Photo credit:Ā Neighborhood Centers Inc, Flickr
Ruth Kimble has been waiting a long time for early childhood education to have its moment, and now, she thinks, it has arrived. Across the country, voters and politicians alike are making prekindergarten expansion a priority.
That's good news to Kimble, a 66-year-old grandmother of four who offers day care and preschool in a violent and impoverished section of Chicago. But it's not nearly enough, she says.
Kimble has ideas about how to get society's youngest and most vulnerable learners off to the right start. She's carrying them out in her community, a predominantly African-American neighborhood on Chicago's west side called Austin. On a very small scale, others say, she's demonstrating promising practices for the nation at large.
Children of the working poor often spend their most pivotal years for brain development - birth to age 5 - in government-subsidized day care in other people's homes. So Kimble is trying to professionalize the day care industry - notorious for its high turnover and low-skilled workers - while making more academic preschool settings available to the kids who are served by day cares.
http://www.sacbee.com/2014/05/01/6369383/in-chicago-advocate-finds-way.html#storylink=cpy
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