Wednesday July 5, 2017
By Janaki Chadha
Cairo
Academy preschoolers play and learn together at the North Powellhurst
School in Southeast Portland. The program, funded by the Preschool
Promise, aims to provide early learning opportunities to families living
below the Federal Poverty Level. Sarah Silbiger/Staff
For years, African immigrant and refugee families in Portland have lacked options for getting their children into preschool. Between affordability, transportation and language barriers, finding any school has been a challenge—let alone a program that would incorporate a family's cultural background or have staff that speak their language.
But a new preschool is providing just that for some African immigrant families, putting parents at ease about their children's transition to kindergarten.
The preschool, which serves 20 mostly Somali children in outer Southeast Portland, is one of 92 funded through a new Oregon initiative called Preschool Promise. Launched last September, the program added 1,300 publicly funded preschool slots around the state for families earning less than twice the poverty level.
That program, which cost $17.5 million, is aimed at a little-known but serious shortfall in Oregon: More of the state's 3- and 4-year-olds miss out on preschool than in the rest of the country. Statewide, 57 percent of young children aren't enrolled in early learning programs, according to the most recent data, for 2013 through 2015, from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Giving 1,300 more youngsters free, high-quality preschool has moved the needle, albeit marginally, on the large number of young children who enter kindergarten unprepared.
During 2016-17, Preschool Promise and Oregon Head Start, which offers publicly funded preschool to families under the poverty level, together served 62 percent of 3- and 4-year olds below the federal poverty level and 37 percent of those from families earning up to twice the poverty level.
On weekday mornings and afternoons, children at the new Somali-oriented preschool known as CAIRO Academy can be found singing the alphabet, tracing letters and numbers on worksheets and gathering for storytime in both English and dialects of Somali they speak at home.
The school's name stands for the group that founded it: the Center for African Immigrants and Refugees of Oregon, or CAIRO. The 20 students in the class have roots in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, and a majority come from families below the poverty level. It operates out of the North Powellhurst school building in the David Douglas school district of east Portland.
Other preschool options for these children, says the center's founder, Abdikadir Bashir, are slim. He's seen families spend months on waiting lists only to be told in August there isn't a spot for their child. And he questions the ability of other programs to work with children who don't speak English at home, may come from refugee backgrounds and have parents unaccustomed to the American education system.
He's long been concerned about poor educational outcomes for the children of African immigrants, and thinks the lack of early childhood education is a big contributing factor.
"If children aren't in any kind of school until kindergarten or first grade, by the time they get there they're already behind, and they're already playing catch-up," he said.
Federally-funded Head Start and the state-funded version combined served only 59 percent of eligible children in the 2015-16 school year, according to the Oregon Department of Education.
"There's an incredible need, across the board," said Danielle Pacifico-Cogan, director of communications and community engagement at the Children's Institute, a Portland-based non-profit that advocates for young children.
This need, Pacifico-Cogan says, can be traced to a range of factors. Finding an affordable program is one hurdle, but access also plays a large role, she said. For families in rural parts of the state, finding a program close to home is a concern, and for populations like the one Bashir serves, language barriers are often an issue. Sometimes, families don't understand the importance of preschool. And if they do, Pacifico-Cogan added, "there's a waitlist everywhere."
Preschool Promise is a step forward, she says, but it's not enough. "When you're in preschool, you learn how to take turns, how to be attentive," she said. And those letter recognition worksheets the African immigrant children work on, or "pre-reading skills," come back into play in elementary school. Students who know how to read proficiently by third grade, she noted, are four times more likely to graduate from high school.
"An investment early on has long impact," said Gwyn Bachtle, program coordinator for Preschool Promise. "What we want is children to enter into the K-12 system school-ready."
State testing on kindergarten readiness has found disparities across economic status and English proficiency. Data from fall 2015 found economically disadvantaged students had a 14 percent success rate when identifying names of English letters, compared to a 19 percent average for the total population. Students with limited English proficiency had an 8 percent success rate.
Programs funded through Preschool Promise are distributed across 17 counties and are run through public schools, private preschools, childcare centers, community-based organizations and other settings. The $17.5 million of state funding was allocated on a competitive basis to coalitions in nine areas of Oregon. The Multnomah County region used the money to create 192 preschool slots in programs run by 10 providers: seven in Portland and one each in Gresham, Lake Oswego and Fairview.
Preschool Promise provides publicly funded preschool to a broader window of children than Oregon Head Start, since participants can come from families earning up to 200 percent of the poverty level. But so far, 33 percent of the children in the program are poor enough to qualify for Head Start. And a majority are children of color, program officials told the House Committee on Early Childhood and Family Supports in February.
Bachtle said one of the biggest strengths of the program is the diversity of settings offering preschool. A preschool housed in a community-based organization, for example, can address language and cultural issues in a way another program might not be able to, she said.
In the CAIRO Academy classroom, flags of different African countries hang from the ceiling, and a tapestry of the African continent hangs down one of the windows. Several of the young girls in the class wear hijabs. Head teacher Skyler Pestle leads the group in English while class aide Shukria Isse works with smaller groups of children in other languages spoken among the class, which include two dialects of Somali, Swahili and the Ethiopian language, Oromo.
This past year, the preschool also had a Somali-speaking family services specialist on staff to help families of children in the program apply for benefits, find work opportunities and navigate other agencies and services.
For Abdifatah Abdurahman, whose 4-year old son Abdalla attended the program this past year, having a Somali speaker in the classroom was a big part of why the family's experience has been so positive. His son was enrolled in African-American-led Albina Head Start at the beginning of the school year, but switched to the African immigrant-oriented preschool after two weeks.
"I wanted my son to be around members of our community and make sure he grows up knowing his language and culture," Abdurahman said.
The switch has helped with issues like making sure the school is honoring the family's religious food restrictions and has also made interacting with the preschool much easier for Abdurahman's wife, Hawa Nur, who does not speak English. During the two weeks her son was at the Albina preschool, Nur remembers getting phone calls she didn't understand, and one day, when her son was sick, not being able to call the school herself as there was no one there she could communicate with. Her 3-year-old son, Anwar, will attend the program next year as well.
Much of the work that contributes to the cultural specificity of the preschool, Bashir says, happens outside the classroom. That often includes educating families about the ways the school system in the U.S. is different from schooling in their home countries.
"Back home in Africa, we aren't involved with school, as parents. We view teachers as another parent, and so the idea is, it's up to you as a teacher to deal with my child for the time he's away from home," Bashir said. Helping parents understand the importance of parent involvement and improving attendance at parent-teacher conferences, for example, is a priority, he said.
"The most important thing I do is teach these families how to engage with schools that are not like CAIRO in the future, and how to prepare for the public school system," he said.
Preschool is not something many families in the community have understood the importance of in the past, Bashir said, but now, he has more interest in the program than students he can serve. The ten spots that were open for next year have already been filled, but he still gets calls every week, and has over 20 students on a waitlist.
Other preschool sites that didn't draw much interest when Preschool Promise launched also have more requests to enroll than space for children. Pacifico-Cogan said residents of Yoncalla, a small city in Southern Oregon, didn't see the need for a preschool originally. But the one that opened there now has eight students on the waitlist for a program with 16 spots.
Bobbie Weber, an expert on early childhood education at Oregon State University, said that while the publicly-funded programs currently offered in the state are successful and high-quality, too many children are left unserved.
"We are barely touching the surface," she said. "Where Oregon falls short is in funding—we're unwilling to put in the public dollars."