N.M. county builds blueprint to better pre-K
Coalition in Doña Ana County explores ways to boost early childhood education
LAS CRUCES — Charlie Garcia, a bubbly 4-year-old girl who attends the Alpha School in Las Cruces, is an exception in her afternoon class of the state-funded New Mexico PreK. The program is dedicated almost exclusively to children who are attending preschool for the first time. But Charlie has been to preschool before.
She is in the program for more than child care — her mother wanted to expose her to the benefits of early education. The tuition-free state program at Alpha School was an attractive option for Nayomi Valdez, who had just returned to Las Cruces with Charlie from the Albuquerque area following a recent divorce. And they’re just the type of family the school is trying to reach.
Alpha School is participating in a larger effort in Doña Ana County to give more low-income kids access to the purposeful play and learning that could affect the rest of their school careers.
“The science has caught up to where we are today,” school Director Ray Jaramillo said. “We understand how important early childhood is to brain development and relationships. Now we’re seeing the results of early childhood education.”
With research showing that 80 percent of brain development happens in the first three years of a child’s life and state data showing that early childhood education can eliminate an achievement gap for low-income children, Doña Ana County wants to ensure every child has an opportunity to get a strong start. It has stopped waiting for New Mexico lawmakers to ramp up programs. Through a coalition of early childhood educators, nonprofits and community members, and a partnership with New Mexico State University, the county is creating its own model of expanded access to early childhood education that has the potential to work throughout the state.
“What we’re trying to do is solve the problem in Doña Ana County, but I do believe that by doing this work, we’re going to affect how New Mexico looks at the situation,” said Frank Lopez, executive director of Ngage New Mexico, the early childhood coalition.
Test case for New Mexico?
In many ways, Doña Ana County is a good laboratory for exploring ways to increase access to prekindergarten and other early child programs: Its demographics are similar to those in much of the state. Half its population is in Las
Cruces, the second-largest city in New Mexico, and the other half resides in rural communities that struggle to offer high-quality child programs.
The county also has access to a research university.
Over the past three years, Ngage has brought together more than 60 people and 15 organizations to identify the stumbling blocks to pre-K access.
It created a research center at NMSU, the Center for Community Analysis, to put hard data behind the effort, and to identify where services are lacking. The coalition also has hired an early childhood education coordinator and a communications specialist to raise awareness of the advantages of early learning among both parents and policymakers.
It’s starting by examining the reasons why many children aren’t in high-quality programs — such as the inexperience that comes from teen parenthood, long working hours, cultural barriers and immigration status.
“All families love and care for their kids,” said Erica Surova, the research center’s program manager. “But maybe they don’t know what they could be doing to help them along the way so that we don’t see this huge disparity.”
Most importantly, the coalition is in the final stages of a countywide plan to take to state legislators during the upcoming session. The group has narrowed the focus to two areas it believes will make the biggest difference locally and across New Mexico: capacity and workforce.
Beyond capacity
If all children under 5 in Doña Ana County — over 15,000 of them — needed to be in some kind of licensed care, either home- or center-based, there would be room for fewer than half of them, according to the Center for Community Analysis.
Surova and her research team pulled together census data, as well as child care provider information from the state Children, Youth and Families Department, and determined how many funded slots exist in the county for home visiting, Early Head Start, Head Start, New Mexico PreK and public preschool for atrisk or developmentally delayed children — all considered evidence-based programs that can help with brain development and social-emotional skills.
The analysis found that nearly half of the county’s children under 5 live in poverty, putting them at a disadvantage when they enroll in kindergarten, and nearly two-thirds of all the children under 5 were not enrolled in free or subsidized evidencebased programs.
The limited access could be linked to the high cost of child care and a difficulty in recruiting and retaining trained child care workers, especially in rural areas.
According to a December 2016 report from the Children, Youth and Families Department, child care centers reported that one-third of their staff turns over every year. The same report said the median hourly wage for child care workers in the state was $9.10, a 4 percent drop in wages since 2010.
“You can’t expect people to stay in a profession if they barely can survive,” Surova said.
Many parents in Doña Ana County spend $1 of every $5 they earn on child care. For a single mother like Valdez, it’s an even higher ratio: $1 of every $3, according to data collected by the Center for Community Analysis.
The state helps many of those parents, spending $100 million per year on child care subsidies for families making up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level.
But the bulk of that money is going toward lower-rated child care centers or registered providers, which haven’t proven to affect a child’s kindergarten readiness or reading and math proficiency. Doña Ana is among the counties that rely heavily on registered child care providers, which aren’t licensed by the state child welfare agency.
Most of the county’s highestquality centers are in Las Cruces. Parents in border communities would have to drive up to 20 miles to find equal care.
“I think two or three miles is kind of a deal breaker for families with limited transportation,” said Michael Radke of Ngage.
The partnership is recommending incentives for licensed providers to increase workers’ education levels and pay, an expansion of the number of child care subsidies available for families and eligibility for families that earn up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level.
Return on investment
On a morning at Alpha School, the children were enjoying the school’s playground, where mature trees shaded them from the New Mexico sun.
It was almost time to go in for lunch, and the teachers began to round up the children.
Assistant teacher Brittany Polanco greeted them by name as they walked into the classroom. One boy said he was going to tell her jokes and sing a song. She listened to his performance with a smile.
NMSU’s Surova said these types of interactions with caregivers, whether teachers or parents, show children how to deal with their emotions and with other people. “It’s basically the building blocks for their future success.”
The educational and socialemotional benefits of highquality preschool programs have been shown to have lifelong effects, including higher graduation rates, higher incomes, fewer teen pregnancies and fewer incarcerations, according to pioneering research from the Perry Preschool Project, which followed low-income children in Michigan for decades.
Data from the state Legislative Finance Committee show that children who get exposure to Head Start and New Mexico PreK are more prepared for kindergarten than their peers who have not been to preschool. Optimism is even greater for PreK combined with K-3 Plus, another state program that adds 25 days to the school year for low-income students in kindergarten through third grade.
Tim Hand, who recently left his position as deputy director of the Legislative Education Study Committee, said these results give him and other educators confidence that expanding early childhood education can have results in New Mexico.
“I’ve been doing this for 20 years in this state, and rarely do I see something that is within range that’s having that big an impact,” he said. “It blew me away.”
Data Committeefrom the show state that Legislativechildren who Financeget exposure to Head Start and New Mexico Pre K are more prepared for kindergarten than their peers who have not been to preschool.