The news was spilling from journals on neuroscience:
Children were born to learn from the cradle. Their brains thirsted, and parents had to be their first and best teachers.
But parents weren’t exactly reading scientific papers, so in the early 1980s Mildred Winter set off like a self-described missionary to take the message into the homes of Missouri parents.
Selling the notion that they should allow educators into their homes to train them to teach their newborns and toddlers wasn’t easy, said Winter, Missouri’s first director of early childhood education.
It’s easier now.
Saturday marked the 25th anniversary of legislation in 1984 that forced all Missouri school districts to offer the experimental Parents as Teachers program to families living in their boundaries.
Not just to targeted families. Not just for low-income families. But any family in every district.
The universal mandate, inserted into the bill at the 11th hour, probably was intended to kill it, Winter and others said. Such scope, it seemed, would render the program unfundable and unmanageable.
But Parents as Teachers, with the backing of Gov. Kit Bond and Education Commissioner Arthur Mallory, forged ahead.
And it grew far beyond its Missouri roots.
It is international now, with more than 3,000 programs in all 50 states and six foreign countries, according to the Parents as Teachers National Center in St. Louis. Last year, state records showed, the program reached 43 percent of all families in Missouri with children ages 3 and younger.
The program still faces some challenges.
A school district using Parents as Teachers will spend $1,400 to $1,500 a year per family, according to program estimates.
Earlier this year, Missouri legislators, needing to cut state expenses, trimmed 10 percent from the $34 million budget for Parents as Teachers.
Some critics question whether such early childhood programs are worth the cost, especially when achievement gaps between races and socioeconomic classes persist as students move into high school.
The balance of research has supported Parents as Teachers’ impact on a child’s readiness for school.
The Promising Practices Network, a project established by the Rand Corp., rates Parents as Teachers as “promising.” It found that several studies generally have agreed that children in Parents as Teachers outscored their peers in measures of language skills, cognitive abilities, physical development and social development.
Evidence of the effects of early childhood programs diminishes through the upper elementary grades, but that doesn’t mean the home visits aren’t worth the costs, said Edward Zigler, the director emeritus of Yale University’s Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy.
“You shouldn’t oversell these programs,” Zigler said. “We have to dovetail these programs together” with stronger elementary school education.
Zigler said Parents as Teachers works in part because it strives to reach out to all families.
“There’s no stigma to being in the program,” he said. “I’m supposed to be a world authority (on child development), but when we brought my son home from the hospital, I didn’t know what to do. We all need this service.”
Cathy Lee, a mother of three from Independence, agrees.
Her two sons — ages 2 and 4 — ran to the window last week watching for Shannon Shelton. Shelton is one of 20 parent educators in the Independence School District who each month visit more than 100 families each. But Lee’s sons only know that Shelton always brings something fun to do. Homemade toys. New games.
To reach Joe Robertson, call 816-234-4789 or send e-mail to jrobertson@kcstar.com.
@Nyx.CommentBody@