Case Study 15A

The Early Learning Campus

Jill Jacobi-Vessels, Christine Sherretz, Dorothy J. Veith, and Ann E. Larson

I’m a single parent and work full time as a secretary at U of L. I am also a grad student. I needed a place for my daughter that was close to work and school and also affordable on a tight budget. The Early Learning Campus has been those things, but so much more—the level of quality care provided here is amazing. The staff is wonderful. The building is beautiful and well designed. There is thoughtful planning going on. It is a place I have complete confidence in for my daughter. That frees up a lot of my energy so that I can focus on my work and studies.

—Karen Habeeb, graduate program assistant senior, University of Louisville

The Early Learning Campus has provided social interaction and learning opportunities for my son that we could not provide as working parents. The quality of staff and variety in activities is far better than what we have witnessed at other traditional “day care” facilities. We are absolutely thrilled to have been an ELC family from day one.

—Nick, Alice, and Indiana Dawson

The Early Learning Campus

The University of Louisville’s Early Learning Campus (ELC) is an exemplary preschool learning community consisting of a rich collaboration of students, faculty members, and professionals committed to the development of nearly 140 young children. The campus fully embraces many of the elements found in prosocial education’s philosophy, focusing on meeting children’s and family’s needs that could otherwise be barriers to learning. ELC is located adjacent to the Family Scholar House apartments and academic services center, a unique arrangement that primarily serves single parents seeking a college degree (see later section).

Lack of child care and stable housing are major hurdles to educational attainment. The university campus leaders identified the child-care issues of our constituents as a major factor in the amount of time it takes for students to graduate, potentially causing students to leave the university prior to completing their degrees. Child care also was identified as an obstacle to students, staff, and faculty who seek to balance professional and family responsibilities. ELC and the Louisville Scholar House (LSH) operations represent the development of a national model that enables single parents of economically at-risk families, headed primarily by women, to obtain an education and hopefully gain economic success.

ELC ensures that children in these families have the necessary developmental supports and educational experiences for infants through preschool to be fully prepared for and highly successful in school. This intrinsic link to the community is the foundation that makes the partnership between the U of L and LSH (formerly called Project Women) truly exceptional. This joint effort addresses a mutual community need for quality child care, resulting in the university opening a long-needed child-care center and the LSH expanding their housing opportunities for single parents. The partnership is aimed at eliminating disparities in education, health, economic development, and human and social services.

ELC is operated and managed by the university’s College of Education and Human Development (CEHD). This facility has over twenty-five thousand square feet of space and serves children ages six weeks to four years old; during summer months and after school, children up to twelve years old participate. The building has a unique design intended to encourage the creativity of the children, resembling a child’s shape sorter, with a variety of geometric shapes used for the windows. A large skylight is featured over a transparent second floor, which allows natural light to brighten the interior of the building. Classrooms with observation windows surround a piazza area on each floor, providing space for community gatherings and family conversations, a reflection of the ELC’s emphasis on the Reggio Emilia approach, very much a prosocial education strategy. Reggio Emilia, named for a town in Italy that originally developed this format, emphasizes supportive relationships from parents and community in meeting young children’s comprehensive needs (Lewin-Benham, 2005).* The third floor is a combination of open indoor space for gross motor activities during inclement weather, a greenhouse, and a rooftop garden.

We believe that one reason our young students succeed results from the great attention given to the look and feel of the classroom. Environment is considered the “third teacher” at ELC. Teachers carefully organize space for small and large group projects and small intimate spaces for one, two, or three children. Documentation of children’s work, plants, and collections that children have made from former outings are displayed both at the child and adult eye level. The learning philosophy of the ELC embraces the knowledge that a child is first an individual with unique talents, strengths, and needs. The child seeks to make meaning of the world by exploring, discovering, and mastering skills, information, and concepts. Their journeys are to be respected as much as supported by family and community. Each step of the child’s journey requires the elements promoted by prosocial education, including dependable and lasting connections to the adults in their young lives.

A distinctive characteristic of the ELC is the diversity of families’ educational attainment, socioeconomic levels, and ethnicities. Many learning centers, particularly those on university campuses, are “homogenous in their diversity” due to enrollment costs. Having a cohesive, diverse group at the ELC learning community provides an intrinsically rich environment that is rare and much needed in the child-care community.

ELC provides teacher candidates from CEHD with supervised fieldwork in preschool classrooms. Faculty members across campus have developed ELC opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and medical residents for observation (in which there is no direct child contact, but the observation rooms are used) and field placements (in which there is direct contact in classrooms with children). These experiences help to achieve education goals in teacher preparation, pediatric medical residency, social work, art, music, occupational therapy, speech and language, and audiology. Faculty and staff contributions include music sessions with the School of Music, H1N1 vaccinations from the Medical School, and dental hygiene services from the Dental School.

Partnership and Community Engagement Meet Community Needs

ELC is a unique project that has involved a diverse partnership since its inception in June 2007. The Kentucky governor, Family Scholar House (FSH), University of Louisville administration, and state and local officials developed ELC to support university students who are parents and to educate young children in a state-of-the-art early childhood learning center. The university made available to the FSH organization a one-half-block tract west of the Belknap Campus on a dollar-per-year lease for the housing project. Physically, the Gladys and Lewis “Sonny” Bass Louisville Scholar House Campus consists of the LSH facility and ELC, which is administered by the U of L College of Education and Human Development. Other key community partners that support the project include the Louisville metro government, the Transportation Authority of River City (TARC), Housing and Urban Development (HUD), nonprofit foundations, other educational institutions, and local businesses.

The management teams of ELC and LSH maintain a close working relationship strengthened by the shared location of offices for both organizations and the enrollment of some LSH staff members’ children in ELC. The management of ELC works with LSH staff members to ensure that the needs of each family are understood and supported. The well-qualified staff have credentials directly related to early childhood development: master’s degrees (four); bachelor’s degrees (ten); associate’s degrees (seven); Child Development Accreditation (CDA), a nationally recognized certificate in early childhood (five); entry-level staff working on degrees in the field or CDAs (twelve); and student workers in education. The first director, recently promoted to assistant professor in early childhood education, has a PhD in teaching and learning and a master’s in interdisciplinary early childhood. The current director is Dianna Zink, MEd.

Louisville Scholar House and Family Scholar House

Louisville Scholar House is the nonprofit organization that administers the Family Scholar House operation. FSH is the region’s only nonprofit organization with a mission dedicated to assisting homeless, single parents while they obtain a college degree. The FSH theme is “Changing lives, families, and communities through education.” The nonprofit organization started in 1995 as Project Women. Its mission is to end the cycle of poverty by giving single-parent university students the support they need to achieve a four-year degree. FSH recognizes the challenges that single parents face in trying to provide housing, child care, and basic necessities for their children. In the past decade, the number of homeless parents and children in Louisville has continued to increase. Over nine thousand children in the Jefferson County School system (nearly 10 percent) and their parents are homeless (according to the local Coalition for the Homeless), requiring FSH to expand its housing and program capacity. This unique combination of housing, on-site child care, and support programs successfully serves fifty-six families and also provides nonresidential programming for over five hundred families on the preresidential waiting list for housing. FSH has forty two-bed and sixteen three-bed units. All are disability compliant, and four are handicap-designated units. The Louisville site is currently the only residential housing site, but the LSH organization provides services in nineteen counties in Kentucky and seven counties in Indiana.

The university–community collaboration has resulted in a business model that is being reviewed by several cities across the country (e.g., Dallas, Cleveland, Pittsburgh). Locally, this model is being replicated at the Downtown Scholar House, a partnership between FSH and Spalding University, which opened in January 2011 and provides supportive housing and educational programs for an additional fifty-four families in the Louisville community.

The university also assists LSH residents through the Cardinal Covenant financial aid program, the first program of its kind in the state of Kentucky. Cardinal Covenant helps to make college attainable for the 22 percent of Kentucky families living at or below 15 percent of the federal poverty level, determined by the U.S. Census Bureau. Through this program, students are able to graduate debt free as long as they finish within five years and remain Pell Grant eligible each year. In addition to financial support, the university’s Information Technology unit provides computers for each apartment unit and access to the main computing system, which links each LSH resident to the Internet.

The university’s Department of Public Safety provides round-the-clock security for the LSH and responds to 911 calls. This important component ensures residents’ safety, because 90 percent of the residents come from backgrounds involving domestic violence. In addition, LSH residents enrolled in the U of L or another local educational institution are provided other student benefits such as free bus transportation on the TARC system, university identification cards, and access to the university’s libraries. Residents and their children can also utilize U of L Hospital and health services.

Growing Impact in the Community

The compounded impact of this exceptional program and the commitment of university and community support has created enthusiasm and excitement among the residents and university faculty. Many discussions about service provisions for individuals facing multiple challenges normally stop at identification of the problem issues and do not proceed to collaborative approaches that can be used to construct holistic solutions. The Louisville Scholar House and Early Learning Campus have created an immersion effect that truly empowers the residents of the program to succeed.

A similar community-supported model was successfully implemented and detailed in Dr. James Comer’s book Leave No Child Behind: Preparing Today’s Youth for Tomorrow’s World (2005). The 2007 winner of U of L’s Grawemeyer Award in Education, Dr. Comer’s program involves teachers, parents, administrators, and others at more than six hundred low-performing schools in making decisions by consensus to improve the educational experience for children. LSH and ELC were created with the same goals in mind and see their fruition: Community involvement can make a difference in the educational outcomes of children and their parents. The ELC is experiencing the same kind of comprehensive involvement from the Louisville community. Because the ELC is only two years old, outcome data are not yet available, but stay tuned. Results are coming.

References

Comer, J. (2005). Leave no child behind: Preparing today’s youth for tomorrow’s world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lewin-Benham, A. (2005). Possible schools: The Reggio approach to urban education. New York: Teachers College Press.

*For more about the Reggio Emilia curriculum approach, see pages 4 and 5 of the ELC handbook, online at http://louisville.edu/education/elc/ELC-handbook-6-11.pdf.