GONZALES — The City of Gonzales and United Way are working together on a Community Impact Grant focusing on kindergarten readiness and out-of-school care.
“Part of this grant would help us inventory what we have, identity areas that we can improve in and increase the city’s capacity,” said Rene Mendez, city manager. “This is phase one in what we hope is several phases to increase the city’s ability to provide quality child care.”
The policy fellowship is sponsored by a state-wide organization, the California Women’s Foundation, who are focused on empowering women around the state to learn more about state legislation and county policies.
“We’re focused more on what we can do here locally and we selected early childhood development to focus on,” said Nina Alcaraz, senior policy and communications manager at First Five Monterey County. “The purpose of our fellowship is to provide advice on best practices for early childhood policy. That could be through research, interviews, specifically how to integrate early childhood policies into general plans.”
The fellowship also serves as strategic thinking partners for how to implement the early childhood policies.
“It’s clear and evident by research that investing in early childhood education services prior to entering school, not only improves learning outputs for all children but also enhances admissions in schools,” said Janette Rojas, Monterey County Office of Education. “It introduces grade repetition, decreasing dropout rates, and improving the achievement gap especially for marginalized groups.”
According to the Monterey County Impact survey of 2016, 87 percent of adults had a desire for their children to attend early care settings, but the cost kept them from enrolling their children in preschool.
The Community Impact Grant would be for $17,100 to be provided by the United Way and would be a one time, one year grant. The United Way and City of Gonzales grant would put a portion of its focus on kindergarten readiness. The grant will look at licensed child care facilities within Gonzales and other child care providers to identify them and see how the quality of the care can be improved.
The grant and policy fellowship arose when Alcaraz and the team met with Mendez several months ago. The conclusion that came from that meeting was two priorities, kindergarten readiness and out-of-school support.
Some of the ideas the fellowship came up with were exploring the public private partnership to maintain and enhance existing programs that are already in place. Examples included programs for school breaks, after-school programs or partnering with the Parks Department to develop play groups that would be supporting early childhood development.
