Remarks to the
Health and Human Services Joint Oversight Committee,
Early Education and Family Support Program Subcommittee
Lawrence D. “Larry” Vellani, MPA
CEO, Smart Start of Forsyth County, Inc.
Winston-Salem, NC
Introduction
Honorable Co-Chairs, Senator Pate and Representative Dobson; our own special, home-town hero, Representative Donny Lambeth; distinguished members of the subcommittee; legislative and executive branch staff; members of the public; and listeners across the state.
Good morning!
I am proud and delighted to bring you warm, life-long-learning greetings from the children, parents, and early educators of Forsyth County North Carolina.
My name is Larry Vellani. I am the chief executive officer of Smart Start of Forsyth County, Inc., with offices in Winston-Salem—the only private company in Forsyth County, charged by state statute, to care about the quality and progress of our county’s early care and education system.
Accompanying me this morning are Doug Punger, JD, retired general counsel for the W-S/F County School Board, my immediate past board chair, one of Governor McCrory’s appointees to the NC Partnership for Children’s board of directors, and Co-Chair of Forsyth County’s NC Pre-K Committee; and Jenny Whitley, MEd, MBA, our director of teaching and learning services, a professional educator with more than thirty years' experience in early learning, and whose responsibilities include the management of the Pre-Kindergarten program in Forsyth County.
Legitimacy
Excluding my experience as a parent, and my wife’s readiness to become a grandparent, my formal work in early education includes 10 years on the board of directors of the Alamance Partnership for Children, Inc., in Burlington, where I served as board chair, and where we were fortunate enough to retain Cindy Watkins as our chief executive officer for several years. Cindy, of course, now serves as the chief executive for the N. C. Partnership for Children, Inc., here in Raleigh.
I also am a founding member of the board of directors of the Holy Comforter Community Play School, a half-day, fully bi-lingual, early learning program sponsored by my house of worship, Holy Comforter Episcopal Church, in Burlington.
Since May 2012, I have been the chief executive at Forsyth County’s Smart Start partnership. I also serve on two of NCPC’s statutory management committees: the Local Partnersbip Advisory Committee (LPAC) and the Audit Committee.
Our Progress in Forsyth County
Since the founding of our state’s Pre-Kindergarten program, my organization has been Forsyth County’s Pre-K contract administrator—almost 15 years-experience supporting thousands of our community’s children, and their parents and educators, in the journey through the fourth year of life, and across the threshold into the K-12 system.
Early care and learning is alive and growing in Forsyth County. I could speak at length about our innovative partnerships with our pediatric community and with our Department of Social Services, which manages the CCDF subsidy funds locally, as well as our strategic linkage with The Forsyth Promise, a unique, cradle-to-career, joint venture of our local chamber of commerce and our united way.
However, our topic today is the Pre-K program, an important component of our local early care and learning system.
Wwe must thank our parents and educators for the current vitality of our pre-kindergarten program, as well as our professional partners in the independent, private child-care sector, our Head Start contractor, Family Services, Inc., and Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools,.
Assignment
I have already submitted a summary of my responses to the three questions you have asked me to address today:
1. What’s working well in our local Pre-K program.
2. What’s not working well in Pre-K, and
3. Recommendations for both
(a) Short, and
(b) Long-term solutions
1. What’s working well: I have three items to share …
I. First: The continuing professional development of our teachers:
- If it’s children’s behavior we want to effect, then, we must focus on the behavior of the adults who spend time with them. In Forsyth County, we enjoy the benefit of the Early Education Division’s (DCDEE) strong commitment to post-baccalaureate, teacher licensure in early ed.
- Upon these minimum standards, we are building a program of advanced in-service mentoring and coaching for our teachers, involving the close cooperation among my staff, and the at Family Services, and the public schools
- To quote from Forsyth early educator Joseph C.: I can’t tell you how happy I am... as a Pre-K teacher … working with my coach … who has uplifted my soul, my teaching methods, and how we do things inside the classroom.”
- A college degree is the start, not the completion of our teachers’ professional growth.
II. Second: The transition of our children into the Pre-K classroom, and from Pre-K into Kindergarten:
- In our Smart Start scholarship subsidy program, available for families with children throughout the first 2000 days of life, we already require each licensed center or child care home that does business with us to have a transition plan that follows a child into the Pre-K program or into Kindergarten, depending upon the child’s specific path.
- An important part of our contract oversight of the local Pre-K program requires that each child has a transition plan moving out of Pre-K into Kindergarten.
- We originally pioneered this transition work with support from the Kellogg Foundation beginning in 2008. We since have secured funding from the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust to strengthen and expand this work.
- We have a fulltime transition coordinator. We have convened a local, multi-disciplinary work group to construct pathways, so that all children currently in child care programs—licensed centers and homes, as well as the unlicensed, half-day programs—will enjoy the benefit of meaningful transition plans into Kindergarten.
- Specific steps include:
§ An on-going community campaign to raise awareness about the importance of smooth transitions for children and families; and
§ Building on preliminary work begun severally at HHS and DPI, we are creating customized toolkits for families, educators, and community members with effective research and evidence-based transition practices, such as
- school zone transition teams,
- structured home visitations, and
- community transition and kindergarten registration fairs.
III. Third: A community vision to meet the needs of each child, and the professional leadership and private philanthropy to support greater access for more children:
- We know that not every parent in Forsyth who wants their child to receive a high quality, four-year old experience is able to afford it—whether through their own means, through the Pre-K program, or through CCDF subsidy funds. Our current public waiting lists stand at
- Pre-K, 647
- Smart Start Scholarship, 190
- CCDF Subsidy, c. 850
- While we wish and would hope that the General Assembly will increase funding for the Pre-K program, we are not expecting increased investments in the near term. Thus, the principal Pre-K partners in Forsyth have formed a local steering committee to work toward expanding the availability and affordability of high quality, four-year old educational settings. We are actively exploring universal pre-k models underway in other communities around the country.
- Progress starts with a vision of what we want and need. No vision, no impact. We have the vision; stay tuned for an update on our impact.
- We also know that, no matter how firm the trust and the commitment to cooperation by local leaders, important public goods require money, in addition to strong, inter-organizational, working relationships. We are quite fortunate to have the ear and confidence of some private funders.
- Is private initiative and investment often necessary to achieve public goals? Yes. Will it ever be sufficient? No.
… so, on that note …
2. What’s not working well in our local Pre-K … again, three items I would like to share …
I. First: There is not yet enough public investment or private incentive to expand high-quality, affordable pre-K opportunities for every child.
- We know that high quality, early childhood settings pay in dividends many times the initial up-front costs. Recent research on programs in our state calculates more than eight dollars ($8.79) for every one dollar spent.
(New evidence for large state and local returns from investments in preschool and child care: Duke University study of North Carolina’s programs, T. J. Bartik, 2011)
- To cite a recent report from the American Enterprise Institute: “The scientific research is clear: learning and brain development are inextricably linked. They both begin in the womb and continue at a rapid pace … (and) critical to learning … early childhood, from conception to kindergarten.”
(Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security: A Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream, 2016)
II. Second: Discrepancy in pay among early educators--whether in the private, independent sector, or in public schools—in comparison with other important, prevention and front-line professionals.
- In our area, the median starting wage for a pre-school teacher is $9.25/hour—a salary of less than $20K/year.
- The gap between pre-k educators in the private sector and those in the public schools is almost $12.3K/year, or $29.7K to $42K/per annum.
- 44% of our pre-school educators are enrolled in at least one form of public assistance, such as TANF, SNAP or Medicaid.
- The late scholar and public citizen, Daniel Patrick Moynihan reputedly said that “everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.”
- The facts are that the best results for early learners begin by securing and retaining the best early educators.
- While we are working within our means in Forsyth, our means do not allow us to keep the best educators engaged with our children.
- Our early educators need and deserve compensation commensurate with their training and the responsibility for our children’s development that we entrust to them.
III. Third: Not enough work underway among the state-level leaders to construct a clear, actionable vision for the use of the available funds.
- No one questions being answerable for the use of public monies. However, we need a common set of guidelines, regulations, and complimentary eligibility criteria for our use at the county level, guidelines that clarify and simplify how we can best arrange and array our diverse investments to serve the greatest number of children in the highest quality settings. There is only so much that innovators at the local level are willing to do without the informed authorization of someone in Raleigh, Atlanta, or the District of Columbia.
- In a recent report from the American Enterprise Institute, “At the state and local levels, integrating … federal funding streams with … state-funded early childhood programs is difficult to impossible ... (in order to achieve) the complicated… task of combining … (the) streams into money that is actually useful to children and working families.”
- To paraphrase a related study, only cooperative funding and programming can lead to the desired outcomes for children, and their families and educators.
(Building a Strong Foundation, Southern Regional Education Board, 2015)
- With wider, common understanding among the public regulators, we can better bring to scale, within our local means, the infrastructure—teachers, facilities, materials, transportation--that will achieve the outcomes we seek and our children deserve.
… and, finally, some specific suggestions …
3.a. Solutions, Short Term:
1) Charge state and federal administrators to construct a workable set of guidelines or minimum regulations for braiding or layering the Head Start, Title I, NC Pre-K (and perhaps some of the CCDF) funds to serve the most children at the highest quality. We have made great strides to align at the local level. We need active commitment to alignment further up the chain of public accountability. This solution would include the training and technology to manage the eligibility and the placement of all the children in our care.
2) Charge state administrators to redouble their efforts to build out a workable set of guidelines and minimum requirements for use by public and private child care providers and Kindergarten classrooms for smoothing children’s transitions from Pre-K to K, and from K into higher levels of elementary education.
3) Amend NCGS § 115C-242, “Use and operation of school buses” in section (1) by changing the term “More at Four” to the “NC Pre-K program.“ If there are other statutory anachronisms about our pre-kindergarten program, let’s find them and update them. A rose by any other name …
(Romeo and Juliet, W. Shakespeare, 1595)
3.b. Solutions, Long Term:
1) Increased investments in early educator pay and early education facilities.
… toward that end …
2) Designing tax-incentives, and other revenue generating policies that will allow for greater public and private investment in early learning.
3) Provide clear, accountable requirements for transitions, and technical assistance and guidance, including (cf. 3.a.(2) above):
· Disseminating materials on best practices
· Developing templates for transition forms and tools
· Improving documentation requirements
In Conclusion
The late Justice AnTONin Scalia wrote in a 2010 opinion that standing up for one’s opinions is a mark of laudable “civil courage.” In the area of early education, I am convinced that Scalia meets Moynihan, and opinions and facts merge into the common, shared reality that we can, must, and will do more to create a more robust, equitable system of early care and learning—not just in Forsyth County, but for the entire State.
Thank you for your leadership in this endeavor.
Thank you for the privilege of sharing a bit from our local experience.
If I or any of my companions can be of further assistance, we stand (and, today, sit) at the ready.
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