Monongalia County Schools just got another boost — for the booster seat crowd.
The district’s Head Start and Early Start programs last week received $1.8 million in federal monies from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
It’s all part of the annual outlay that keeps such early childhood education efforts going, both here and nationwide.
Head Start and Early Head Start are family enrichment programs that have been fighting the fight for nearly 60 years now.
Both were born of President Lyndon Johnson’s federal War on Poverty initiatives in 1965.
In places such as West Virginia, with its prevalence of poverty and overall lack of educational attainment, those initiatives couldn’t be more critical.
Changing dynamics from the state’s crushing opioid epidemic add one more set of clouds, district Head Start director Debbie Jones told Monongalia County Board of Education members in February 2020, right before the pandemic hit.
Jones was talking then about grandparents tasked with caring for their grandchildren in the 21st century, as they attempted to navigate whole new sets of school bureaucracies and classroom politics and particulars — all of which had to seem utterly foreign to them.
“We’re looking at people who haven’t been in a school building in years,” she said at that meeting.
The new landscape, she told the BOE, is known as, “kinship care.”
Jones was out of town Tuesday and unavailable for comment for this story.
For now, the Mountain State continues to sit near the top in the nation, for its accessibility to pre-kindergarten education.
West Virginia ranked fourth in those offerings to 4-year-olds, according to a recent study by the National Institute for Early Education Research, which is housed at Rutgers University.
The District of Columbia, Florida and Oklahoma were first, second and third in the study, which was released this spring.
Utah was last on the list, among the 45 states currently offering pre-K.
West Virginia served 67% of the state’s 4-year-olds and 7% of 3-year-olds in state-funded preschool, increasing this year’s total enrollment to 13,731, according to the report.
As West Virginia continues to play academic catch-up from the pandemic, such early education, state Superintendent Michelle Blatt said, couldn’t be more critical.
“Early learning has a vast impact on the growth and development of our children and the future of the Mountain State,” the superintendent continued.
“Access to pre-K education provides families and students an introduction to lifelong learning.”
That sentiment was echoed by U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV), when he announced the Head Start outlay last week.
Manchin, a north-central West Virginia native, is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which manages such monies.
“This funding will provide children in Monongalia County with the skills and foundation they need for a bright future,” he said.
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