Educare Arizona

A Comprehensive Program

Educare Arizona is part of a national network of Educare schools that is dramatically changing the life trajectories of thousands of children growing up in families facing the greatest obstacles to success—and changing the way America thinks about early education.  Based on research, our school is a comprehensive early childhood program aimed at preventing the achievement gap that takes root between children in poverty and their more resourced peers long before they enter kindergarten.  Independent research shows the model works.  Experience across the network of Educare schools demonstrates that Educare is a powerful catalyst for improving early childhood practice, informing early childhood policy, and cultivating new private and public investments in the first five years of learning.

A state of the art, full-day, year round school, Educare Arizona serves children from birth to five years.  Embracing our community’s most vulnerable children with programming and instructional support that develop early skills and nurture strong parent-child relationships, Educare Arizona creates the foundation for successful learning.

Educare Arizona’s Mission

Educare Arizona’s mission is to ensure vulnerable young children and their families are successful in school and life by providing quality early childhood learning, family support and health care and by acting as an unequivocal voice for early childhood policy and practice.

To achieve our mission, Educare serves as:

• A Partnership between the private and public sectors to create a high-quality, birth-to-five program that achieves higher levels of quality.
• A Place that nurtures early learning, is a beacon of hope for the community, and sends a firm message that we must invest in early childhood -- because children are born learning.
• A Program to prepare young, low-income children for school by implementing the approaches and practices that science tells us are necessary to help young children grow up safe, healthy, and eager to learn.
• A Platform for Change, serving as a “showroom for quality” and a catalyst to drive broader policy and systems change in our state and nationally.
  
  

The Need for Educare in Arizona

The fastest growing segment of the Arizona population is children birth through age five, and Arizona's children face a unique set of challenges.

• More than one in five Arizona children under the age of five lives in poverty, which can impede their ability to learn and can contribute to poor health.  The presence of strong protective factors, including high quality early learning experiences, can offset the consequences of poverty.
• One in ten high school freshmen will drop out of school before graduation, and one in five Arizona children lives in a home headed by a high school dropout.  People who don't complete high school are more likely to live in poverty, and their children are more likely to repeat grades, require special services and risk dropping out of high school themselves.
• Nearly one in three Arizona children resides in a home where a language other than English is spoken. In the Balsz School District where Educare will be located, 75% of children enter kindergarten struggling to speak English.
• Fewer than half of Arizona children ages birth to three are read to on a daily basis.  Research shows that children who are read to on a regular basis perform better in school.
• More than one in ten Arizona babies are born to teen mothers.  Children born to teen mothers are at an increased risk for school failure and poverty.

 

Early childhood education is just the kind of investment that can make the difference. It is an investment in individual children to set them on the path to school success, and it is an investment in society. Children who are stimulated and nurtured during the critical first years of life are less likely to require remedial or special education or to become involved with criminal activities. They are more likely to read at grade level, graduate from high school, and earn a good living for themselves and their own families. Clearly, early childhood education makes a long term difference, for individuals, their families, and for entire communities. Combining service delivery with professional development and advocacy, Educare is among the most compelling and promising models of early childhood education reform.