SPRING NEWSLETTER! Check out for some
great new books to share in your classroom.
Thanks to the AKRON BEACON
JOURNAL; NEWSPAPER IN EDUCATION for helping celebrate
Week of the Young Child


Have you checked out the
Child Care
Connection facebook page?
If not you should, they have great ideas to
use in your classroom or share with
parents. They also share great training
opportunities.
Drop in public
preschoolers in Ohio is biggest in nation

By Jennifer Smith
Richards
The Columbus Dispatch
Wednesday April 11, 2012
Ohio had about 18,000
fewer 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in
high-quality public preschools last school
year than a decade ago, the biggest decline
of any state with public programs. And
although the state didn't lose ground in
preschool enrollment between 2010 and 2011,
enrollment didn't grow, either, according to
a report released yesterday. The report
gives Ohio low marks in every area for its
public preschool programs for poor children:
funding, access to programs for 3- and
4-year-olds, and standards for high-quality
programs. Consecutive years of deep funding
cuts are to blame for the enrollment
decline. Last year, the annual preschool
report from the National Institute for Early
Education Research showed that no other
state had cut preschool funding more than
Ohio. This year's report says that Ohio
spends a little more than half per child
what it did 10 years ago: $3,942 per
pre-kindergarten child. Only 2 percent of
the children who are eligible - they live in
poverty - are enrolled in a state-funded
preschool. "I don't think there's any other
state that has had these kinds of
fluctuations in spending or enrollment. It
seems that Ohio just cannot stay on a path
to provide quality preschool to a
substantial portion of the population," said
Steven Barnett, director of the National
Institute for Early Education Research at
Rutgers University in New Jersey. He's lead
author of the report.
Article continued on the
Advocacy page
********************************************************************
Early Childhood
Education Professionals: At the Table or On
the Menu

Rae Pica
Huffington Post
In the past, early
childhood professionals didn't have to worry
about legislation and policy. They quietly
and diligently went about their work,
preparing young children to read and write,
to "use their words," and to take turns.
They knew their work mattered; they saw it
on the attentive faces, and heard it in the
inquiring voices and increasing
vocabularies, of the children with whom they
shared their days. The policymakers, and
even the rest of the education profession,
ignored them, considering them little more
than "babysitters." Today, they're still too
often considered babysitters -- but they're
no longer being ignored. Whether it's
because they want to jump on the ECE
bandwagon, which began rolling when brain
research highlighted the significance of the
early years, or because they're looking for
"easy" ways to cut the budget, policymakers
are now all too aware of early childhood
education. (Apologies to those policymakers
who honestly see the value of this
profession and work to support it.) I
recently had the opportunity to
discuss the impact of the policymakers'
spotlight with the leaders of four state
affiliates of the National Association for
the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).
Representing
New York
State,
Florida,
Ohio, and
Texas,
Kristen Kerr, Suzanne Gellens, Kimberly
Tice, and Aaron Carrara told me what's
happening in their states and how it's
representative of what's going on at the
national level.
Article continued on the
Advocacy page
*********************************************************
"Occupy
Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on
one of America’s central challenges, the
inequality that leaves the richest 1 percent
of Americans with a greater net worth than
the entire bottom 90 percent. Most of the
proposed remedies involve changes in taxes
and regulations, and they would help. But
the single step that would do the most to
reduce inequality has nothing to do with
finance at all. It’s an expansion of early
childhood education."
To
read more go to our
Advocacy page
*********************************************************
Check
out our Great Ideas page for
new activities for your
kids!
*********************************************************