Strong Start for Children

When I was teaching, I taught a brilliant student named Aiya. I had lots of brilliant students, but Aiya was one of those incredibly rare nine-year-olds who reads at least a novel a day and remembers everything you tell her. Every afternoon she would take a book home and read it aloud to her 4-year-old sister Amani. Amani was in Ms. McClure’s Prekindergarten class (which was just down the hall) and she loved to stop by our classroom to tell us what the letter of the day was, or sing us whatever number song she had learned that morning.

Then one day Aiya and Amani stopped coming to school. I called home – no answer. Eventually I found out that they had been in danger. Without going into too many details, their mother needed to urgently withdraw the girls from school and take them out of state. About 2 months later they were back!  When I saw those two little smiling ladies get off of bus 77 I thought my heart would burst with happiness.

But there was a problem – a big problem. Read more »

Today is the Early Learning Day of Action! In April the President Obama proposed his early care and education initiative which would greatly increase access to high-quality pre-K for four-year-olds with a new investment of $75 billion to support state-federal partnerships, expand the availability of high-quality options for infants and toddlers through partnerships between Early Head Start and child care, and expand voluntary home visiting programs with a new investment of $15 billion.

After the jump, you’ll find links to blog posts from NWLC staff members and from our participants. Keep checking back here for the latest posts!

p.s. Are you on Twitter? Join us at 2:00 pm ET for a tweetchat on early learning. Our official chat hashtag is #PreKForAll, and we’ll be joined by U.S. Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, and other special guests!

Have a blog you’d like to submit to the blog carnival? Leave a link in the comments section on this post or email it to djackson@nwlc.org. Read more »

The White House is a busy place – there is always a steady stream of people flowing in and out, meeting with officials to make a case for their cause. Yesterday, Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, had a meeting about the PreK for All plan with some very important advocates ages 5 months to 5-years-old.

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Member organizations of the Strong Start for Children campaign collected over 30,000 notes and pieces of artwork thanking President Obama for his deep commitment to early learning, which the children delivered to Ms. Muñoz.