Birth to Five Initiaitive Planning & Projects
Boston's Birth to Five School Readiness Initiative is a comprehensive and inclusive strategic planning process taking place throughout 2007. Led by Mayor Thomas M. Menino and United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley, the Initiative will determine how to prevent the achievement gap and level the playing field for the next generation of students by promoting school readiness and ensuring the healthy development of the city's youngest residents, their families and their communities.
Supporting young children and families has long been a focus of many committed individuals and organizations throughout Boston. The Initiative builds on these years of work in Boston to strengthen early care and education, improve the health of Boston's children and families, improve the quality of and family engagement in the public schools which young children enter, and much more. The Mayor's three-pronged approach to this issue includes:
- cataloging and mapping demographic data (about children, families and neighborhoods) and information about existing services for families to understand Boston’s assets and challenges;
- expanding successful programming now to meet current needs (with a particular focus on expanding early learning opportunities for children and promoting parents’ role as their child’s first teacher); and,
- developing a concrete, sustainable, measurable long-term agenda to guide Boston’s efforts to ensure school readiness and overall healthy development for future generations of students.
Boston's Birth to Five School Readiness Initiative includes long-term planning as well as projects designed to assess children's school readiness, communicate child development information to parents and professionals, and engage the community in this important issue. Read on for more information about each part of the Initiative.
To see a map of how the current planning and projects and pre-planning work of the Initiative fit together, click here.
Click below for more information about the following parts of the Initiative:
Mayor's School Readiness Action Planning Team
The Mayor's School Readiness Action Planning Team, also known as "the APT," was convened in March 2007 by Mayor Menino to develop a 10-year vision and a minimum 5-year plan to prevent the achievement gap, promote school readiness, and ensure the healthy development of Boston's youngest children. The 60-member group brings together individuals from all over Boston representing the many partners needed to truly impact the lives of our city's children and families, including health and mental health practitioners, early care and education providers and foundation and private sector leaders. The APT will present their plan to Mayor Menino by January 2008. The APT is facilitated by DCA, a consulting firm located in Boston with national experience developing community-wide school readiness plans.
Since first convening in March, the APT has outlined a draft vision, guiding principles and four goal areas. This work has led to the creation of four work groups focusing on families, early care and education, health care and other systems, and city/community sustainability (one work group for each goal area). Work groups, which include a mix of APT, Parents APT and DART members as well as other community leaders, will develop strategies and measures of success for their specific focus area and will prioritize long-term steps to create real change for our city's young children, families and communities.
To view a full list of APT members by sector, click here.
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Parents Action Planning Team
The Parents Action Planning Team, also known as "the Parents APT," brings together a uniquely diverse group of caregivers with young children (parents, grandparents, foster parents and guardians) from Boston's many neighborhoods to ensure that parents' perspectives are incorporated in the APT's planning process and that all major ideas are first vetted with families before moving forward. Understanding the important role that parents play in a child's early years, parent's input and ideas are a highly valued and integral part of the APT's work. DCA also facilitates the Parents APT.
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Data and Research Team
The Data and Research Team, co-led by the Mayor's Office and Boston EQUIP (a project of Associated Early Care and Education), ensures that this planning process is driven by data and research and responds to information requests from the APT and other projects within the Initiative. The group includes researchers and practitioners with expertise in early childhood, education, health, and a variety of other areas.
To visit the DART's website, click here.
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School Readiness Definition
Community Partnerships for Children, with support from Boston EQUIP and the Boston Child Care Alliance, is building consensus across the early care and education community in Boston on the definition of school readiness (including the cognitive, social-emotional and physical assets that facilitate school success). With a common definition of school readiness, families and providers across all early care and education settings will know and understand where children should be in their learning and development at school entry and will teach and encourage readiness skills and concepts long before kindergarten enrollment.
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Early Care and Education Assessment
With a common definition of school readiness, Community Partnerships for Children, with support from Boston EQUIP and the Boston Child Care Alliance, will be aligning the most-commonly used assessments in early care and education settings with the indicators set forth by the school readiness definition. Assessments in early care and education settings will help catch child development concerns earlier and will engage parents earlier in understanding and promoting their child's development and growth.
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Kindergarten Assessment
The Boston Public Schools (BPS) will begin implementing the Work Sampling assessment in all K2 classrooms in the 2008-2009 school year. The assessment will provide teachers with valuable information about individual children to guide their teaching and will offer a way to track our progress as a city in promoting school readiness. Additionally, BPS, in collaboration with Community Partnerships for Children, is developing a method to ensure that information about a child transitions with that child from one setting to another, bridging the gap between early care and education settings and kindergarten.
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Milestones Project and Parents as a Child's First Teacher Campaign
Building on existing national work, Countdown to Kindergarten is determining the best indicators of school readiness at six-month intervals between the ages of birth and five and the most effective ways of sharing that developmental information with parents (as well as health care and early care and education providers). These "milestones" will be communicated to parents and other early childhood professionals through one or more new school readiness products.
Building on the APT's plan and the Milestones Project, Countdown to Kindergarten will develop a "Parents are a Child's First Teacher" Campaign to highlight parents' important role as an educator in their child's early years and share what parents can do at each stage of their young child's development to maximize learning and healthy development.
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Talk Campaign
ReadBoston is developing a Talk Campaign to encourage frequent verbal communication between adults and very young children. Research has shown that low-income children hear about 30 million fewer words than their middle-income peers by age three. At school entry, this "vocabulary gap" translates into greater difficulty learning to read as low-income children learn to read and write words that they have not heard. The Talk Campaign, to be launched in Fall 2007, will include information and strategies that parents and caregivers, even those with low literacy skills, can use to increase the quantity and quality of everyday communication with their children. The Campaign will be city-wide and will also include more focused work in select low-income neighborhoods.
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Community Engagement, Focus Groups and Communication
To ensure that all of the Initiative's planning and projects are informed by input from key stakeholder communities and Boston families, community meetings and focus groups are being held throughout the planning process to gather information from specific populations and bring questions to larger audiences. This work builds on outreach conducted before the official launch of the Initiative, including three community meetings which drew 225 participants. Focus groups with non-native English speakers, low income parents, and parents facing challenging circumstances (from domestic violence to substance abuse) are being conducted by DCA to bring a variety of perspectives to the APT and other projects within the Initiative. Community meetings are being planned by the Boston Child Care Alliance to bring information and pose questions to key stakeholder groups.
The Initiative's overall communications strategy, media relations, website, and newsletter are being developed and managed by Argus and Schneider Associates, two Boston-based communications firms. Once the APT's plan is complete, a new website, much more detailed and interactive than this current basic site, will be launched detailing Boston's strategies and plan to prevent the achievement gap.
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Evaluation
Goodman Research Group, Inc. is documenting the work of the Initiative and conducting a process evaluation to provide ongoing feedback during the year-long planning process and answer key questions about how effectively this approach achieves the goals and objectives of the Initiative.
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