Word: prekindergartens
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...Rosemont Elementary School in Baltimore, college prep begins early. How early? Starting in prekindergarten, students take some of their lessons from tenured university faculty. Undergraduates serve as teachers' aides, and kids spend their summer vacations studying on the campus of a nearby college. When students graduate from the fifth grade, they get a handshake and a diploma from a university president. So it was understandable that when a visitor recently toured the school, a bespectacled third-grader asked, "Excuse me, Miss? Are you a professor...
...fact, she has staked her professional reputation on it. Kearns, 60, is superintendent of Newcomb Central School, serving Newcomb, N.Y., (pop. 550) on Route 28N in Adirondack State Park. Her public school is the smallest in New York, with 69 students from prekindergarten through 12th grade. The two-story brick schoolhouse was built for 400 children in 1948, when a titanium and magnetite mine was operating nearby. After the mine closed about a decade ago, the student body dwindled, and the state pressured the town to shut the school...
...until two years ago, says Handy, the brick structure was not only decrepit but crawling with rats and mice and "roaches so big you could feel the critters move under your foot." Academically, the school, which serves 2,051 students -- prekindergarten through the eighth grade -- was in just as bad shape. On any given day, he relates, a significant number of the kids were on "disciplinary removal," hanging out unsupervised and causing trouble on the block. "I would intervene in a street fight four or five times a week," says Handy. "Every morning the white students, especially the girls, would...
...blackboard: the relatively high cost of the original program -- $5,000 a year for each preschooler -- was actually a bargain. The results at Ypsilanti are echoing louder across the country, not only in facilities for the underprivileged but also in preschools everywhere. Twenty-seven states now fund prekindergarten facilities -- a huge jump from only seven in 1979. And the early-childhood boom goes on unabated. Some 1,700 nationally accredited public programs operate in the U.S.; an additional 4,300 are actively seeking accreditation...
...only about 1 in 5 of those eligible. As the summit closed, White House chief of staff John Sununu noted that "the Governors succeeded quite well in convincing the President of the value of preschool and early-childhood programs." Bush conceded "the need for more federal support for the prekindergarten education process...