Preschool Development Grant Set to Help Areas Like Boundary County

The Idaho Association for the Education of Young Childrenhas released the results of a Idaho Preschool Development Grant Birth-Age 5 Needs Assessment. The assessment is designed to help Idaho policymakers, administrators and stakeholders understand early learning needs for families and children in Idaho. The AEYC also announced the renewal of the federal PDG totalling $6 million per year for the next three years, which will be used to help address some of those challenges.

The assessment revealed four key findings:

Idaho families experience a variety of unmet needs that inhibit their children’s ability to learn, including poverty, hunger, housing insecurities, lack of health care and inconsistent access to the internet or computers.

Child care is unaffordable for many Idahoans. A typical family in Idaho spends 25% of its annual income on child care for an infant and a 4-year-old.

Early childhood care and education is unavailable for nearly half of Idahoans. Nearly 50% of Idahoans live in child care deserts — communities that either completely lack licensed child care providers or the providers are so scarce that there are more than three children for every available child care space. There is a greater lack of availability in rural, low-income communities and communities with higher percentages of persons of color.

Idaho lacks data connecting early childhood care and education settings and early literacy outcomes. There is no system in place to understand which types of early childhood care education settings are most effective in increasing school readiness and early literacy.

Beth Oppenheimer, Idaho AEYC executive director, said that while the four key findings are “equally important as one impacts another,” she added that “the biggest concern is that, what we know based on limited data, so many families do not have access to basic needs (...) Children who are hungry have a very difficult time learning, impacting their academic and social success.”

The PDG will allow the AEYC to work toward expanding access to high quality child care. The plan is to expand home-based child care programs in child care deserts like Boundary County, where rural and low income communities are disproportionately affected. In 2020, the poverty rate in Bonners Ferry was 22.4%, making this study and grant money vital to Boundary County as a whole.

According to Oppenheimer, the PDG will also be used in a variety of ways to help support parents. Some of those plans include Idaho Public Television Early Learning campaigns, disseminating materials and creating workshops through programs like Kids of Idaho Love to Learn Early Literacy Campaign and Ready for Kindergarten.

The breakdown for how the PDG will be used also included child care start up technical assistance, child care start up grants, a number of outreach and collaborative programs.

“While there is a lot of work to do to make impactful changes, we believe this is an important starting point to help Idaho’s families and caregivers better prepare for their children’s readiness for school,” Oppenheimer said.

You can see all of the PDG work from 2020, as well as access more information about the AEYC, here: https://idahoaeyc.org/pdg.