Purdue University’s Westville campus live streams early learning summit to spread information
Mary Jane Eisenhauer said she helped set up a live stream of the 2019 Indiana Early Learning Summit at Purdue University’s Westville campus to bring the information to those living in and around Westville.
“Statewide, we’ve been talking about the importance of early learning as a key driver of economic and community development,” said Eisenhauer, an associate professor at Purdue University’s Westville campus. “We know that there are people in our community that would really like to hear this information — need to hear this information — they just can’t get to Fort Wayne for the day.”
About 20 people from different organizations and backgrounds gathered in a conference room at Purdue University’s Westville campus Thursday to watch a live stream of the 2019 Indiana Early Learning Summit for economic development.
The summit, on its fourth year, was held in Fort Wayne, and featured guest speakers, presentations, documentaries and a panel.
The summit was focused on how Indiana’s businesses and communities are affected by child care issues, and business leaders across the state gathered to understand the business care for investment in early childhood and to discuss ways they could take action in their communities.
“We all need to use our resources and we need to think about how can we support the working family, how can this make a better tomorrow, a better future, not just for our community, but for those children?” said Karyn Tomkinson, during part of the business panel.
Kristin Zakutansky, the chief operating officer at FirstCare Consulting LLC, said she attended the live stream of the summit Thursday to see if her organization could find ways to further integrate with early learning.
Zakutansky said being able to see the summit through the live stream was a good way to help reach communities outside of Fort Wayne.
“Communication and everyone being on the same page is key,” Zakutansky said. “If we are under the same understanding, obviously we can work together to accomplish the outcome we’re trying to achieve.”
Jim Spurlino, the president and owner of Spurlino Materials, was a keynote speaker at the summit, and said he was asked to speak because he’s part of Ready Nation, a group of businessmen who speak on early childhood issues.
“We’re kind of a collection of what they call ‘unexpected messengers,’” Spurlino said. “You might go to an early childhood conference and hear from a lot of teachers or social work organizations. We hope to bring a different voice about the importance of investing early.”
During Spurlino’s speech he talked about how investing early can make a difference in a child’s life, and can even increase the likelihood of high school graduation.
Spurlino said he looked at not only the science behind early learning, but also the money behind it. He noted that it’s important to teach children executive functions early, to increase growth in the brain.
“What we’re talking about are producing children that are happy and healthy and productive, but we’re also hopefully talking about spending less money on things like special education and crime and grade repeating,” Spurlino said in his speech.
Spurlino went on to say that early childhood can be compared to concrete, describing to the audience what the process of making the tallest building he’s been a part of putting together in Indianapolis was like.
“Do you know where the most important concrete is in that building?” Spurlino asked the audience. “You don’t even see it. It’s literally like 80 feet below the street level. It’s the first concrete I poured on the job — the foundation. No matter what we did above that, no matter what happened above that, if that foundation wasn’t right, the building was going fall down. It was going to be a failure. The foundation of a building is just like our early childhood efforts — we have to get it right.”