The three women who work for the Oak Park Collaboration for Early Childhood Development have a long list of reasons students might not succeed in school.
Low income. Very low birth weight. Homeless. Military family. Single-parent family. Teen Parent. Parent with mental illness. Parent with disability or chronic health condition. And more.
But the task of Gail Shelton, Reisha Williams and Elizabeth Budz-Falk is to break the trends that predict those students will do poorly in school.
Parenthesis Family Center, a decades-old Oak Park institution, hired the three women in January using Collaboration for Early Childhood Development grant money. The Village of Oak Park and local school districts have committed $1.3 million to the Collaboration for a three-year “Parents as Teachers” program, in which staffers reach out to families with children at risk of doing poorly in school and help their newborns to 3-year-olds succeed.
The program’s goal, officials have said, is to narrow the persistent gap between high- and low- performing students at every grade level by reaching them as early as possible.
But reaching children who are likely to perform poorly when they get to school isn’t easy, the three staffers said in recent interviews.
“It’s not like you meet a family with risk factors and tomorrow they sign up,” said Shelton, the home visiting program’s director.
Based on Census figures, the Collaboration estimates there are about 5,400 children in Oak Park under age 5, Collaboration Chairwoman Carollina Song has said. Of those, about 800 are likely at risk of falling behind their peers in school, according to Collaboration figures. Approximately 400 of those children are 3 or younger – the home visiting program’s target group.
The program staffers rely on local social service agencies for many referrals, but also seek out at-risk children in other places. They hand out materials at child-care centers, parks and other social centers, they said. From there, they attempt to establish a relationship with parents on the parents’ terms. Then they encourage them to sign up for workshops, support groups and other services Parenthesis provides.
“What we found is that you need to create that relationship, with that trust, up front,” Williams said. “And that looks very different for different families.”
Some parents might respond to texts at first, while others react more positively if she shows up at their door, Williams said.
Williams said she has a background as a counselor, while Budz-Falk’s background is in education. They each use their strengths to reach different people, while Shelton oversees and coordinates, they said.
In the four months since they started work, the women estimate they’ve handed out program information to more than 300 people. Twenty-seven families so far have agreed to participate, Shelton said. Of those, 24 were referrals, she said.
Parenthesis’s contract with the Collaboration for Early Childhood Development calls for the Parents as Teachers program to actively engage 25 to 30 children by June 30. The contract calls for the organization to engage 75 to 90 children by June 2015 and 100 to 120 children by June 2016.
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