The City of Akron is launching a pilot program to invest in and revamp the city’s diaspora of early childcare providers.
The 12-month program, dubbed the Unified Early Learning System, will offer substantial business support to eight of Akron’s existing providers. The program intends to bolster workforce pipelines and increase employee retention by providing tools for business owners to adopt more sustainable practices.
“The folks who are early childhood educators need a community that has their back,” Akron Mayor Shammas Malik said Thursday evening while flanked by 17 educators and care providers.
Reimaging early childhood education in Akron a long time coming
Malik noted that Akron is the one of the largest Ohio cities without universal early childhood education. Lagging behind the rest of the country has benefits, however.
Akron’s team of educators, city officials and nonprofit employees have been able to learn from others what worked, and what didn’t.
Last school year, Akron Public Schools rolled out district-wide, full-day pre-kindergarten, which experienced staffing shortages and led to concerns about child hygiene and safety. Richelle Wardell, the city’s education and health strategist, said that’s a common misstep in early childhood education expansion efforts: You can have all the funding and open seats in the world, but that doesn’t serve students if organizations are understaffed.
That insight is why the first phase of the program announced Thursday at a press conference held in Summit Lake focuses on testing initiatives to bolster the business practices and employee retention in Akron’s early childhood education industry — instead of securing funding to get more students enrolled.
That effort will come later, the mayor said.
“This is not pretending that we’ve solved all the problems or that we figured out all the funding that comes later,” Malik said. “But this is about building a future where quality is consistent across our community, where providers are supported and not struggling, where families have real choices and every child enters school ready to learn.”
Supporting educators first, families to follow
The Akron approach is unique in that it will not open any new, city-funded child care centers, instead choosing to improve the business practices and employee retention at centers already in existence. The Unified Early Learning System is intentionally mixed-delivery, meaning that it intends to help providers of all stripes, whether they’re at a public preschool, a childcare center, a Head Start program or a licensed family child care home.
“We’re going to test elements of an eventual community wide system that has been built by our local early childhood experts and modeled after best practices from around the country,” Wardell said at the press conference.
Phase One of the city’s Unified Early Learning System appears expansive in the support offered to local early childhood education providers but will only serve eight entities. That’s by design. The intent of the first phase is to test supports that will lighten the load on business owners and educators while buying time for the city to find long-term sustainable funding to provide financial relief to families in Summit County.
That business-first focus doesn’t mean families won’t feel a positive impact. The plan calls for the hiring of a behavioral health specialist, who will visit each of the eight sites on a rotation, two navigators, who will help both the schools and families cut through the red tape to connect to public services, and three substitutes, who will be pooled for use by any of the eight providers.
“We often talk about infrastructure in terms of roads and bridges, and those things need investment, but often the systems that aren’t visible need support just as much,” Malik said. “And so this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to wrap capacity and structure and support around what we already have.”