In visit to KC school, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stresses early learning

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan walked into a classroom at the Woodland Early Learning Community School in Kansas City on Monday morning and stretched out on a blue, red and yellow alphabet rug to play with magnetic building tiles and 3-year-old Cristian Rodriguez.

Then he walked over to the writing center in teacher Barbara Fulbright’s preschool class to watch 5-year-old Landen Myers draw a squiggly-lined picture.

Duncan visited the city public school as the first stop on his annual 10-city Back to School bus tour. This year’s tour, under the theme “Ready for Success,” was set to highlight the importance of including children with disabilities in high-quality early learning programs and to push the importance of community focus on early childhood education.

“As our country continues to move forward on the critical task of expanding access to high-quality early learning programs for all children, we must do everything we can to ensure that children with disabilities are part of that,” Duncan said.

He said that in Missouri about 80 percent of preschool children don’t have access to quality care. About 6,000 preschool-age children live within Kansas City district boundaries, but fewer than 1,700 are being served in its schools.

In a brief speech, to a room full of Kansas City community and education leaders, Duncan stressed that investing in early childhood learning is the nation’s best course of action for success well into the future.

Last fall the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce made kindergarten readiness one of its Big Five initiatives. “It became clear that we needed to focus attention on kindergarten readiness, an appalling number of our children can’t read at grade level by third grade,” said Jim Heeter, chamber president.

When Woodland Early Learning Community School opened two years ago, it was one of two early childhood sites in the city to receive a portion of $10 million in grants from the state Community Development Block Grant program and the Neighborhood Assistance Program to expand early childhood education. Woodland got $480,000. That money was used to renovate the school, which now not only includes space for about 300 3- and 4-year-old children, but also houses about a dozen community and social service agencies.

The community school provides a one-stop shop for parents living in the urban core with young children and needing help with a variety of social service issues.

That Duncan chose Kansas City and the Woodland community school to visit “says that we are focused on the big issue for this community, perhaps the nation,” said Brent Stewart, president of the United Way of Greater Kansas City. The organization partners with local districts to open Success by 6 Resource Centers — free toy and resource lending libraries in schools filled with educational toys and books for children birth to age 8.

Mayor Sly James, whose administration in 2011 launched Turn the Page KC, a reading initiative aimed at having all children reading at grade level by third grade, said Duncan’s visit “raises the level of the conversation about the importance of early childhood education in Kansas City to priority. We have to find ways to guide resources to it. It has to be a community focus.”

This story was originally published September 14, 2015 at 1:26 PM with the headline "In visit to KC school, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stresses early learning ."