Clarksville Elementary receives $69,000 grant for pre-K program

Brooke McAfee, The Evening News and the Tribune, Jeffersonville, Ind.
·3 min read

Nov. 2—CLARKSVILLE — Clarksville Community Schools has received a statewide grant to support its pre-K program.

Clarksville Elementary is one of 15 schools in Indiana to receive the Closing the Gap grant from Early Learning Indiana, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit. The $69,000 grant will help the school with the cost of furniture, equipment and educational materials for the pre-K classrooms.

This school year, the school expanded its pre-K offerings through the addition of new classrooms and the introduction of the state's On My Way PreK program. The school went from one classroom to three classrooms, and it moved from half-day preschool to full-day programming.

Clarksville Assistant Superintendent Brian Allred said the district is "thrilled and so grateful" to receive the grant, which will support the startup cost of items purchased for the district's pre-K expansion, including hands-on materials that are helping kids with motor skills.

The elementary school has capacity for 60 children in its pre-K program, and 57 are enrolled. Of the 57 students, 46 are enrolled in the On My Way Pre-K program.

On My Way Pre-K, a program run through the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration, provides free tuition to high-quality pre-K for 4-year-old children from eligible families.

Allred emphasizes the opportunity to prepare students for kindergarten through the increased pre-K offerings at Clarksville Elementary.

"Another thing I'm thrilled about is this being open to the community to help kids and help families and help the community," he said. "It's really about getting early childhood and pre-kindergarten readiness for kids so they can have a really great start to their educational experience."

"I'm just excited to see how it translates in the future, and I can't wait to talk to kindergarten teachers next year to see what they may be seeing in terms of kindergarten readiness," he said.

The Closing the Gap grant program launched this year in connection with the release of Early Learning Indiana's 2022 statewide report on early learning. A total of $1 million in funding was awarded to schools in 14 counties across the state with support from the Lilly Endowment.

According to a news release, the Closing the Gap report found a "slight improvement in both overall capacity and high-quality early care and education capacity, but these gains are threatened by workforce shortages and the rising cost of child care."

The report found that more than 70% of children ages 0-5 in Indiana do not have access to high-quality pre-K, but the percentage of children in need of care that have access through existing capacity increased from 55.5% to 61.2% from 2021 to 2022.

The report also found that counties with the most capacity for high-quality pre-K can only serve less than half of the children in need of the care.

"Our report confirms that we are making slow, but steady, progress in expanding access to high-quality early learning opportunities," Early Learning President and CEO Maureen Weber said in the news release. "Even as this work continues in communities across Indiana, we must redouble our efforts to ensure that every early learning classroom has an effective teacher and that families in need can afford the cost of care."