Chelsea Lord is a family specialist with New Hanover County’s early childhood department. She recently received New Hanover Smart Start’s ‘Children’s Champion’ award.
As a family specialist, she helps with enrollment and support of pre-K student caseloads throughout the district. She also sometimes helps teachers in moments of student dysregulation and provides support for in-class instruction.
Lord said there are misconceptions about who can qualify for NHCS pre-K. She said qualifying factors can include income level and showing an educational need, which can be academic, cognitive, language, or physical. They typically use the Brigance screening tool to identify those needs.
She said she wants to encourage families with three—to four-year-olds (who must be this age by August 31) to apply and call their office if they need help filling out the application. The office can also walk families through the required documents, such as proof of age and residency, wage verification, immunization forms, and photo identification.
As for an enrollment deadline, Lord said, “There's never an end date for us. We are doing enrollment all year long. We hope to do placements shortly, so that we can give parents adequate notice to find other child care if they are on a wait list.”
NHCS pre-K has a substantial waitlist, particularly for three-year-olds; it’s about 250 wanting spots, but Lord doesn’t want that to discourage families from applying because seats open up. They have over 500 spots, including private sites, available, but they used to have double that when NHCS had the Head Start grant from the federal government. This past year, the award went to Excel Learning. Lord said one reason was that they offered infants to 18-month-old classrooms.
She added that if a family is on the waitlist at three years old, they have a better chance of getting a spot the following year.
Once the application is complete, they do a family intake, and then the student is invited to a family screening day. They’ve already done about four of these, seeing about 100 families.
“It's so sweet when a kid comes in for their screening and they've got their backpack on because their mom has said they're going to school, and they're so pumped to go,” she said.
Once accepted into the program, families can expect their students to have access to breakfast, lunch, snacks, and transportation to school. The school day is roughly the same as kindergarten, about 7:30 to 2:30, and they can connect families with aftercare sites, but it is an additional cost.
And they’ll have access to high-quality educational programming, which "focuses on the whole child and the whole family, which looks at five different learning domains, and part of that is social-emotional, academic, cognitive, physical, math and science,” she said.
They also offer families education on topics like potty training, parenting classes with resources on bedtime routines, and enrichment activities.
Parents do family needs assessments throughout the year to find out if there’s an area of concern for them. For example, sometimes she finds that the family runs into an issue mid-year.
“And then they said that they lost their employment and needed some help with food resources, we're able to connect them with that,” she said.
One parent shared with the NHCS pre-K department that, “We truly don't know what our family would have done if she had not been able to go to CRECC [College Road Early Childhood] NHCS pre-K every day. We were living on food stamps and Medicaid, while I was trying to maintain a full-time class load and hospital clinicals. [...] Thanks to NHCS, I never worried about if I would miss class or be penalized for missing clinical work at the hospital, due to child care. And I never fretted about whether or not she was properly prepared for upcoming kindergarten. The ripple effect of this program reaches far past just preparing a child for kindergarten.”
Lord sent several parent testimonials, and some were pleased with the pre-K services, but some said they wished they could expand the program to eliminate waitlists. Funding is determined by the local county commission and state and federal governments. Those in the preschool community have said they might also seek financing from The Endowment to supplement when the government falls short.
Additional support is also offered to their pre-K students.
“We're going to give them that first early intervention, which is being in our program and being in a language-rich environment. We can assess through the data that we take throughout the year that maybe they need different accommodations, or more substantial supports,” Lord said. “And so we can start children on an MTSS plan, which is a multi-tier system of support, and if our team has decided that this student could use more resources, we start an IEP [individualized education plan] process, and [the student] can start receiving speech, occupational, and/or physical therapies.”
Getting into pre-K helps them perform better in kindergarten and later in 3rd grade, a milestone in how well the child is prepared for the rest of their educational years. [Note: You can view some of the district’s metrics on pre-K student performance at the end of this report.]
“If they aren't meeting [expectations] at a third grade level, and we didn't invest in early childhood, we can say, ‘Well, we could have bridged that gap, [...]’ oftentimes people don't look at the investment and see the true value of it, but I could not speak enough about the value of it,” Lord said.
The pre-K application is available here. The district's website lists eight public pre-K sites and nine private ones.
NHCS PreK Report by Ben Schachtman on Scribd
