The Collaboration for Early Childhood Care and Education is a public/private alliance of family care providers, directors and staff from childcare, pre-school and kindergarten programs as well as early childhood educators from local colleges and universities.
In Oak Park, the Collaboration for Early Childhood Care and Education is demonstrating that combining a broad range of community resources and perspectives can attract other funders to achieve a combined vision and direction and can accomplish more that any one organization alone.
Projects of the Collaboration that build and benefit the whole community include:
providing on-site college-credit training for early childhood staff; administrative support through the establishment of The Directors’ Roundtable; implementing an education campaign – “Start Early: Learning Begins at Birth” to inform parents of the importance of early development and experiences; initiating a community-wide Early Childhood Dialogue between kindergarten faculty and early childhood providers on practices which are critical to improving school outcomes; conducting data collection and research on the experiences and practices of families with infants and toddlers in Oak Park, and launching a “Start Early: Literacy Begins at Birth” initiative offering workshops on ways adults can boost children’s literacy skills from infancy. (Wednesday Journal of Oak Park River Forest, April 25, 2006)
The Collaboration meets regularly to discuss early childhood care and education issues in an effort to forge stronger relationships between elementary schools and their feeder programs.
This website is dedicated to providing the latest findings and most up to date information regarding early childhood care and education.
