Chamber Hears Plan for New Child Care

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Category: News

Created on Monday, 16 December 2024 14:22

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By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
    In the sixth and final presentation in a series on child care in the community, Sitka School District educators told the Chamber of Commerce about child care programs, and high school-level coursework on the subject.
    Over the last month and a half, speakers have told the Chamber about the shortage of qualified child care in Sitka, the effects it’s having on the economy and the importance of preschool to prepare children for success after they enter the school system.
    Marley Wild, who heads the district’s after-school program for kids who already are enrolled in the primary grades, told the Chamber that the program, called Ventures, struggles to maintain staffing, and faces other difficulties as well. Even so, she said, the district is looking at starting a child-care program for preschool children.
    “One of the struggles everywhere is workforce – having qualified employees,” said Wild, who was hired for Ventures a month ago, after the position had been vacant six months.
    “The Ventures program has been a long-established program in our community, that is, after-school care for children ages 5 through 12. And currently there’s over 40 kids in the program,” Wild said.
    The Betty Eliason and SJ child care centers are for preschool age children, but Ventures is a program for kids after they are already enrolled in classes.
    Wild said families looking for a spot in the program often have to wait. “My wait list is large, and we have more kids at it every week,” she said.
    She stressed the importance of societal support for child care, which she said is often left behind in decisions about funding.
    “The ultimate goal would be universal preschool for all,” she said.
    The Sitka School Board approved a plan for the school district to inaugurate a preschool child care program, which is likely to start in January, Wild said, starting with one teacher and ten children.
    “I have started calling some of the families who have put in pre-applications (for the planned pre-K program), and four out of the 10 said, ‘I’m waiting to go back to work as soon as I have care for my child,’” she said. “And so there are people that are ready to go back into the workforce, but there is not care for them.”
    Chamber executive director Rachel Roy, who led the discussion, also spoke of the role of child care in allowing parents to work, and cited the 40 families with children in Ventures.
    “When you look at 40 families, that’s potentially 80 employees,” Roy said. “It’s our workforce that’s out there working; because they’re able to have their kids (at Ventures), they can stay at work longer. That’s all super critical.”
    Wild said the pre-K program’s goal is to serve kids who otherwise would not have care outside the home.
    “How can we help our families? How can we serve our children? And so as we’re deciding on selection criteria for students, we’re looking at the first round will be kids going to kindergarten this fall who do not currently have care, who are not enrolled anywhere, and the second round will be any children who are not enrolled anymore. So it’s scooping up the kids that can’t get into any other preschools,” she said.
    The other speaker at Wednesday’s gathering was Margaret Galanin, who has been involved in early childhood education for decades and presently teaches high school classes on the topic. Her Sitka and Pacific high courses are dual enrollment classes taught in conjunction with the University of Alaska Anchorage. Students earn college credit for completion of the class.
    Galanin began working with kids in the school district in 1980, and this semester is teaching an introductory class on early childhood education.
    “We’ve covered that introduction, mostly about child development and going through all the different… ages and stages from infancy to toddlers to preschool,” she said. “Haven’t quite gotten into kindergarten yet, but I think next semester, we’ll do a lot more with that, covering all of the developmental areas, from language to motor to social-emotional and at pre-academic (levels), their cognitive skills, thinking skills,” she said.
    One of the key aspects of the class, she added, is teaching the role of playtime for young children.
    “The biggest one, I think, is we did a semester project on the importance of play, because I think play is not given much credibility, and yet it is how children learn, and we need to be good players with our children in setting up environments that they will learn from,” Galanin said.
    In the spring semester, she’ll teach a class on child development and learning, which will include a practicum in which students spend time at child care centers around town.
    Two of Galanin’s students attended the chamber meeting, and she said they already have a solid grounding in child care and could make capable volunteers at child care centers.
    “At this point without even the second course, they would be wonderful volunteers and ready to learn,” she said. “They would be curious; they would be interested. I think the relationship that they would build with the children would be very positive.”
     Galanin said, “We’ve spent time talking about engaging families, about challenging behaviors. I know as a student in this field, nobody ever talked about those kids with challenging behaviors… They may be difficult to interrupt, but oftentimes they’re developmentally appropriate for the age that they’re at.”
    She cited a North Carolina study that linked the education of young kids to positive outcomes later in life.
    The study “took children from poverty –  real poverty – ... and provided high quality education, preschool education, to a group of children and then tracked their lifespan,” she said. “We’re 40 years down the track, and it was overwhelmingly successful.”
    Statistics showed that “when they looked at those people, they were healthier, they made more money. They were more educated than others, less likely to have... committed a crime... It’s well worth the money that we spend in early childhood. It’s far more costly to do the repairs later in life.”