"KinderCare teacher Miranda Siers shows a table of attentive 3-year-olds flash cards with one letter written on each. The children see the card and blurt out the first word they think of that starts with “M”… “J” … “T” …

This private, for-profit preschool has nearly 1,000 centers nationwide and offers care to children as young as six weeks and as old as 5 years.

Private and public preschools are growing as more research has developed that reinforces the importance of early childhood development to later academic success. Parents who can afford private preschools have acted on these findings, enrolling their children earlier and at an increasing rate. But some worry this may contribute to the gap in achievement that exists in public schools.

Paige Pullen, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and director of its early childhood and developmental risk program, said a family’s socioeconomic status cannot be changed, but public schools can offer preschool programs so that children can overcome any initial disadvantages.

“If we don’t do something to change the trajectory [of disadvantaged children], the gap between the haves and the have nots gets wider,” Pullen said.

Some public programs are in place, but the majority of these schools serve only 4-year-olds. Private preschools care for children sometimes younger than 1. Seventy-eight percent of 3- and 4-year-olds from families with incomes greater than $100,000 attend preschool, according to a 2004 study conducted by the National Institute for Early Education Research. For families with incomes less than $50,000, that figure stands at less than 50 percent.

Public programs’ value

The Virginia Preschool Initiative, established in 1995, gives state funds to schools and community groups to provide programs for low-income 4-year-olds who are not served by the federal preschool initiative, Head Start. The state devoted $10.3 million to VPI at its inception; in fiscal 2006, it received $46.6 million.

Nancy Gercke, director of the preschool program for Charlottesville schools, said programs funded by VPI attempt to bring low-income children up to speed in their academic development.

“Some children may not have parents that are well educated, or don’t have the resources, or the time for home schooling, and that puts them behind in their readiness for kindergarten,” she said.

Gercke added that it is difficult for some children from low-income families to gain the skills in the city’s program for 4-year-olds that children enrolled in private preschools spend as many as four years developing.

Pullen said schools can narrow the achievement gap by exposing children to child care before kindergarten.

In offering them chances to improve their language skills at a preschool, schools can compensate for parents’ level of education and lack of language development within the home, two factors that widen the gap, she said.

A growing focus

Albemarlefamily.com’s 2007 directory lists 63 area preschools - both public and private, independent and church-related.

Among those are KinderCare and Bright Beginnings, an independent private school that has three local locations.

Kathe Petchel, owner of all three, said the Bright Beginnings program mixes free play that encourages creativity with a focused curriculum that stresses skill building.

“Because of the political climate and parent expectations, we’ve had to evolve,” said Petchel, who started with one building 25 years ago and has since expanded to three. “Kids are expected to know more at an earlier age than they did 25 years ago.”

The emphasis on standards that accompanied the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act has increased the focus on student achievement in an effort to ensure all socioeconomic groups are taught effectively.

In 2004, 15 states increased funding for preschool from 2003 by a combined total of $200 million, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. Twenty-six states increased funding in 2005, raising their preschool investments from the previous year by more than $600 million.

Virginia’s preschool program is for “at-risk” students, and the state defers to each school division as to how it defines “at risk.”

According to Gercke, 82 percent of the children enrolled in the city preschool program qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a factor often used by government to gauge low-income families. In Albemarle County’s program, 85 percent of the children enrolled qualify, said Charity Haines, director of its preschool program.

The role of standards

The Virginia Preschool Initiative also includes “foundation blocks” that outline concepts in literacy, mathematics, science, history and social studies on which teachers should focus.

“While the foundation blocks are tied to the [Standards of Learning], it’s still preschool,” said Charles Pyle, director of communications for the state’s department of education, addressing how these specific goals are balanced with the role of creativity in early childhood development. State preschools do not have rows of desks and a firm schedule like later grades, Pyle said.

“The SOL tells the content to be taught,” said Mark Allan, director of elementary instruction for the state education department. “Teachers can be creative in how they get kids actively involved in instruction. The foundation blocks have a lot of room for innovation and creativity.”

Kids develop earlier

Preschool managers and kindergarten teachers have seen the effect of an increased emphasis on preschool.

Lauren Moore, the director of Bright Beginnings’ Crozet location, said her preschool has seen a rise in the enrollment of 2-year-olds over the last few years.

In speaking with county kindergarten teachers at Crozet and Brownsville elementary schools, Petchel said some have had to adjust what they teach because their students are entering with increasingly higher literacy abilities.

Tammi Williams, a kindergarten teacher at Crozet Elementary, started dividing students into literacy groups three years ago so that students at varying reading levels could progress at a speed comfortable for them.

“When I started 14 years ago, kindergarten was what preschool is today,” Williams said.

Gercke said parents caught up in the acceleration of their children’s development that starts with kindergarten literacy and ends with college admissions may be stressing the wrong tenets in education.

“If you read the general literature out there and want your child to go to an Ivy League school, you would think it starts from birth.”

While some families enroll their children in private preschools that develop children at an earlier age than public schools do, other families cannot afford the tuitions of these private programs.

Williams, also the mother of a 3-year-old, said she is currently mulling over her preschool options and finds herself stuck in the middle.

Her family does not qualify for state or nationally subsidized preschools for students from low-income families, but she also finds the private preschools expensive.

One student in Williams’ class this year did not go to preschool, and she said it has been a challenge to accelerate his literacy skills to match the skills of students who did attend a pre-kindergarten program." (Matt Deegan, The Daily Progress, November 26, 2006)