Cooperative Efforts Get Financial Boost

“All.”

Such a little word - but such a big concept.

As in: “giving all our children the best possible start in life so they are ready to go to school to succeed.”

That challenge, Melinda Gates emphasized last week, is one of society’s greatest responsibilities. Meeting it is the hope behind a new foundation she and Mona Locke, co-chairwomen of the Governor’s Commission on Early Learning, announced while they were here.

For some children, the ingredients for success are already in place. Stable families. Nurturing environment. Adequate food, shelter and health care. Books, music, conversation and other intellectual stimulation in the home. But conditions are different for too many youngsters, especially from low-income settings. Their parents or other primary care givers lack the money, time, skills and often even the will to lay a proper foundation for learning.,

By the time those two groups of youngsters enter kindergarten the academic gap between them is difficult if not impossible to close, condemning needy children to a lifelong educational disadvantage.

Potential solutions aren’t all that elusive - in theory, at least. Research has found, to no one’s surprise, that poor children who enter an educational child care program in infancy achieve much more academic success, even in college, than those who don’t. Working on kids’ readiness to learn before they reach school is not a new idea. United Way’s Success By 6 program has been doing it in Spokane County since 1994.

In one Success By 6 initiative, known as Parents as Teachers, social workers are mentoring more than 80 Spokane County families, one on one, in the skills and strategies needed to prepare their children for school. But one-on-one mentoring and educational child care programs are costlier than low-income families or financially strapped nonprofit organizations can afford.

The new Washington Early Learning Foundation, with $10 million in seed money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, can help. Not by merely writing checks for programs and services but by teaming with schools, families, employers and existing programs such as Success By 6. Collaboratively, they can design, test and perfect strategies that will assure Washington’s children enter school prepared to learn.

All of them.