Word: preschooling
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...when the baby boomers put forth their own modest boomlet in the late '70s. Kindergarten classes are filling up once more. Parents are taking a hard look at the first year of school and demanding a greater stress on learning fundamentals. More are sending their children to the preschool programs that launch four-year-olds armed with the alphabet. Schools are responding by fortifying the play-oriented kindergarten curriculum with weighty matters like arithmetic and reading. "Parents now want their children to bring home a stack of papers," says Marilyn Arwood, principal of Waynewood Elementary School in Fairfax County...
...companies now provide child-care assistance to parents, double the number of two years ago. The need springs from such major social changes as the increase in single parents and the continuing movement of women into the work force. In 1970, two-thirds of U.S. women with preschool-age children stayed at home to watch over them. Today only half do so, according to a report by the Washington-based Bureau of National Affairs. Good professional supervision for children, though, is often hard to find, and the possibility of child abuse is a growing concern. Working parents horrified...
...school's students are as varied as its courses. Among them: a Roman Catholic priest from New Jersey, a psychologist from Texas and a high school instructor of auto mechanics from Hawaii. Judy Cullen, an animated grandmother and preschool teacher from Lopez Island, Wash., signed up for Day's course because she wants to help her husband build a 36-ft. sloop. Brockett Muir, who recently graduated from the University of Virginia, came to the school because he hopes to spend the next few years building boats professionally...
Cases of child abuse also made headlines elsewhere in the country. New Jersey prosecutors are investigating reports of child molesting in nine state-supported and private facilities. In California, preliminary hearings got under way in the case of a private Manhattan Beach preschool that was shut down last November; seven teachers were indicted on 207 counts of rape, sodomy and sexual abuse. The prosecutor charged last week that one of the defendants drugged a seven-year-old boy to make him sexually compliant. Such horrific tales are becoming depressingly familiar. Said Bronx District Attorney Mario Merola: "This kind of child...
...purple coat dotted with Teddy-bear pins, Virginia McMartin, 76, a white-haired widow, sat in a wheelchair last week in a Los Angeles superior court, her head bowed low. McMartin, three relatives and three other women faced charges that they sodomized, fondled and raped more than 100 preschool children at a day-care center run by McMartin in Manhattan Beach, a coastal suburb of Los Angeles...