With a second Educare center scheduled to open here in September 2009, Tulsa is expected to become the only city in the U.S. with two such cutting-edge facilities designed to interrupt that devastating cycle of poverty that plagues generation after generation. Only Omaha has a second Educare center in the planning phases, and Tulsa's is expected to open first.
Though the importance of appropriate early childhood education is better appreciated than ever before, still-emerging research — some of it being generated right here in Tulsa — is beginning to suggest the earlier, the better. Such research, if it proves to be well-founded in the next few years, will have important implications in the growing debate over funding universal pre-school programs.
In a nutshell, the research could show that spending public funds on intensive, high-quality programs for at-risk infants and toddlers from poor families could prove more beneficial to society — not to mention the children — than funding universal pre-school for middle-class families.
But back to Tulsa Educare. A coalition of public and private organizations has come together to launch the second Educare center next to Hawthorne Elementary School at 36th Street North and Peoria Avenue. Groundbreaking was held in May.
The new center will serve 164 children, and Educare officials are hoping most of them will be the first born in their families. Research shows that when a first-born child and its family receive the comprehensive services Educare provides, there are lasting salutary effects on the family that benefit later-born children.
The Hawthorne center will join the first Educare center, located adjacent to Kendall-Whittier Elementary School. That midtown center opened in 2006 and now serves 200 children and their families.
The new center will focus more on younger children, from infancy to age 3. It will house 12 classrooms, each serving eight infants and toddlers, and another four classrooms each serving 17 4- and 5-year-olds.
Other Educare centers are open in Chicago, Omaha, Milwaukee and Denver. Others are in various phases of development, including one in Oklahoma City set to open next year.
The Buffett Early Childhood Fund, the Ounce of Prevention Fund, other philanthropic organizations and numerous public and private partners over the past decade developed the Educare concept, which aims to "take the nation's best early childhood research from the lab to the street," according to national literature. Well-regarded research produced by such programs as the Perry Preschool, Abecedarian and the National Early Head Start is put into practice at Educare centers, with the aim of identifying best practices that can be replicated.
Educare promoters insist on combining a mix of public and private funding and services to maximize all available resources. The aim is not only to provide children with a good academic start, but to also provide staff and services that can meet each family's various needs, which can be multiple and complex.
The George Kaiser Family Foundation has taken the lead in Tulsa in pursuing Educare, bringing in such partners as the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine at Tulsa, Tulsa Public Schools, the Community Action Program Head Start, the Tulsa Health Department, and the state of Oklahoma, among others.
Because research shows disadvantaged children benefit greatly from an early, secure relationship with a caregiver, each Educare classroom is staffed by a bachelor's-degreed teacher, an assistant teacher and an aide who stay with the youngest learners from infancy through age 3. A Master's level teacher supervises. The 3-year-olds then matriculate into the older toddler program in the same building, where they stay together until they head off to kindergarten.
The overall aim of Educare is to create up to 15 Educare centers in a 10- to 12-state consortium that will dramatically improve the quality of early childhood programming, and serve as a platform for pushing broader policy changes.
In just a few short years, the findings already have been dramatic. Children attending the Chicago and Omaha centers — the first to be created — were found to have communications and vocabulary skill levels similar to those of children from middle-class homes.
"Because the solid majority of low-income, at-risk children enter kindergarten well below average and behind their higher-income peers, these early results are encouraging," said a report on the findings, "Educare — The Early Returns."
While such emerging research is exciting and encouraging, it also is sparking new debate about how early childhood education programs should be structured and funded. Tulsa will continue to play a pivotal role in how that debate plays out.
Full text available at Tulsa World.