CCSD#2 receives grant for early childhood education

Successfully preparing your child for school is like taking on any other project: it requires the right tools. A newly-acquired grant may soon provide local parents with those tools.

The Carbon County School District No. 2 (CCSD#2) Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) received a $37,270 grant from the Wyoming Department of Homeland Services. The grant, called the Early Childhood Community Partnership Grant, will establish workshops for parents to ensure their preschool students and young children are prepared for school.

BOCES coordinator and grant writer, Melissa Donough, said the program will go into effect in June 2015 and will continue until the following year.

The grant proposal, called the Four C’s of early education, included criteria for students, community, communication and collaboration.

According to Donough, several early-childhood educators in the district claimed their students, as a whole, were not up to standards when entering the lower level grades. Additionally, Donough said kindergarten students in the district traditionally have not been proficient on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) assessment, which is a test used to gauge the literacy levels of early-childhood.

“(Kindergarteners) were scoring in the ‘likely to need intensive support in reading and literacy’,” Donough said. “And we decided we needed some kind of program in place in address that.”

Early childhood educators from Hanna, Encampment and Saratoga are going to establish a district-wide readiness development criteria. Once that criteria is established, BOCES will format workshops to help parents get their children to reach those standards.

“It’s one thing to tell people ‘Ok this is the criteria your child needs to know before they get to kindergarten,’ but it’s quite another to create a workshop on how to do those things,” Donough said.

The grant is based on nine domains located in the Wyoming Early Learning Foundations. These domains include creative arts, language development, literacy knowledge and skills, logic and reasoning, mathematics knowledge and skills, physical development and health, science knowledge and skills, social and emotional development and social studies knowledge and skills. These domains will be included in the workshops as well.

Though the grant extends for two years, Donough hopes they will continue programs such as this in order to help with early childhood development.

“I think the district has had something like this in mind for a while,” Donough said.

While no specific workshops have been established, Donough hopes to include local professionals and teachers to run the workshops. The workshops will likely be held once a month and will be located both in northern and southern Carbon County.

Ensuring children are prepared for kindergarten helps the district as a whole, Donough said. Those who score well on the DIBELS assessment in kindergarten often do better in high-stakes state-mandated tests, such as the Proficiency Assessment for Wyoming Students (PAWS) and Measures of Academic Progress (MAPS) tests, later in their education. Also, providing students with a solid educational foundation helps children achieve academic success throughout their career.