“Good morning everyone and how are you?”
Jo White welcomed several of Akron’s youngest learners to her home-based child care center with this sing-along greeting, corralling them onto pillows they call “soft flowers.”
It’s Circle Time.
The four children in her care on this weekday morning, the oldest of whom was 4, were surrounded by cubbyhole shelves filled with toys, educational posters with shapes and letters alongside toddler-drawn artwork that adorned the walls at Circle of Life Child Enrichment Center.
Up next? Their daily walk in East Akron.
“We can walk, we can walk,” 2-year-old Chance Bray said while holding White’s hand on the sidewalk. White’s son, Kofi, 21, carried a sleepy-eyed 1-year-old, and Jennifer Kemp, an employee with the Early Childhood Resource Center, joined them.
“They’re really hands on with the students, they really want to teach the kids and have them learn everything,” said Chance’s mother, Amber Lyons, who recently moved to Akron. “And really put it in their heads, their minds, that it’s OK to learn, it’s OK to, you know, make mistakes. It’s OK to just venture out.”
Moments like these replay throughout the day. It’s what keeps White dancing during impromptu recitals and playing “Eye Spy” during walks. It’s one of the reasons she chose to shoulder the burden of owning an early child care center.
“You don’t enter this field for the money,” Kemp said. “You enter it for a reason — for the kids, the families.”
White’s business is one of eight child care providers receiving support through the Unified Early Learning System, the City of Akron’s 12-month program intended to boost early childhood education. The long-term goal is to acquire funding that helps families shoulder costs.
For now, the flagship initiative is introducing measures that support business owners and educators such as White, who, on many days, also serves as her company’s accountant, human resources liaison, lesson planner, bookkeeper and much more.
“What UELS is doing, which I love,” White said, “is taking that stuff off of our plates again so that we can focus back on the day-to-day connection and preparing these children to make sure that they’re ready for school.”
Why is early childhood education so important?
Akron’s children are struggling to read.
Akron Public Schools scored one out of five stars for early literacy in the most recent state report cards. In the same report, fewer than half of the school district’s third graders met state standards. The poor literacy marks overshadowed an otherwise positive report card, which saw APS rise to meet the state’s standards cumulatively.
Reading doesn’t improve in Akron schools’ higher grades. In the Buchtel cluster, only 9% of eighth graders demonstrated English proficiency on Ohio’s standardized tests. Across Akron Public Schools, eighth grade English proficiency is just under 27%; the state’s standard is 55%.
When reviewing third-grade literacy, a critical guidepost in children’s reading and writing skills, APS scored 45% across the school district, with only two clusters — Firestone and Ellet — scoring above the state standard of 57%.
“They change the bar going up, up, up, increasing, and now the bar has hit proficiency,” Superintendent Mary Outley said earlier this school year as she addressed the state report card. “And so that was the greatest change that we are facing, is ensuring that we get as many students to that finish line as possible.”
For decades, research has revealed that quality early childhood education can help young learners achieve literacy proficiency. One of the most recent examples is a 2024 study focused on Mississippi’s fourth grade reading leap from 49th place nationally to 21st in 2022, finding that early literacy intervention and instruction helped the state’s youngest learners outpace nearly half the nation in the metric.
In that state, a focus on improving teachers’ professional development, as well as adopting a K-12 science of reading curriculum — which Ohio recently mandated — paved the way for the remarkable improvements.
Meanwhile, White said she and other child care providers realized many of today’s children were not learning at the expected rate.
Data and anecdotal evidence like this explain why Mayor Shammas Malik and his administration invested in the Unified Early Learning System.
“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,” Malik said during a September press conference announcing the program.
White: Admin tasks often pull early child care educators away from kids they serve
White said mounting paperwork keeps child care administrators stuck at their desks and piles extra work onto educators, especially with smaller organizations, from developmental screenings and referrals for families to social services to the regular paperwork and accounting it takes to maintain a business.
One example is the Ages and Stages Questionnaires, a survey that gauges a child’s development. It tests gross motor, fine motor, problem solving and personal-social skills, helping providers identify additional support a student may need.
There are also provider agreements with the county that must be updated periodically; background checks for providers and all adult household members; provider medical statements; a detailed plan of operation; routine home and safety inspections; children’s health records; child attendance and enrollment forms; CPR; first aid and abuse prevention training certificates; liability insurance statements; dental and medical emergency plans; and, in some cases, food service licenses.
That’s in addition to required annual trainings, monthly reports for subsidy programs providers or families are enrolled in, and compliance updates when there are changes at home.
Suggested Reading
Ultimately, White said this led to a decline in the quality of education and care provided to young students in Akron and elsewhere.
“I am a believer in regulation, because it’s that check-and-balance system to make sure that we are running a safe and quality program,” White said. “But on the other side of it, when there’s so much red tape, when there’s so much regulation that you’re focused on being [in] compliance with the regulation, more so than connecting with this child on this day and working them through this problem.”
Unified Early Learning System: These Akron child care providers are receiving support
Public and private organizations partnered to fund the pilot, which cost approximately $950,000. Early commitments came from the City of Akron (nearly $300,000), GAR Foundation ($200,000) and the Akron Community Foundation ($100,000) to fund support staff, training, shared services and evaluation for the following child care providers:
- Akron Area YMCA
- Akron Public Schools
- Bright Hopes Community Childcare
- Circle of Life Child Enrichment Center
- Community Action Akron Summit / Head Start
- Empowered Early Learning Academy
- Our Future is Bright Child Care
- Wonder World Child Development Center
White’s work paying dividends for students
When Lyons moved to Akron, she knew she needed a quality daycare for her son. She was referred to White’s home-based center.
“I knew off rip that’s just a good daycare to go to because it’s quality,” Lyons said.
The smaller class sizes and White’s approach to early childhood education attracted her to the Circle of Life Child Enrichment Center.
After a community walk, Chance and his pint-sized peers settled in for lunch — pizza, apples, veggie juice and milk — before their daily nap. White and her son made sure all the kids received their fair share after burning off some childhood energy on the walk and inside a fenced-in backyard where they played with bikes, balls and each other.
Smaller class sizes and help from her son allow White to hone in on what the children need.
Said White: “I felt like I could do more one-on-one support of them in that way.”
