On Monday, civic partners gathered in the city of Springfield and broke ground on what will be a $14 million Educare Center, a school that will open next year and provide “a full-day and full-year program for up to 141 children from birth to age five each year,” MassLive.com reports.
As we’ve blogged, Springfield’s educators and philanthropists have called this Educare project a “dream come true,” one that promises to provide the city’s children with increased access to a high-quality early education program.
Educare “began in Chicago in 2000,” public radio station WAMC reports. It’s a research-based model that has four core features: “data utilization, embedded professional development, high-quality teaching practices, and intensive family engagement,” according to Educare’s website.
“Among the innovations at Educare,” WAMC adds, “is the placement of teachers with the same children from the time they enroll as infants up to age 3. Parents are required to participate in school activities, home visitations, and regular parent-teacher conferences.”
“Several years of rigorous evaluation shows that when children leave Educare for elementary school, the majority are academically, socially and emotionally prepared for kindergarten.”
There are “23 Educare schools in 15 states,” including California, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin. “Educare Springfield will be the first in Massachusetts.”
Springfield is putting the Educare Center in its Old Hill neighborhood, the home of many children who live in poverty. The neighborhood suffered considerable damage from the 2011 tornado that struck the Springfield area.
At the ground-breaking ceremony, Lieutenant Governor Karyn Polito pointed to the economic significance of the Educare Center, praising Springfield for “rebuilding this neighborhood” and noting that the school will serve children who are born in Springfield and grow up to become part of the city’s workforce, MassLive reports.
Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno added, “Educare is a significant investment here in the city of Springfield and it’s another public and private partnership, with everybody working together for the same goal for our children.”
There are many members of this public/private partnership including: the Davis Foundation, which provided fundraising support and overall leadership for the project; Springfield College, which donated land; and the state of Massachusetts, which provided both a $1 million facilities grant to help finance construction as well as infrastructure funding from the MassWorks program at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development. Among the other partners are the Children’s Development Fund, the Mass Mutual Fund, Capital One Commercial Banking; and a number of anonymous donors. (The full list is on the City of Springfield’s website.)
Educare Springfield will be operated in partnership with Holyoke Chicopee Springfield Head Start. All Educare sites build upon strong partnerships with Head Start, and this one is no different. HCS Head Start Executive director Janis Santos spoke at Monday’s groundbreaking and shared her extensive conversations with other Head Start colleagues nationally who have partnered with Educare.
“They all told me, ‘It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it,’” she said.
The center will also serve as a learning laboratory “for best practices” as well as “an essential resource for Springfield College, Springfield Technical Community College, Springfield Public Schools, and the early education community across the state for training and providing professional development for future teachers, social workers, evaluation and research.”
It’s an ambitious project with a great deal of promise that could transform children’s lives. As Tom Weber, the commissioner of the Department of Early Education and Care, explained to WAMC, “despite the success the state has seen with rising test scores and graduation rates in the last 25 years, it still has one of the largest achievement gaps in the country.”
“We have to take risks,” Weber added. “It is worth taking risks. If the solutions were obvious to us, we would have solved these problems already, so we have to be daring.”
Stay tuned. We hope to share more about Educare Springfield as the project develops. The center is scheduled to open in late 2019.