Center for Hispanic Preschoolers Moving Into Larger Home

The freshly painted rooms are stocked with Goya-brand foods, crackers and other snacks. Shin-high chairs around tables are placed next to a colorful reading mat. On the wall, phrases such as "We will clean up" are repeated in English and Spanish.

The space is the new Centro Familia day-care center in the basement of First Baptist Church, at 10914 Georgia Ave. in Wheaton, set to open this week.

For three years, Centro Familia, a Silver Spring-based organization that focuses on early childhood development for low-income children, had been operating a free bilingual child-care program for 3- and 4-year-olds in Resurrection Lutheran Church in Kensington. The goal of the program is closing the achievement gap for Hispanics in Montgomery County schools. But with just two teachers, the tiny operation could handle only 15 children in three hours.

So, in August, the "escuelita" -- little school -- moved to its new location to expand its enrollment to 41 children in all-day child care. Officials with Centro Familia said the center should open this week after it receives its final permits.

The school is supported by a $250,000 grant from the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services. In addition, it will charge tuition to parents who can afford to pay but will remain free for the 30 children already at the school. Tuition of $200 a week will help pay for the $1 million expansion project, said Centro Familia's office manager, Diego Alvarez.

The school provides lessons, in Spanish and English, to children about to enter kindergarten. But La Escuelita is also a school for the parents, said Erica Serrano, Centro Familia's program director. She said the school's primary objective is to promote interaction between parents and their children.

In many cases, Serrano said, parents the center works with are unsure how to supplement their children's education or don't interact with them. That can leave children starting kindergarten without proper discipline or basic social skills, she said.

"They get to school, and the teachers just ignore them in a way because they're the problem kids," Serrano said.

La Escuelita requires that parents participate in their children's homework, said Leticia Jurado, one of the school's teachers. Parents are given weekly assignments to do with their children, Jurado said, as she displayed the wall of macaroni-decorated photos the children made with their parents.

She said work or the obligations of large families often limit parent-to-child interaction.

In fact, every mother in the program is either pregnant or has another young child, said the school's family coordinator, Amparo Hincapie, who is working with parents who qualify to apply for federal child-care grants for tuition

Bibi Kahn's 4-year-old daughter is one of the school's students. Kahn said she wanted her daughter to learn how to write but was unsure how to accomplish that. Now, she said, her daughter is thriving even before she starts kindergarten.

"She's very happy, very social," she said. "She likes her teacher a lot."