Every experience that parents provide to their children in the earliest years makes a physical difference in their children’s brains.
Realizing that is powerful, said Joy Rouse, director of the early education department with Ferguson-Florissant School District.
With the school district’s Parents as Teachers program, early education can be a lot of fun, she said. And making it fun is what has helped the program grow to now serving 2,500 families.
“This is a program that you really get your bang for the buck – it absolutely works,” she said.
The group has followed the test scores of their children for 10 years now, and the students who have gone through their early education programs perform better academically.
The Ferguson-Florissant School District received the 2009 Losos Prize for Excellence at the national Parents as Teachers Conference, hosted in St. Louis, on Wednesday. The St. Louis-based PAT National Center selects the award winners out of the hundreds of programs worldwide.
Parents as Teachers is an international program that was founded in Missouri, and the state has the highest number of PAT programs in the country. The program, which is offered free to families beginning in pregnancy, is based on four main components: personal visits, usually at home; group meetings and parent-child activities with other families; screenings to check on development, hearing, and vision; and connections to community resources.
Every year, Rouse’s team hosts a fall festival that offers families access to various free community resources, as well as activities that parents can do with their children. About 1,500 people come out, and it’s a way for the group to recruit new families as well.
“It’s not about pushing expensive educational toys, but how to build with cardboard boxes or using bird seed in a container as an educational activity,” Rouse said.
The national conference, held from Nov. 8 to 11, brought in people from across the country to share those ideas. Attendees learned everything from how to get a PAT program off the ground to the inner workings of a child’s brain.
“We are focusing on helping all of our programs nationally and internationally move into a new era of accountability and work with the neediest families,” said Cheryle Dyle-Palmer, chief operation officer of the Parents as Teachers National Center.
Budgets and toddlers
One of the presenters at the conference was Roxanne Brotsky and her team from a PAT program in Hayesville, Kan. Studies show that children learn more effectively at a young age when the lessons come through a significant person in their lives. One day a week, the Kansas group offers half-day courses for toddlers, where their parents or siblings teach them the lessons.
Previously, the group had offered classes twice a week without the family component. However, when funding decreased, the group had to do some innovative thinking on how to cut costs but still be equally effective.
Cutting down the classes but involving the families more was a winning solution.
The Ferguson-Florissant program had to deal with the same kind of budget restraints this year when the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education cut funding to PAT programs by 10 percent, or $30 million. Rouse said the true effects will come in January, but already they have had to offer the program to fewer families and offer fewer opportunities to train PAT educators.
“The district is doing as much as possible to keep the numbers high,” she said. “It’s definitely a challenge.”
The PAT National Center receives money from DESE to train and offer professional development to the school districts. That’s a cost that the school districts will now have to pick up. The cuts will really be felt by the school districts that can’t fit that bill, at first, Dyle-Palmer said. However, she is hopeful that DESE will balance out the loss among school districts that really need the resources.
“The wealthier districts will find ways to cover that, but the less fortunate districts – that’s where you’re going to see the greatest impacts,” she said.
The National Center will continue to advocate for restoration of that budget cut with DESE officials, she said.
Family involvement
The concept for Parents as Teachers was developed in the 1970s when Missouri educators noted that children were beginning kindergarten with varying levels of learning readiness. Research showed that family involvement in children’s learning is a vital piece to the child’s development of academic skills.
“There are so many ways to see how important the role of a parent is,” Rouse said.
Child obesity is one example. If children learn that they can be comforted by their parent and not just by sticking bottle in their mouth, then eating won’t be the first line of comfort in their lives, Rouse said. Instead, the children will reach out for human connection in times of need.
PAT recognizes the importance of offering parents support right off the bat.
At the conference, Diana Sanford, of the Women’s Healthcare Partnership in St. Louis, gave a presentation about postpartum depression and how it affects up to 15 percent of mothers. Most women don’t realize that when they are pregnant, their protective hormones increase “almost 1000 times,” Sanford said.
Yet within 24 hours after the woman delivers the placenta, her hormones plummet below pre-pregnancy levels. That factor, combined with sleep deprivation, inadequate support and other factors, can push women into depression.
That’s why it’s important to have programs such as PAT to bring parents out of isolation. Yet the focus should not only be on the mothers.
Rebecca Graham, director of health education programming with the National Fatherhood Initiative, said that organizations should be careful how they address the fathers. The group has an online “Father Friendly Checkup” for organizations and businesses to evaluate how encouraging their message comes across to fathers. The website is www.fatherhood.org.
With funding from DESE and The Danforth Foundation, Parents as Teachers began in 1981 in Missouri as a pilot project for first-time parents of newborns. By 1985, the program was in every school district in Missouri. And since then, it has expanded to all 50 states and to other countries.
“Missouri started this program and it’s been a gift to many throughout the nation,” Rouse said. “If children have a better start, they will have more successful lives.”