Bright Beginnings Community Partnership
(http://www.cms.k12.nc.us/programs/brightbeginnings/brightbeginnings.asp)

In the Preschool Cooperative’s four year old pre-kindergarten classroom, we use the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Bright Beginnings Community Partnership curriculum. Bright Beginnings Pre-K is an award-winning full-day, literacy-based initiative for 4-year-olds who have identified educational needs. Bright Beginnings is designed to provide a child-centered, literacy-focused curriculum to ensure that all children in Mecklenburg County enter kindergarten ready to learn.

Our Bright Beginnings classroom is partially funded by the State More at Four initiative of the Governor's office.

Developing Emergent Literacy

The majority of the children served by the Seigle Avenue Preschool Cooperative live in poverty and will likely qualify for the free-and-reduced lunch program when they enter the primary school system. These children come from neighborhoods with high rates of violent crime and they will experience marked difficulty in learning to read and in succeeding in school. These children will be more likely to develop behavior problems in school, which will cause them to be labeled “learning–disabled” or identified as having emotional disturbances. And these children are more likely to drop out of school before high-school graduation. Overall, these children are less likely to succeed academically than children who come from enriched environments.

However, Seigle Avenue Preschool Cooperative works with each of these children to overcome these obstacles. The average three-year-old who enters the Preschool Cooperative scores in the 25th percentile in the area of language on developmental tests. By the time children graduate from the Preschool Cooperative’s four-year-old program, the average developmental score increases to the 75th percentile. Despite this success, some children still fail to make progress once they enter the school system; tests show that their language proficiency decreases each year. The effects of even an excellent preschool education appear to diminish over time as the students progress through school.

Seigle Avenue Preschool Cooperative implements a new curriculum which addresses these regressions. This program strengthens the child’s preschool experience in the area of emerging literacy skills by giving the child an “edge” in language and literacy. Developing Emergent Literacy allows the Preschool Cooperative to employ an on-site Speech and Language Pathologist in the following capacities:

• as a consultant to the teachers,
• as a literacy therapist to individual children,
  
• as a vehicle to adapt and deliver the literacy curriculum within the home,
  
• as an assistant to our Parent Educator, providing literacy-based programs and services for parents,
• and as a facilitator who conducts developmental testing for children.

The specific beneficiary of Developing Emergent Literacy is the child who is empowered to be successful in school and in life through early literacy intervention. In the bigger picture, the entire community benefits by building up of its most precious resources, its children and families.