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Adamchik heads the
Covington Resilience Project, which will work with close to 700
preschool children. Shannon Starkey of the Children's Home of
Cincinnati heads Promoting Resilient Children, which will work
with close to 1,300 children in Cincinnati and surrounding
Hamilton County. The programs are key examples of United Way's
new mission to focus substantial funding on areas that will have
powerful and lasting impact on the community.
"We're helping
children develop the social and emotional skills they will need
in kindergarten and through school and beyond," said Starkey.
"We're catching them during a really important window of
opportunity."
The two
Resilience programs literally will change the future, said
Starkey.
"A good start in
kindergarten can affect everything that follows," she said. "If
you intervene and give a child the support and therapy and
resources they need, you can remediate problems. If a child has
social/emotional problems, it doesn't get better, it keeps
getting worse."
Children who are
not ready to learn fall behind and can get trapped in a spiral
of academic failures and behavior problems that can lead to
crime, poverty, teen pregnancy and lifelong problems with jobs
and relationships.
"Strengthening
children strengthens the whole community," Starkey said.
"Putting the
dollars up front prevents so many bigger problems later," she
said.
Both programs
have built and expanded on previous preschool programs that have
proven results. The United Way funding expanded those promising
starts with solid funding that is approved for three years - a
change from previous funding cycles that often left program
planners wondering if their funding would be renewed. The amount
of funding, as always, depends on the success of the annual
United Way campaign, which announces its goal on Thursday at the
campaign launch on Fountain Square downtown.
Under the new
allocation system, if the goal is met, the programs know how
much they'll get - a boon to planning and efficiency.
The campaign
funds more than 320 programs, with more than half of the money
targeting two community-changing goals - helping children be
successful in school and life, and helping adults and their
families become self sufficient.
Marcus's
transformation is just a taste of what hundreds of children
could experience, said Tom Lottman, deputy director of Children
Inc. in Covington, and a regional trainer for the nationally
acclaimed Devereaux Early Childhood Assessment Program (DECA)
which is a major piece of both new programs. Every child in the
participating preschools is assessed to create a social and
emotional profile to help teachers and parents identify areas
that need strengthening.
The goal of
Devereaux and of the two new programs is to build resilience in
young children. - the ability to bounce back and succeed after
adversity.
Studies found
that children who experienced virtually the same levels of
violence, poverty and other difficulties early in life grew into
vastly different adults, said Lottman. Some rose through the
problems to become successful members of the community. Others
thrashed under the weight and never broke through.
The difference,
he said, was the resilience factors in the child's life.
Children who had developed self control, initiative and
attachment to at least one nurturing adult were able to cope
with problems and ultimately succeed in school, jobs and
relationships.
The new programs
combine the best in early childhood education with mental health
diagnostic and therapy skills.
Mental health
coaches are therapists who visit classrooms weekly, observing
the children and the classroom dynamics and then consulting with
the teachers and sometimes with teachers and parents,
brainstorming about new ways to deal with behavior problems or
strengthen children's emotional and social skills, or even
different ways to set up the room to help children learn.
It's a somewhat
radical approach - teaming two professions that traditionally
work in separate spheres, said Lottman.
"In the past, the
early childhood teacher's role was to find children with mental
health problems and refer them to mental health professionals.
Early childhood professionals and mental health professionals
didn't even speak the same language," he said.
Resilience has
become the common language.
Public schools
have access to mental health services, but private preschools
often rely on teachers to spot problems. And preschools teacher
are not trained to deal with mental health problems, said
Lottman.
These programs
focus on the preschools that have no other access to mental
health services.
"There is a
misconception that the young child doesn't have mental health
problems. But we're seeing young children being overly
aggressive, frequently defiant. They're adjusting to issues
around parents divorcing, visitation. We've had children who are
dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, they might have
been sexually abused or physically abused," said Lottman. "What
we see is the disruptive behavior. But we want to find out why,
and help the child deal with that and become strong.
"Research tells
us social and emotional skills are more predictive of success
than academic skills," Lottman said.
The programs work
on three levels - a universal level where all children in the
class benefit from the strength-building program, helping
children develop initiative, self control and attachment. A
targeted level develops strategies to address specific concerns
in a classroom and the intensive level provides services for
specific children dealing with specific problems.
In the Covington
program, the counseling happens at the preschool, with the
mental health therapist that the child is accustomed to seeing
in the classroom.
"I'll have an
office set up onsite," said Rebecca Akers, one of three early
childhood mental health therapists hired through the program.
Akers will work
in 16 classrooms in the Children's Inc. network. Other
therapists will work in Head Start classrooms and in other
preschool centers in Covington.
The Covington
Resilience Project is part of a place-based United Way funding
measure that has targeted a handful of neighborhoods.
In Hamilton
County, Karen Mumford, a mental health professional with the
Children's Home of Cincinnati, is the lead coach and trainer for
the Promoting Resilient Children program. "We have seven coaches
making weekly visits to 25 centers," she said. The program also
provides support and training for administrators of 10
additional centers, preparing them to enter the program.
As teachers in
individual classrooms hone their resiliency skills, the mental
health coach may move to a different classroom in the center,
expanding the reach to more children, said Mumford.
Teri Burch, early
learning coordinator for the Children's Home of Cincinnati, has
been working with the Promoting Resilient Children program since
it started in April, and before that with its forerunner.
"When I first
started teaching preschool, I thought 3 to 5 year-olds would be
a great age. It would all be so much fun," Burch said.
"But they have
emotional issues that are sometimes much deeper than they appear
on the surface."
She said working
with the mental health coach has expanded her understanding and
effectiveness.
A study by
Success by 6, a United Way initiative to assure children are
mentally, physically and emotionally ready to succeed when they
enter school, showed many children entering kindergarten were
not prepared socially or emotionally.
The Children's
Home formed a consortium and won an Early Learning Opportunities
grant to provide in-classroom mental health services. That
effort was the forerunner of the Promoting Resilient Children
program run by the enlarged Consortium for Resilient Young
Children. |
