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Babies and toddlers soon will receive extra support from Dallas ISD under a new initiative aimed at serving the city’s youngest learners.
The school district — one of the state’s leaders in expanding prekindergarten programs — wants to bolster its investment in children before they turn 3.
While still in its early stages, DISD’s new initiative — dubbed Start Strong Dallas! — aims to connect families with important information that can help children be better prepared to enter school.
“From my perspective, there is no wiser investment we could be making than in zero- to 3-year-olds,” trustee Dustin Marshall said at a recent board meeting. “These are our future students.”
About 90% of a child’s brain develops before age 5, and research shows that much of this growth happens before a child ever gets to a formal education setting, said Elena Hill, assistant superintendent of early learning.
So while Dallas has put tremendous effort into expanding pre-K opportunities across the city, many students may arrive with skill or knowledge gaps. Such gaps could be tied to a lack of resources or not having access to a dedicated caregiver who spends time intentionally developing language or social skills.
Plus, many parents don’t know how to help their children develop language from birth, said Jill Allor, a professor in Southern Methodist University’s department of teaching and learning. (SMU supports The Dallas Morning News’ Education Lab.)
“It’s clearly very important to get families information early on to make sure that oral language development is progressing as it should and to give them support,” Allor said, although she admitted there’s not one clear resource for how to provide parents this knowledge.
That’s where Dallas ISD hopes to step in, Hill said.
District officials hope to work with health care providers, such as pediatricians, who regularly interact with new parents to provide information that doctors can pass along to parents on how they can work with children at home or how to enroll their children in school programs.
DISD officials plan to partner with community institutions such as hairdressers or barbers as additional avenues to pass along educational materials.
“Why not give a child a book while they’re getting their hair done?” Hill asked. “Or have an educational activity or a book that a child can take home when a mother is getting her hair done?”
The school district also hopes to develop programs or training specific to parents.
For example, parents might not know the importance of speaking to their children during routine tasks, Hill said. If a family goes to a grocery store, they can describe the items they pick up and introduce new vocabulary into their child’s life.
“We want to bring to the forefront those everyday activities that can strengthen a child’s experience by the time they get to school,” Hill said.
Parents may not always be the main caregiver for a child, said Chelsea Jeffery, the director of PK-12 Strategic Initiatives at the Commit Partnership. That’s why it’s important that the district consider supporting all of the caregivers interacting with children: neighbors, extended family, employees at childcare centers.
(Todd Williams, chairman and CEO of Commit, supports the DMN Education Lab through the Todd A. Williams Family Foundation.
What Dallas ISD is exploring represents the evolution of early childhood education, she added. Education experts long advocated that full-day kindergarten or pre-K would have the power to close academic achievement gaps.
But students living in poverty tend to start school much further behind their peers because they often lack many resources, including opportunities for educational enrichments, research shows.
“We’re not going to be able to close this gap in a year or two of pre-K,” Jeffery said. “We need to start even earlier to be able to help these families with brain building interactions and health care resources and developmental screening.”
When Dallas ISD officials presented the new initiative at a December board briefing, they received nearly universal support from school board members. However, trustee Joyce Foreman bristled at the district looking to serve an age group that doesn’t receive state funding when DISD’s current students need help.
“If we are not taking care of our core competency, why are we interested in another space to start with?” Foreman asked, referencing poor test results.
But her colleagues emphasized that supporting younger students could show academic gains when they are in older grades.
Marshall compared it to major league baseball teams investing in farm teams or children’s leagues to realize improvement down the line.
“For us to think that we should just take a first-grader when they show up or just take a pre-K student when they show up and then be responsible for closing all those learning gaps, when instead we could invest from the time they’re born … the repercussions of that investment will make it all that much easier to educate them when they show up on our doorstep,” he said, adding that forming relationships with families earlier also might boost district enrollment.
The new 0-3 initiative is still in the early stages as DISD officials talk with childcare providers, health care groups and local government officials to hammer out the details.
But for early childhood experts, the district is on the right path.
“The sooner you start, the better the outcomes. There’s no question about it,” Allor said.