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Starting Smart

"It’s a real struggle sometimes," a woman caring for her three young granddaughters told a meeting of Windsor’s Early Childhood Council (ECC). As an older caregiver, she spoke about the challenges she faces in locating resources, getting support, helping her family with homework -- and her fatigue at the end of a long day of both paid work and family caretaking. "Stories like that remind me of why I accepted the invitation to join the Council," says an ECC parent member. While her own children are now past the "early" years, she notes that she wanted to get involved in setting the direction for early childhood care in town. "We have to remember," she says, "that if parents are feeling overwhelmed they are less likely to be responsive to what their kids need."

Since April of 2001, Windsor has committed to providing an optimum beginning for its youngest residents through its Start Smart program. Described by a town official as "a program to ensure that children are ready to learn when they enter school -- based on a ‘parents as teachers’ model," Start Smart is free and available to any family with a child, newborn through kindergarten age. Through this home visit program, a trained parent volunteer comes every four to six weeks, supplying materials, coaching the family on parenting skills and providing friendly intervention if problems are detected.

Start Smart in turn is run under the auspices of Windsor’s Healthy People Initiative, begun in late 1999 as an umbrella organization for town programs that focus on "the physical, intellectual, social and emotional well-being of all people in Windsor." Another official notes: "We wanted to create a structure to help us prevent problems, not just react. When we heard about the invitation from Graustein to join Discovery, it was a natural fit for Healthy People and its strategy team(s) to be the lead organization."

Healthy People collected data -- through forums, focus groups and surveys -- on the quantity, quality and availability of early childhood care and education. During this process, the idea for an Early Childhood Council emerged. A school administrator says: "There’s a gap for parental involvement in early childhood issues. If you have children in the school system, there are channels for input. But there’s no board of education for preschool. The ECC is a vehicle for parents of young children to have input on what’s happening in town."

In important ways, a lot is happening for young children in Windsor, with a wide array of services and programs. But as a result of Healthy People’s information gathering, this ethnically and culturally diverse community of 28,000 located just north of Hartford also uncovered concerns about the well-being of its young children, many of which focused on child care. "Child care is not the only issue that matters when we think about the social, emotional and physical health of young children," says a town official. "But it is central."

Many of these concerns are common to communities across the state. Windsor has a number of child care providers -- public and private, formal and informal. But care is hard to find for parents with unconventional work schedules, and is often not readily obtainable for infants and for children with behavioral issues. Cost is always a factor; care that is not affordable is not really available. "And we hear from providers," says a Windsor teacher, "that they would like professional development, which is hard to come by, especially for those who are home-based."

In addition, Windsor, like every community, faces its own unique challenges. The head of a town agency points out: "Something you might not think of is how the size and shape of the town create barriers. Windsor is elongated north-south with a huge area to the northwest adjacent to the airport and the other part near the Hartford town line. Child care is not distributed across the town in a way that makes it accessible to all families." A school official adds: "There’s also an issue with transportation, since our child care centers are not located on bus routes."

Through its Discovery process, Windsor is creating a structure to build on its strengths and to identify and address problems. "Ultimately," says one parent, "we want the ECC to provide a vehicle through which we can move into the future once the Discovery work is done."

What is really exciting, adds a board of education employee, is the community input. "When I talk to other towns about Healthy People, the Early Childhood Council, Start Smart and the Graustein Discovery process, I’m aware of the degree to which Windsor has made early childhood health a town issue, and of how conscious we are of creating an environment that is attractive to families with young children."

"Even the young kids themselves are helping to keep us on track," another ECC member says. "Most of the Council members have kids of their own and we’ve been using the teens from one of our youth groups to entertain and feed the little ones during meetings. The kids have so much fun with their teenage babysitters that they’re always asking their parents, ‘When are we going to a meeting?’!"