Wednesday Journal met with Eric Gershenson, a founder of the Collaboration; Kathy Stohr, its grants manager, and Kathy Kern, director of Parenthesis Parent-Child Center, to ask what’s next for this ever-developing group.
WJ: What is the state of quality care and education for young children in Oak Park?
Gershenson: There are about 4,300 children, birth to 5 years old and 400-plus people engaged in early childhood care and education here, which means this is the largest private employment sector in town.
From our point of view, the setting where childcare takes place doesn’t matter. What is essential is that all these venues are aware of and engaged in best practice for kids. Everything needs to be far more systematic, far more comprehensive and far more tied into some existing mechanism for support.
WJ: What is happening in Illinois?
Stohr: Illinois is really one of the better states in the country, and is moving toward a comprehensive, high-quality early childcare system. We have a commitment from Gov. Blagojevich for Universal Preschool, and a growing acceptance that that is what is going to happen in Illinois. There are opportunities for us to plug our programs into Universal Preschool.
There are also opportunities for childcare programs that meet higher-quality standards to receive more money than what they are able to charge parents. So there are a number of ways at the state level that enable childcare programs to help their staff get the necessary credentials, and there are different ways that we can help to support that to really assist local caregivers along wherever they are on that path to becoming a high-quality program.
WJ: To date, what have you done?
Gershenson: We have been able to accomplish a great deal in six years. But we are only beginning to scratch the surface. What we envision for the future is Oak Park becoming a community in which every family from every background is supported so they can fully nurture their young children’s cognitive, emotional and social development. We also want to do what we can so all early childhood providers are engaged in best practice. That is our vision for the future.
WJ: How are you going to accomplish that?
Gershenson: The starting point is to get a handle on the dimension of this issue as we see it, as well as its demography. We have help from the village and the high school to conduct a yearlong needs assessment and planning process. We’re calling it the Human Development Partnership. We are about to embark on that in early May.
We have also hired a well-respected consultant, Dr. Theresa Hawley, who has conducted these kinds of projects in a number of communities in the state, including Aurora, Naperville and Rockford.
We are also looking to take what we are currently doing to scale. What we have been able to do with relatively small amounts of funding and thousands of hours of volunteer resource time need to be made much more comprehensive, systematic and universal in terms of those 4,300 kids.
WJ: What else are you hoping to implement?
Gershenson: Parents as Teachers is a family visitation program that started in Missouri in the early ’70s and is now international in scope. It is a model for delivering service to all families through home visitations, parent group meetings, child development screenings and resource referrals. The Collaboration has always been about all children succeeding, so the Parents as Teachers model is consistent with our outlook.
WJ: What is next for Parents as Teachers in Oak Park?
Kern: We received some grant dollars from the Oak Park and River Forest Community Foundation to send me and four social workers to train on the model. Currently we are credentialed and are beginning to roll it out within our own programs. This is a researched-based national model and we are very pleased to hold this certification.
Deb Quantock McCarey