School Readiness - Findings and Library Implications

First 5 Alameda County has released their 2010 School Readiness Report.  School district level reports (including Berkeley Unified) are also available.

Findings include:

1. Children who had formal preschool experience are the most ready for school
2. Children who did not have formal preschool experience but participated in short-term First 5 Summer Pre-K programs show readiness skills comparable to those who had formal preschool experience
3. Children who appear healthy and well also perform well in Kindergarten
4. Intensive home-visiting supports for the county’s most vulnerable children boost their readiness for school, and
5. Leveraging opportunities to support parents in receiving information about child’s readiness and to support positive parenting attitudes can have positive effects on children’s readiness.

For libraries concerned with promoting school readiness, these findings indicate two primary focus areas. 

First, we need to be taking every opportunity to support parents and caregivers in being their children's first and best teachers.  There are myriad ways to make this happen - including information on school readiness in existing storytimes and EC (early childhood) programs, inviting community resource people to provide school readiness programming at the library, providing information, spaces and materials (including toys) to parents within a context that supports their understanding of the importance of play to school readiness, etc.  Staff working with children should be fluent in the language of school readiness as well as the language of early literacy, and be able to translate those concepts to a wide range of parents.

Second, we need to be looking to the design of short-term school readiness programs to see what can be brought in to our current programming.  The Family Place Parent/Child Workshop addresses School Readiness issues, to be sure, but there are likely aspects of the First 5 program and other pre-K crash course programs that can and should be adopted by libraries. 

We know that the current economic climate is stretching existing preschool programs to the limit, and that many parents have lost access to this road to school readiness.  For some families, the Library is as close to preschool as they are able to get.  We owe it to those families to provide programming proven to promote the success of children and families.