A new round of grants from the Rochester Area Community Foundation aims to support home-based childcare providers, particularly around teaching literacy.
The foundation awarded $467,000 to five organizations that work closely with home-based providers who provide a crucial service but often operate on tight margins.
The efforts are aimed at helping providers sharpen their skills in early literacy and defraying the cost of materials. That includes kits for families that can be sent home with children.
"We want our youngest community members, being our children in this community, to have access to high-quality reading materials and literacy specialists that are in every corner of their lives," said Tyana Velazquez-Smith, director of early childhood at the Rochester Area Community Foundation.
The targeted grants are the result of a lot of study. Velazquez-Smith started in her role at the foundation 16 months ago and spent the first half of that time doing on-the-ground research.
That led her to interview 90 home-based day-care providers to learn how the foundation could support them. Assistance with teaching literacy emerged as a big need, Velazquez-Smith said.
Home-based child-care providers have "a sharp, sharp eye for continuous improvement, and they really wanted more access to literacy supports and intervention, understanding that they have the opportunity as these children's possibly, like, first experience outside of theirhome," Velazquez-Smith said. "They want to be able to provide literacy-rich experiences."
The Rochester Area Community Foundation will collect data on grant-funded effort to help determine where additional resources might be needed. Here's what some of the projects look like:
- Rochester Childfirst Network is using its award to establish a food and supplies pantry for providers. Among the supplies will be literacy materials — including age and culturally appropriate books to help children learn phonics and other reading skills — that parents and caregivers can use at home with children. Velazquez-Smith said providers told her that, in addition to literacy supports, food costs were also an issue for them. Providers are responsible for giving meals to children in their care.
- The Monroe County Library System will take its Raising a Reader program on the road. The program provides families with take-home literacy kits. Under the grant, a literacy specialist will come in to work with providers on teaching key reading skills.
- The Child Care Council will use a coaching and mentoring model to support 12 providers, reaching 75 children. The council will help providers with their skills, strategies, environment, activities, and resources. It will also provide them with literacy kits for children and their parents to take home.
Bethany Williams, director of special needs for the Child Care Council, said she hopes the effort increases literacy skills among the teachers while making parents and caregivers more comfortable and confident with teaching children to read.
"We also want to build the children's excitement around reading and just learning different ways that they can, you know, engage ... with literacy skills through different activities," Williams said.
Megan Pheterson, special needs consultant for the Child Care Council, said there's good reason to focus on early literacy: Children's brains grow more between birth and age 5 than at any other time in their lives.
And home-based child-care providers, she said, are in a position to promote early literacy and help children develop key skills.
"It's supposed to be fun and play-based and developmentally appropriate for them," Pheterson said. "We're building little communities of learners in there and I think that's the biggest focus."
