Barbara Mason was thrilled to be presiding yesterday over the inauguration of the sixth branch of her free preschool program, Alexandria-based Child and Family Network Centers. Located in an apartment complex on Duke Street, the branch would enable the nonprofit organization to serve 32 more children from low-income families who might not otherwise go to preschool.
But when Mason arrived, she was greeted by more than singing children and beaming dignitaries. Officials from the Freddie Mac Foundation, which had promised a $350,000 grant for the center, announced that they were throwing in an extra $100,000. The difference will allow the center to double its enrollment to 64 children.
Barbara Mason, director of Child and Family Network Centers of Alexandria, with City Council member Ludwig P. Gaines, learned her new center would get $450,000.
(Dudley M. Brooks -- The Washington Post)
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"I had no idea," Mason said as a roomful of politicians and child-care providers cheered. "Oh, my goodness, what a blessing."
Sixty-four new spots is a lot for the program, which has built its capacity over 20 years and today enrolls 172 children, including the 32 who started at the new branch in September. Besides preschool, the program offers health services, job training and English classes for foreign-born adults. One-third of its $2.3 million budget comes from city, state and federal funds, one-third from foundations and the remainder from fundraising.
Mason, a former kindergarten teacher, began the program in 1984 with six children in a converted apartment after every single kindergartner from that public housing complex had failed that year.
"My daughter was entering kindergarten, and I was concerned with the discrepancy I was seeing between the kids coming out of the projects and their middle-class peers," she said.
A major factor was preschool. More than just a warm room full of toys, Mason said, preschool is where children begin to learn important skills such as decision-making and critical thinking.
A long-term study released last month by the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation found that children from low-income families who attend preschool are by age 40 more likely to have graduated from high school and be holding a job, and they were less likely to have committed crimes than those who did not attend preschool. They also have higher incomes and are more likely to own their own homes.
At the opening, Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who procured $250,000 in federal funding for the preschool program, said children who enter kindergarten and "don't know the answers" often decide early that they will always be behind. "Sometimes they decide to be a cutup and disrupt the class," he said. "Sometimes they shrink into the corner. They never seem to recover from these experiences."
In Alexandria, 21 percent of children younger than 6 live in poverty, many of them immigrants from Central and South America, Mason said. Only 34 percent the children attend preschool before they get to kindergarten.
Mirroring the federal free and reduced-lunch guidelines for schools, the program accepts children whose families earn 185 percent of the poverty line or less; in Alexandria, 52 percent of children qualify. For a family of four, that means earnings of $34,000 or less per year, and it includes families that earn too much to qualify for Head Start -- restricted to those below the poverty line -- but can't pay for private preschool.
But even the expanded new center is not large enough to accommodate all of them. The program has more than 100 children on its waiting list and plans to open a seventh center in January.
The preschool problem is not limited to Alexandria; in Arlington County, only 14 percent of low-income children attend preschool before enrolling in kindergarten. Mason has been working with a coalition that includes the Arlington public schools and the Arlington Housing Corporation to try to raise funds for two similar centers there. Montgomery County has also asked her about setting up a program, she said, adding, "I think every city's going to need a program like ours because there are always going to be kids that fall through the cracks."
At the center yesterday, Toya Nichols, whose daughter Troi is a student, said her daughter had begged to go to school but everything was too expensive.
"Ever since she was 2 years old, I was looking for a place, a center where they would actually teach her something, where she wouldn't just be sitting around," Nichols said. "In Alexandria, all the places were at least $300 a week just for one child, and I couldn't afford that," she said as Troi, in a blue jacket and white tights, grinned shyly.
"She comes home, and she's singing songs and telling me things that Miss Mary taught her in class," Nichols said. The program has another bonus, she said: It also enables her to go back to school herself.
