This is Personal: Your Help Needed!

Most of what I've written here over the past 17 years is grounded in my experience as both a parent and teacher at the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool which is affiliated with North Seattle College through its parent education program. That program is now in jeopardy and I'm writing today to ask you to help if you can.

I would have ever become an early childhood educator if it wasn't for the parent educators at North Seattle. Val Donato, who oversaw the program for many years, was the educator assigned to the Latona Cooperative Preschool during our daughter's years there. I give her much of the credit for the kind of parent I became. Beyond that, Val and classroom teacher Chris David were the one's who urged me to become an early childhood educator. It was a career I'd never considered. They saw it in me. They didn't just plant the see, but watered it, and tended it.

Over my decades in the North Seattle system I had the great fortune of working with dozens of parent educators. As a cooperative preschool, parents work in the classroom as assistant teachers, and the parent educators are right there in the room with them, supporting them, teaching them, serving as wise women in a world of young parents. They offered their brains to pick and shoulders to cry on, while role modeling best practices. As families moved on to other kindergarten, the thing they reported missing most was the parent education -- not me, not the play based curriculum, not our state-of-the-art playground -- it was the parent education that was missing from their lives.

A new interpretation of the state funding model claims that parent education experience and college credit do not translate into "workforce value" and so will not receive state funding starting July 1. As the parent ed team writes, "We know this is not true. Parent Education programs build leadership, strengthen families, and create real workforce skills that benefit our entire community." I'm living proof. That three years as a parent ed student was life-changing.

This is program that has served families for 88 years, underpinning one of the largest and most successful cooperative preschool systems in the world. Thirteen colleges across the state will lose their programs if this cut happens, leaving thousand of families without the kind of support they count on to not just raise their children, but to do so within the context of the kind of village that every child deserves.

Parents would sometimes grumble about our monthly parent education meetings. It was a pain to come to the school on a weekday evening after a long day's work, to sit in tiny chairs. But the grumbling always stopped once the meeting began. We would then talk about our children, both individually and as a community. The parent educators would provide resources and offer counsel, but most powerfully they lead discussions in which parents shared their concerns and challenges, then supported one another as only a true village can.

It's shockingly short-sighted to judge this program based on "workforce value" even though it clearly provides that for working parents who must constantly juggle parenting with their jobs. Psychologist and author Alison Gopnik points out that the "central project" of every civilization is to care for the children. The economy is here to serve that project, not the other way around. Cutting programs that serve families will just make their lives more difficult. If we were really focused on workforce value, we would be expanding these types of programs, not cutting them.

I'm especially reaching out to readers in Washington state, but even if you're from elsewhere, your help is needed. Please click this link. There you will find 6 specific ways that you can take action. This is personal to me. Please help us save parent education for the next generation of families.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

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