The I. Jerome and Rosemary Flance Early Learning Center celebrated its second year of providing early childhood education on the near North Side in June, but its leadership and staff are looking ahead, rather than behind.
“It’s going to go right over there,” Michelle Landers-Ochsner, a development associate at the Flance Center, said while pointing west from the front door of the center, located at 1908 O’Fallon St.
“It” is the new $1.7 billion Western Headquarters for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which will be built within walking distance of the Flance Center. The City of St. Louis is scheduled to hand over the 100-acre site to the federal government next year, with an estimated three years of 1,350 construction jobs needed to build it. Then, sometime in 2021, it will open with some 3,150 people working at NGA West, a half-mile from the Flance Center.
As center director Mark E. Cross said, people tend to look for child care – otherwise known as early childhood education – near where they live or where they work. So the future of the Flance Center, and countless other businesses on the near North Side, will soon be much brighter and busier.
At present, enrollment at the center is less than half-way to its capacity of 154 students, with 69 children regularly attending the center, ages six weeks to six years. Their families are a mix of market-rate customers (about 17 percent) and the rest families with some subsidy through Early Head Start, Head Start or the Department of Social Services. The Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis is the center’s Head Start grantor, with 34 students enrolled; the center’s Early Head Start partner is Youth in Need, with 24 students enrolled.
The Flance Center, managed by Flance Management, is a project of Urban Strategies and St. Louis-based urban redeveloper McCormack Baron Salazar. It was envisioned as much more than a place for harried parents to park their small children while they earn a living. Its vision is “to create a new paradigm in early childhood education that will serve as a model for creating a systemic change for children and families.”
The mixed-income model is integral to the ambition to create “systemic change.” The Flance Center is committed to serving “a racially, culturally, developmentally and socio-economically diverse population of children” while providing “supportive services to families,” according to its mission statement.
The center’s staff – it has 31 on-site employees, with 24 of them being teachers – has help in pursuing its ambitious, progressive mission. The LUME Institute has been a guiding presence from the beginning. LUME, which evolved from the University City Children’s Center, offers “systemic and comprehensive approaches to early childhood education that engage, impact and transform communities,” according to its mission statement.
“They do a lot of work teaching, coaching, consulting and mentoring our teachers,” Cross said of LUME, which is directed by Steve Zwolak. LUME provides what Landers-Ochsner described as a “creative curriculum – you learn through play.”
The educators at the center also are learning through the LUME institute. Current teachers receive training to meet certification requirements, and people interested in becoming certified early education teachers receive training. “Teachers and prospective teachers come for training from the neighborhood and from all over the city and county of St. Louis,” said Sandra Moore, president of Urban Strategies. Since opening, she said, 469 childcare practitioners have received some type of early childhood training at Flance.
Ready Readers, a St. Louis-based nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring preschool-age children from low-income communities to love books, also is working at the center. On a tour of the center, a group of children being read to aloud by a teacher or volunteer is a common sight. “Early literacy and language development is intimately tied to our mission,” Cross said.
The center is developing a partnership with COCA to provide more arts-based education. “I’m a big believer in the arts,” Cross said. “It’s a fun and engaging and hits a variety of cognitive domains – academic, emotional, psychological.”
Also, a Healthy Eating Program was launched in May, funded in part by the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Foundation. It includes gardening and healthy cooking classes for the students and their families. Programs will occur at least once a month through the end of 2016. It will include food grown directly from the center’s own garden, with the help of Urban Harvest, once the food has been harvested (likely this fall).
“Our kids and families begin to understand how you grow food and where food comes from,” Cross said. “It doesn’t just come in plastic wrap.”
So far, everything is developing as planned, according to Moore.
“The first two cohorts of children leaving the center have entered St. Louis Public Schools cognitively and socially on level, meaning they display appropriate levels of social, emotional, physical, cognitive and math skills that, combined, make a child ‘kindergarten-ready,’” she said.
The center is located in an area where more than 51 percent of the households are low- or moderate-income. That is why the center is committed to have 100 of its maximum 154 children from low-income families, particularly those living in public and HUD-assisted housing or subsidized rental housing.
The median household income in the 63106 zip code, where the center is located, was $10,491 according to the 2010 census. The first five years of a child’s life represent the pivotal juncture of how poverty shapes the development of young minds, said Moore.
“Using this facility to lay a foundation at the early stage, we can apply effective early childhood education that can change the trajectory,” she said. “That has to be what this is all about.”
In the meantime, the center is not waiting for NGA West to bring new faces and business to the near North Side, but actively recruiting new families from those who already live or work nearby.
“We’re pushing for more market-rate families,” Cross said. “We’re pursuing families that live downtown and people who work downtown. We hope to be up to 100 students by the end of the year.”
For more information, call 314-881-0881, email flance@flancecenter.org or visit www.flancecenter.org.
