Nashville must improve access to child care development centers | Opinion

Amid the economic and population growth that all of us are celebrating in Nashville is an alarming decline in the most important part of the city's educational landscape, a decline that has long-term consequences for our community – early childhood education.

All parents want their children to have the best possible start in life, and the importance of early childhood education is well documented. According to studies, children who are in child care centers beginning at 6 months of age are better prepared to enter pre-K and kindergarten, read at or above grade level by first grade, and form stronger social bonds with their peers.

The demand far surpasses the availability of quality, affordable child care

In Nashville, that opportunity has not always been available to every family or child. The simple fact is that a parent’s ZIP code or income often determines what type of start that child will receive. And because of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many young children were desperately in need of the social and academic benefits of child development centers, many of these centers closed, creating high demand for quality, affordable child care that far outweighs availability. This leaves parents with nowhere to turn.

Combine this situation with Nashville’s growth and you have more families chasing fewer and fewer child care options.

Saint Mary Villa Child Development Center

The number of people moving to Nashville each day is now close to 70. They are attracted to what this vibrant city offers and to the businesses, new and established, that are looking for talented employees to drive their economic success. But while the number of jobs may be growing, places for their children to begin their educations are not. I field dozens of calls a week from soon-to-be parents looking for an opening for their infant, and in most every instance, I have to tell them that the waiting list at Saint Mary Villa is at least 12 months long. It is painful to hear the disappointment in their voices when they hear this news, but it is the reality so many families are facing. They also face the reality that public preschool doesn’t offer aftercare, which is a hardship on working families.

Saint Mary Villa Child Development Center is one of the success stories. Started as an orphanage 160 years ago and converted to a child care center in the late 1970s, our driving force is to offer all children, especially our most vulnerable ones, affordable, high-quality early child development. We do that with a curriculum that teaches and engages the whole child. Learning through play, social interactions, stories, songs and teacher-guided activities, children can engage in the curriculum throughout the day. Our programs ensure they easily meet the requirements of Tennessee’s new third-grade retention law, which stipulates that third-graders who score "below" or "approaching" proficiency on the English language arts section of the standardized Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program test, won't advance to fourth grade.

We participate in the state child care assistance program, but for families who do not qualify, we provide child care on a sliding-fee scale based on a family’s annual household income. We also provide breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack to ensure everyone is eating well-balanced meals. Because we provide quality care that is affordable, we serve families from all over Nashville and the surrounding areas, which creates diversity within our classrooms.

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But Nashville needs to address the lack of child care development centers like ours. We need to focus attention and provide support for professional educators to serve our children through excellent, curriculum-based centers. Funds need to be allocated to prepare more early-childhood educators to meet this growing need, and businesses need to invest in centers for their employees to help solve this problem.

I have been working in early-childhood education for more than 15 years, and I have seen its impact every day in the eyes of the diverse group of young boys and girls – and the exceptional educators – I am privileged to be with each day. Nashville needs to make early-childhood education a bigger part of its own development so the newcomers to our city – businesses and the people who work for them – are benefiting from all Nashville has to offer.

Alyssa Garnett-Arno is the executive director of Saint Mary Villa Child Development Center on Heiman Street near Fisk University.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Opinion: Nashville must improve child care development center access