Good morning, and thank you.
My name is Bob Barnett. I'm the Dean of Education and Human Services at the University of Michigan-flint
And I want to talk to you today briefly
about the power of
public-private partnerships in advancing the goals of early childhood education.
Many of you have heard about
the Hope Starts Here project in Detroit. Well, I want to use that as a launching point to talk about
not just the fact that Detroit is doing great things around early childhood,
but they're creating a model that we are now implementing in Flint and I want to share the power of that story.
So if you don't know about Hope Starts Here, it's Detroit's early childhood partnership that's engaged families, businesses,
child education, and health care experts in a larger community, in creating a vision to ensure that children are born healthy,
prepared for kindergarten, and on track for success by third grade and beyond.
So I met the Hope Starts Here folks at the Mackinac Policy Conference
and we started talking about the idea of
what it takes to make a public/private partnership work.
And what we've learned and what we've implemented in Flint based on Detroit is just that, and what we've learned, is that no single entity
can do the kind of work that these kids and families and communities need alone. It takes
strategic partnerships to carry off such an incredible feat.
So in Flint that public-private partnership started as a response to the lead water crisis but quickly
became something far more. We realize that no matter if kids were exposed to lead or not,
everybody deserves access to early childhood education because we know the brain
develops most between the ages of birth to five. We know that intervention is the best medicine and so we created
public/private partnership in Flint between the Mott Foundation
the greater Flint
Community Foundation, the Flint Community Schools, the Genesee early,
Genesee Intermediate School District and the University of Michigan Flint. Each of those partners brings their expertise and
contributions to the table to pull off what we see as a
very hopeful start to providing a better quality of life for our kids before they even start kindergarten.
So the goal is to provide this high quality early childhood care for all kids in Flint. We can't reach all
8,000 of them at one time, but we can do some things
through our programming to make sure that we are reaching as many kids as we can.
So the first step was to open a closed elementary school in Flint and turn it into a birth to five
preschool for
kids who lived in the city of flint and were affected by the lead crisis. This is all free of charge to the parents.
We partnered with the state and the federal government
and in addition to our local partnerships to be able to provide the funding to pull this off.
So we have 200 kids aged birth to five in Flint getting high quality early childhood care
because of this concept of the partnerships. So.
The the main goal is that we have got to provide more access to these kids and to these families
because it's access, that's going to give them opportunity. So in addition to
a four star rated facility with a full curriculum,
we also provide wraparound services that make it easier for the parents and
children to overcome some of the barriers that otherwise would stand in the way.
For example, we have a pop-up school, which I've never done this before, but we bought a van.
It's labeled as pop-up school
and it's full of materials from the classrooms that we take out into the community to
community centers, to churches, to any place that will have us, and we unload the materials which are from the classroom.
So there the kids are engaging in
educational interactive play while we're talking to the parents about how important it is to get their students
into an early childhood facility and so we do a lot of recruiting that way
to get our students in the front door.
We also have a provider mentor model because we know that we're only reaching two hundred kids directly,
but we're working
directly with all of the childcare providers in the city
to do professional development, to raise all the boats and try to get the quality of all early childhood
to the level where we need it because
the ultimate goal is to get these kids kindergarten ready. So not only are we providing an early childhood care
we're working on transition classrooms in the Flint Community Schools that allow these
students to transition into the Flint Community Schools better prepared, ready to learn, and kindergarten ready.
So the next phase of this project is to work with the the staff and the students in k3
to get those kids ready to read by the third grade. So what really started out as
we just want to help the city
based on a wonderful project that Detroit did, is turned into something much much more
comprehensive
and we're trying to lift all boats at the same time
and provide even more early childhood care to these kids. So thank you very much
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