But so far, he said, the push for universal preschool here has proven to be “a great example of what a municipal government can do when focused on a really ambitious goal.” “Trying to do something this quickly presents a lot of challenges,” Wallack said. Social workers have been assigned to work with schools on family engagement initiatives. Coaches and evaluators have been deployed to every school. To that end, district officials have led training sessions for teachers and principals on things like child development and creating welcoming classrooms. And school leaders, used to concentrating on the “testing grades,” as Beecher put it, have had to be convinced that all this effort around the early years is worth it. Changing that would be necessary to the success of any attempt to expand preschool options and improve quality on a national level.Īt every school site in the city ongoing support has been needed to help both new and veteran teachers to improve their classrooms. The majority of the country’s preschool teachers and child care workers are poorly paid and under-educated. Hiring and supporting a better preschool teaching force has been more complicated. Finally, they gave up on choosing the best blocks and just bought some of nearly every type to spread among the classrooms. 3 in the Bedford Village neighborhood of Brooklyn for 17 years, and her five preschool teachers came to be staring at never-ending lists of play blocks. 3 teachers were advised to add more dress-up options in their dramatic play area, purchase outdoor play equipment like tricycles and grow its block collection. In particular, classrooms are now held to the standards laid out in the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS), a tool designed to evaluate preschool classroom environments. Teachers - many of whom are veterans of the city’s smaller, existing preschool program - have been asked to change their classrooms and step-up their teaching to improve the overall caliber of the program. The changes have come with new money and support to ensure that the city is not only offering preschool to all, but top quality preschool to all. “Therefore, preschool should be universal.” “We believe that preschool is an integral part of the public school system and public school should be universally available because every child can benefit from it,” said Josh Wallack, Deputy Chancellor of New York City’s Department of Education. Between the 2013-14 school year and the 2015-16 school year, the city converted thousands of preschool seats from half-day to full-day and also added thousands of brand new seats for a total new enrollment of 49,360 full-day seats. Such choices have been faced by principals like Beecher across the city in the last two years as New York has moved to accommodate all of the city’s public school 4-year-olds in high quality preschool classrooms. And all of them are advertised as the best possible blocks for outfitting a preschool classroom. There are wooden blocks, cardboard blocks, magnetic blocks, clear plastic blocks, number blocks, letter blocks, and fish-shaped blocks, to name a few. There are, New York City public school principal Kristina Beecher discovered, an awful lot of types of play blocks.
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