New initiatives to boost school readiness a community-wide effort says Discovery Collaborative leader

(December 17, 2009) There is a lot of energy behind a series of new initiatives unveiled to the public earlier this month to help New Britain children achieve greater success in school and in life. According to Merrill Gay, executive director of the New Britain Discovery Collaborative which brought together more than 120 community educators and leaders to tackle the problem, the initiatives presented in the city-wide Blueprint for New Britain’s Young Children address five key areas that impact school readiness: reducing low birth weight babies, reducing obesity in three-to-four-year-old children, increasing the number of mothers with high school diplomas, increasing school readiness, and improving literacy rates.  Read full Blueprint report. 

“Our comprehensive two-year planning process zeroed in on these factors, which turned out to be major contributors to the significant achievement gap in New Britain’s schools,” explained Gay, who staffs the Steering Committee that created the plan. The Discovery Collaborative is funded by the Community Foundation’s First Year’s First Early Childhood Development initiative with the goal of bringing together parents, childcare providers, social service providers, educators and local government to improve the lives of New Britain’s children from birth to age 8.

Gay said five elements of the plan are already underway, ranging from measurement and screening tools to training:
1. The School Readiness Council has reprogrammed their Quality Enhancement Grant to fund a number of training initiatives aimed at improving the teaching in preschools;
2. The preschools have implemented an annual height and weight measurement with BMI (body mass) calculation to provide a better citywide picture of the childhood obesity problem;
3. The New Britain school district sought and received funding to take the Breakthrough to Literacy software to scale and are now installing it so that every kindergartener through 3rd grader can use it;
4. The Hospital of Central Connecticut has agreed to ask its affiliated pediatricians to begin using a screening tool called the Parents Evaluation of Developmental Status (PEDS);
5. And the Discovery Collaborative is leading one of the initiatives that will tackle school readiness. Called Let’s Talk, It Makes a Difference, the program will focus on promoting language acquisition and vocabulary development among very young, poor children.  Through a partnership with WIC, the collaborative will reach out to low-income parents of infants and toddlers with a special focus on families whose primary language is Spanish - the largest group of children struggling with reading in New Britain’s schools.  Read more about Let’s Talk.

In addition to working to complete those five efforts, a governance board is being formalized to oversee implementation and prioritize the remaining action steps.
 
Gay is also encouraging interested members of the public to get directly involved in the effort by volunteering: “We have opportunities for people who would like to help out with family literacy activities, and to serve on committees to address teen pregnancy, adult education and develop more parenting programming in town.  In addition, we would love to find a company or organization that could provide mentoring to younger sisters of teen mothers, we can always use contributions to support the implementation work and we are looking for a few committed individuals to work on developing an annual report card on the community’s progress.” If you are interested or want more information, please contact Merrill Gay at 860-229-6018 x 309 or merrillg@nbdiscovery.org.