Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (shown at a press conference Monday at the Early Childhood Learning Center) brought home $797,000 to restart the public library’s bookmobile and boost local efforts to get pre-kindergarten kids reading.
DeLauro and local officials gathered at the Early Childhood Center on Blake Street to announce the federal grant — and to make some timely points about kids and education.
The grant will enable the public library system to drive around its bookmobile — called the “Readmobile” — again. The money will go toward visiting child-care programs in poor neighborhoods, enabling parents to take out books and bringing story times to kids and teachers.
The grant will also pay for books for parents to read to newborns through Read to Grow‘s “Books for Babies” program; visits by artists to 20 preschool classrooms; field trips for kids in family day care; and more trips to the Connecticut Children’s Museum‘s “Mornings at the Museum” for home-based day cares. In addition, early-childhood teachers will have new chances for education and training.
“We don’t need any more studies” about what government needs to do to get kids ready for school, DeLauro said during spirited remarks to officials gathered at Monday’s press conference, after she sat through a book-reading at a pre-school class. “We’ve got enough studies for a lifetime. If we don’t do anything with these studies, we should be held criminally negligent.”
DeLauro was referring to findings such as: The fact that 90 percent of a child’s brain development occurs by age 5. And a child who has attended at least two years of pre-school is ten times less likely to have to repeat kindergarten. Those statistics resonate in New Haven neighborhoods where public school kids tend to score well below the statewide average on standardized tests.
(For an example of a report that points out how government is letting kids down on reading readiness, click here.)
DeLauro noted that hundreds of communities applied for the grant New Haven received. Only 42 communities won the grants, of which New Haven was the only Connecticut recipient. That demonstrates the impressive work already done by the groups which united to work on the grant, including the United Way of Greater New Haven, the Children’s Museum, the public school system‘s pre-school programs, Casa Otoñal, All Our Kin, the library, Gateway Community College, and ACES.
A political event wouldn’t be complete without a civics lesson, of course. Even for pre-schoolers.
DeLauro noted that the program under which this grant was obtained had a budget of $36 million this year. The Republican-led House of Representatives has cut that number to $6 million for next year. The Republican-led Senate took all the money out of its version of the budget.
“This grant is safe,” DeLauro assured the crowd, since it comes out of this year’s budget. She vowed to fight not only to keep the $6 million figure, but expand it, when the House and Senate reconcile their versions of the budget.
