I dont what good it will do since the idiot City Council has already voted to spend $58 million on one or the other of these plans. But I feel the need to vent. Why do I object to funding preschool? Well, first of all, the stated goal of these propositions is to address a gap in kindergarten readiness between families of color from poor neighborhoods and white families in wealthy upper middle class families. Problem #1: with both these initiatives: Most of the preschools that are likely to be funded by will be in upper middle class white neighborhoods. Problem #2: There are already plenty of options for funding preschool for families who cant afford it. DSHS and City of Seattle offer subsidies for preschool and there are a number of full day and half-day preschools available that are fully subsidized and available to low income families. Problem #3: Kindergarten Readiness is not rocket science folks. It includes stuff like knowing how to tie your shoes, go to the potty independently, use a pair of scissors, identify colors, count to ten - all the stuff you probably learned at home from your parents. There are a whole lot of upper middle class white families who have read about the importance of Kindergarten Readiness and are terrified their kids arent going to measure up. Thats where the drive for these high priced preschools with teachers who have bachelor degrees in early childhood learning is coming from. And hey, if you have the money and want to have your 3 year old taught by someone with a bachelors degree, thats totally fine. But please DONT ASK EVERYONE ELSE TO PAY FOR IT and thats what both of these initiatives are doing. Problem #4: These dont actually do anything new to help poor families of color - many of whom are single parent families headed by women - help get THEIR kids ready for kindergarten and thats what we really need. Think about this for a minute. If kids are showing up in kindergarten not able to tie their shoes or identify colors, what do you think is going on their homes? A lot of these folks are struggling with just basic survival. WIC - thats Women, Infants & Nutrition is a program supposed to help women with children get nutritious food. Well guess what, its $50 a month. My grocery bill is $400 a month for me and Ella. Maybe instead of spending money on fancy preschools, they could think about giving single moms a significant boost to their basic living expenses, like food. WIC should be $200 per month per kid. And a lot of families are struggling with basic stuff like getting to and from work, and finding childcare that will adapt to their work schedule. If you dont happen to have a 9-5 job, which many single moms do not, you cant put your kid in preschool anyway because the hours of preschools are designed to fit the 9-5 work schedule or in many cases, to fit the schedule of families with one working parent and one stay at home parent. The kind of child care that is available on evenings and weekends thats affordable by a single mom in Seattle is about 95% provided by recent immigrants from Eritrea and Ethiopia. They are almost entirely very traditional Muslim families where the women are wearing burqas or hadith, and many of them dont have good english skills. A lot of them tend to park their kids in front of the TV for a large part of the day as well. So when a kid is getting bounced around from daycare to daycare, sleeping odd hours, eating junk food, watching tv and spending half their waking hours in daycare with people who may or may not speak their language, its not surprising they may show up at kindergarten not knowing all the necessary skills. However these initiatives wont address this problem. As far as I can tell, the main thing theyre going to do is allow upper middle class families whose kids are already in good preschools and would have been ready for kindergarten even without preschool, to get their preschool bill picked up by the general, non-child bearing public. Meanwhile, singe working moms still wont have enough to eat or have time to spend at home with their kids - which lets be honest, is the most likely way their kids would be able to learn what they need to know for kindergarten. And some early childhood education experts and geniuses in City Hall are congratulating themselves for this effort. seattletimes/html/localnews/2023913772_preschoolcouncilxml.html
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 18:37:44 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015