CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Illinois officials need to re-examine enrollment and funding policies for the state's public early childhood education programs to eliminate barriers that may keep the neediest of children from attending.
This is one of the recommendations in a recent report that examined strategies for recruiting "hard to reach" families used by six of the state's preschool/day care providers during a 16-month pilot study. Three Head Start, Preschool for All or child care providers in Chicago participated in the study along with providers in Elgin, Harrisburg and Olympia Fields. Each of the programs received about $60,000 in funding from the Bureau of Child Care in the Illinois Department of Human Services to develop their projects.
Although each agency made its own determination of families that they considered "hard to reach," common characteristics included single-parent households affected by poverty, homelessness, substance abuse and lack of transportation.
During the course of the study, which concluded in May, most of the programs found that they needed a designated staff member or parent from the community to coordinate recruitment, help families enroll and collaborate with community agencies to ensure that children obtained health exams and met other requirements.
"The really successful programs went to the families and helped facilitate the whole process," said Dawn Thomas, project coordinator for the Illinois Early Childhood Asset Map, a unit at the University of Illinois that provides data on early childhood education services in Illinois. "The assumption is that the families will come to the programs, complete the paperwork and the health and dental screenings on their own. But the really hard-to-reach families won't, for any number of reasons."
Thomas and Susan Fowler, a professor in the College of Education, worked with the six agencies throughout the pilot program and evaluated the efficacy of each of their projects in a report that was recently submitted to the Governor's Office of Early Childhood Development.
Three agencies recruited and trained parents whose children had attended the agencies' programs to serve as ambassadors in their communities, talking with families in their homes and at community events to establish trust and promote awareness of the benefits of high-quality early childhood education.
As a result of the parent ambassadors' success at recruitment, Centers for New Horizons, an agency in Chicago, was able to reopen a Head Start classroom at a city college that had been closed because of under-enrollment.
Casa Central, another Chicago program, used its funding to create two informational/recruitment videos: a Spanish-language video with English subtitles focused on parents, and an English-language video focused on business leaders. After showing the English-language video at an annual fundraiser, the agency raised $16,000 to be used for "scholarships" for families that temporarily lost their child care subsidies and needed help paying for their children's care.
Three agencies used pilot funds to create interim services, such as hourlong child socialization and literacy programs. Elgin U-46 School District developed a drop-in program called "Preschool Here," which provided an hour of preschool activities weekly at housing developments, parks and other public locations. Families with young children who happened to pass by when preschool was in session were invited to participate.
The drop-in preschool became so popular that the school district expanded it from five to 12 locations and served 164 children, 57 of whom were enrolled in the district's Preschool for All program as slots became available. The remaining children were scheduled to begin attending the district's regular program this fall.
Interim programs were found to be critical to getting children into early childhood education programs later on if they could not be enrolled immediately. Interim services also enabled agencies to bridge gaps between recruitment and enrollment and to maintain contact with the families.
The success of the interim programs at engaging hard-to-reach families suggests a need to re-examine current policies and permit Head Start and Preschool for All providers to use funds for programming for eligible families that are on enrollment waitlists.
During the pilot program, each agency was required to use a data system to track and stay connected with families whose young children were not being served. Many agencies also had staff members maintain regular contact, such as weekly phone calls, with families of unserved children until they were enrolled or other services could be provided.
According to the report, age and birthday policies, such as requiring children to reach their third birthdays by Sept. 1 in order to enter preschool programs, pose barriers to families. Greater flexibility in the enrollment policies, including allowing agencies to transition children between programs, would enable children to engage with programs when they were developmentally ready and space was available rather than when children met "arbitrary" milestones.
The report also recommended making Preschool for All policies more flexible to allow programs to set aside funds for recruiting children from families with multiple risk factors.
"Right now there is real pressure on the programs to completely fill their slots by the first day of school, without having any flexibility for very needy families that are identified within a month or two of the start of school," Fowler said. "Certainly, it's most efficient financially to serve everyone from the beginning of school, but we have found in early childhood special education that districts have been able to manage enrolling children who turn 3 years old throughout the school year and become eligible. It's expensive, but it can be done."
Transportation is an intractable problem for some families, as is the need for wraparound child care when children attend programs that are half a day or less.
"To be truly effective at serving the hardest-to-reach families, the programs need to expand from half-day to full-day services or transport the children both ways for half-day programs," Fowler said. "There's been an assumption that families would work out the rest of the care needed outside the half-day Preschool for All program. But families that are struggling the most need support doing that and transportation is a critical support."
Among other recommendations, the report suggested mandating that agencies work collaboratively with each other and other stakeholders such as the business community and housing authorities to help families find child care and other needed services.
"These are some pretty strong recommendations," Fowler said. "If the state has the money, it would be helpful to put out a competitive bid for another 12 programs to use the more successful strategies from this pilot program and see how well they work in other locations."
Graduate students Catherine Corr and Lumi Hartle also participated in the project and were co-authors of the full report along with staff members Kevin Dolan and Jill Tompkins.