Making a Difference
Pre-K Students Make Significant Progress under Texas School Ready! Project Innovative Model
Mary Ellen Holman, an educator for over 40 years, retired in 1992 having taught every grade except pre-K. So it was a serendipitous confluence of events that led Ms. Holman back to teaching young children at A Plus Preparatory School, a childcare center in southwest Houston.
Ms. Holman explained, “During the summer, I babysat and taught two neighborhood girls who attended A Plus during the school year. One day their father asked me if I would consider teaching his daughters full-time because he was so pleased at the progress that they were making.”
Ms. Holman acknowledged that she was flattered by the father’s offer, but for a number of reasons she was not interested in the opportunity. She declined the father’s offer and convinced him not to pull his daughters out of A Plus Preparatory. The persistent father went to the Director of A Plus, Francis Hester, and told her that he was considering pulling the kids out so that Ms. Holman could teach them. Coincidently, Mrs. Hester was looking to hire a teacher for the childcare center’s Young Learners program focused on teaching pre-K aged children.
“The father came back to me and convinced me to call Mrs. Hester,” recalled Ms. Holman. “After we finished our conversation, she asked me to come work for her.” Ms. Holman unretired and began teaching 3- and 4-year old children at A Plus in 2007.
Although the classroom lacked materials, furniture, books, and other teaching aides, Ms. Holman did her best to teach her students based on her four decades of teaching experience. However, she acknowledged during that first year more resources would have benefited her students.
Before the Mithoff Charitable Family Foundation gift, Ms. Holman’s classroom lacked the supplies and classroom resources required to create an effective, high-quality learning environment for her students.
Then in the 2008-2009 school year, Ms. Hester received a phone call from Linda Morgan, a Project Manager, at the Children’s Learning Institute (CLI). Ms. Morgan explained that through a generous gift from the Mithoff Charitable Family Foundation, A Plus was selected to have the Texas School Ready! Project implemented in one of its pre-K classrooms. Ms. Holman’s classroom was selected to benefit from this gift.
The Children’s Learning Institute (CLI), a part of The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, is an internationally recognized center for proven clinical and educational programs covering early childhood through the late teens. CLI’s goal is to make sure every child is equipped to learn and able to excel through creating a quality learning environment for all children through research-based classroom curriculum, teacher mentoring, and clinical programs.
Recognizing the importance of quality early childhood educational experiences to help low-income children close the school readiness gap, the Texas Legislature in 2003 created the Texas School Ready! Project, formerly known as the Texas Early Education Model. CLI implements the Texas School Ready! Project, an early education approach that serves at-risk preschool-aged children through shared resources between public and private pre-K programs. Participants in the Texas School Ready! Project improve children’s school readiness through a combination of research-based curriculum from the state adopted list; child progress monitoring to inform instruction; on-going professional development with mentoring for teachers; and participation in the Texas School Readiness Certification System. Although a sizable portion of the funding for the Texas School Ready! Project is through the support of the Texas Legislature, private individuals and foundations have also chosen to support the project by sponsoring individual classrooms.
With the Mithoff Charitable Family Foundation gift, Ms. Holman’s pre-K classroom is filled with age and developmentally appropriate classroom materials and resources.
With the Mithoff Charitable Family Foundation gift, the Texas School Ready! Project model was implemented in Ms. Holman’s classroom. It provided essentials such as books, shelving units, management charts, and other classroom supplies to create an effective learning environment for children. The project also invested in the professional development of Ms. Holman and trained her to use a web-based system to track the progress of her students.
Given her four decades of teaching expertise, Ms. Holman was skeptical that the Texas School Ready! Project would offer her any new teaching strategies that she didn’t already know and do in the classroom. Ms. Holman later acknowledged that her assumptions were incorrect. She found that teaching young children was challenging and required different teaching strategies. She also discovered the Texas School Ready! Project’s professional development program was a rigorous program that required an investment of her time outside the classroom. Ms. Holman attended teacher training courses twice a month and met with other teachers to share ideas and teaching strategies. “I initially found the program very rigorous.” Ms. Holman recalled. “I thought about stopping because teaching young children was so different than what I was used to. For example, when I said ‘sit down’ to an older student, the student sat down. But that does not mean anything with 3- and 4-year olds.
I had to change my mind set.”
Ms. Holman teaches a group of students about patterns in her pre-K classroom at A Plus Preparatory School.
According to Ms. Holman, Ms. Morgan, her mentor from CLI, was an invaluable source of support and encouragement. Texas School Ready! Project mentors support teachers by sharing classroom best practices and providing side-by-side in-classroom coaching. “Having a mentor observing and giving me suggestions was very valuable,” Ms. Holman stated. “My skepticism about the Texas School Ready approach began to fade away as the children made noticeable progress. I am a true believer now.”
In addition to professional development training and mentoring, the Texas School Ready! Project provides teachers with a web-based program that produces actual data about student performance so that teachers can make the best instructional decisions. For example, with this tool, teachers are able to modify their teaching strategies to target areas where children may need more support.
Ms. Holman recommended that all educators of young children participate in the Texas School Ready! Project. Ms. Holman explained, “I have noticed a dramatic improvement in my students’ learning. They now know how to write and spell their names, do patterns, and count numbers. This program has been very beneficial to them.
