News

New York, NY (November 28, 2017): Public Prep, the nation’s oldest and only non-profit network that exclusively develops exceptional, tuition-free PreK and single-sex elementary and middle public schools, and Parent-Child Home Program, the premier organization that conducts one-on-one home visits with under-resourced families to build literacy and learning-rich home environments, announced an unprecedented partnership to improve school readiness. Through the partnership, the unenrolled younger siblings of current Girls Prep and Boys Prep scholars who reside in the Bronx, will receive two years of twice-weekly home visits from a trained community-based early learning specialist.

Each week, the specialist will bring a new high-quality book or educational toy that is a gift to the family. Using the book or toy, the specialist — in the family’s native language — models reading, conversation, and play activities designed to stimulate parent-child interaction and promote the development of the verbal, cognitive, and social-emotional skills that are critical for children’s school readiness and long-term success.

“Public Prep’s philosophy is to start early, with the end of college completion in mind. As such, in 2014 Public Prep was one of the first charter school networks in NYC to launch PrePrep: the Joan Ganz Cooney Early Learning Program, its Universal PreK program to reach children at four years old,” said Public Prep CEO Ian Rowe. “Through this unprecedented partnership with Parent-Child Home Program and Leake and Watts, a PCHP replication partner implementing the Program in the Bronx, future Boys Prep and Girls Prep students who now are toddlers as young as eighteen months old will receive a two-year literacy head start before they receive automatic lottery preference as a sibling into PrePrep.”

For more than fifty years, Parent-Child Home Program has demonstrated that its research-based model has consistently had profound impacts on children’s academic performance, including the results below:

The partnership was announced at the inaugural School Readiness Forum, an event series designed to raise awareness about the most effective and scalable ways to close the achievement gap – with a focus on early childhood solutions, including home visiting. “Many have heard about the 30 million word gap – the difference in the number of words heard by low-income children and those heard by well-off children before they even enter kindergarten. That gap is devastating, but in too many cases it is only the beginning of a gap that begins in the birth to four years period and continues to grow as children enter school and move through classrooms unprepared to be there,” said Sarah Walzer, CEO of Parent-Child Home Program. “To achieve the real value of our investment in K-12 education, we must ensure that all children arrive at that classroom door ready to engage with everything that classroom has to offer.”

Parent-Child Home Program is one home-visiting program that proves it is possible to prevent the achievement gap for low-income children if we ensure they have quality books in their homes and that their families know how to use those books as school readiness tools – reading them, talking them, imagining them. Parent-Child does this for the most low-income families – 80% of whom live at or below the poverty line, providing them with 92 home visits (twice weekly for two 23-week cycles) with a community-based early learning specialist, who brings 46 books and educational toys over the course of the Program.

About Parent-Child Home Program – For more than 50 years, PCHP has been helping families prepare their children for school success through intensive home visiting. This evidenced-based early literacy, parenting, and school readiness model addresses the achievement gap head-on, building language, social-emotional, and numeracy skills. By reaching under-resourced families before their children enter school, PCHP provides them with the knowledge skills, and tools to build school readiness where it begins, the home. PCHP currently works with 115 local partner agencies reaching 400 communities across 14 states.

About Public Prep – Through its Boys Prep and Girls Prep schools that now educate nearly 2,000 students, Public Prep is determined to graduate 8th grade scholars who thrive in “right-fit,” college-prep public, private, or parochial high schools, and ultimately earn a four-year college degree. Since 2013, Girls Prep has had five graduating classes of 8th graders. There are about 300 Girls Prep alumnae now enrolled in grades nine through twelve. And ninety percent of the inaugural graduating class of Girls Prep 8th graders from 2013 is now, as freshmen, attending some of the finest colleges and universities in the country.

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