Home child care providers, child care centers, Head Start programs, school-based preschools, faith-based programs and others all have a place in ensuring that Nebraska's children at risk have access to quality opportunities during their earliest years.
Broad consensus exists that teacher quality matters—teacher quality makes a difference in our K-12 system and it makes a difference in our colleges and universities. But nowhere does teacher quality have a greater impact than with our youngest children.
New Census data show 42% of Nebraska children ages 0-5 continue to be at risk of failing in school. They are located throughout the state and in rural and metro areas.
Private child care providers have a role to play in helping children arrive at kindergarten ready to learn. These Nebraska-specific resources are available for providers pursuing early childhood interventions that narrow the achievement gap.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is ramping up investment in quality early childhood programs to support success in kindergarten and beyond.
Nebraska Step Up to Quality celebrated its first birthday July 1 and celebrated a year of working to improve early care and education quality, and increase positive outcomes for young children to close the achievement gap.
In this short video of a TEDx talk at the University of North Carolina, researcher Kate Gallagher talks about the ground-breaking Abecedarian Project in which low-income children received quality early childhood education. Now, 35 years later, we continue to see how high-quality early care and education changed the life trajectories of the children who participated.
Balancing a wide variety of public interests and with great bipartisan support, the Nebraska Legislature again recognized the critical importance of children’s early years prior to adjourning the 2015 legislative session on May 29. Of preeminent importance to First Five Nebraska is public policy that recognizes the development of the brain in the early years literally shapes the learning capacity for the rest of a child’s life. Here's a summary of our highest priority bills from the 2015 legislative session.
High-quality early education is especially advantageous when children start younger and continue longer, says a new report from the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute.
Child care and education fall under the purview of two different systems in Nebraska, and each approaches early childhood from a unique standpoint. For the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees child care, the issue revolves around ensuring that children’s fundamental requirements for health and safety are met while in care. Nebraska’s education system, on the other hand, focuses on whether children begin kindergarten ready to learn and prepared to advance academically. The science of early childhood development tells us that these two aspects of child development shouldn’t be addressed as separate considerations. Early child care environments are, or ought to be, learning environments—just as the health and safety of young children are necessary for quality learning to occur.