of 190 spots in the program.
Head Start workers also stepped in when Azziana became the subject of two CPS reports this spring. The reports alleged that the child was dirty and underfed, and that Osorio had hit her on the head.
Alondra, 19, had come a long way during the year in the program, from dropping off her daughter and leaving, to staying every day for breakfast, attending monthly parent meetings and asking questions about every aspect of Azziana?s day, said the toddler?s teacher, Ashley Foote.
?She was devastated? by the CPS investigation, Foote said. ?It just wasn?t true. Azziana is always clean and well fed.?
CPS deemed the report without merit and closed the investigation. even so, Osorio voluntarily participated in parenting classes offered to her.
The teen continues to work on discipline techniques with her daughter, with support from the Educare staff.
Foote helped her find an online school so that she can study to pass the math portion of the AIMS, the only thing standing between Osorio and her high-school diploma. Osorio plans to attend community college and earn a nursing degree.
?We look at the child in the context of the family. we know that in order to affect the child?s outcome we have to affect the family?s ability to provide for and support them,? said Bonnie Williams, executive director of the Arizona Head Start Association.
?An infant doesn?t exist outside of the family context. They have to be supported by a loving person who?s able to meet their needs.?
Proven prevention programs
Even in tough economic times, states and communities around the country are investing in promising and proven programs to prevent child abuse and neglect.
Nurse-Family Partnership, various states (including Arizona): Home visits from nurses to first-time moms and their infants.
Ounce of Prevention, Illinois: uses private dollars to leverage public funding for early-childhood education and training.
Think big, Start Small, Wisconsin: Statewide education campaign to promote early-childhood issues, including infant mental health.
Triple P, various states: Multilevel family-support program, ranging from public-awareness campaigns to intensive interventions, depending on family needs.
Sources: Center for the Study of Social Policy, FRIENDS National Resource Center for Community-Based Child Abuse Prevention
Child-care plus
Early Head Start and Head Start are more than child care. Nearly 13,000 Arizona kids and families benefited from other services, including:
8,158 ? Health and nutrition education.
7,553 ? Parenting education.
4,139 ? Adult education.
2,644 ? English as a second language classes.
2,545 ? Job training.
2,279 ? Marriage education.
2,210 ? Mental-health services.
2,070 ? Housing assistance.
608 ? Child-support assistance.
Source: http://www.shortstoriesforchildren.net/preschool-services-help-at-risk-parents-children
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