Step into the Dorothy deLacey Early Childhood Education Center in Carpentersville and you’ll notice how different this school is.
The sweet smell of chocolate wafts down the hall as pre-kindergarten children in one room fingerpaint with chocolate pudding and gummy worms to learn about textures and how things grow.
Classroom walls are cut out to combine two classes of students with a bilingual team of teachers. Sometimes children are taught in Spanish, other times English, Mandarin Chinese or sign language.
Unlike traditional 1st and 2nd grades, the primary classes are made up of 5- through 8-year-olds. Children with disabilities interact with the other kids.
Parents visiting the school often leave their babies at a free on-site day care center, open 14 hours each weekday and five hours each day on weekends.
If parents need a resource book on child-raising or want to borrow toys, make a craft, learn about nutrition or exchange hand-me-downs, there’s a family activity center that’s also open 14 hours daily.
“I doubt you’ll find another facility quite like it anywhere,” said Supt. Norman Wetzel of Carpentersville-based Unit School District 300. “This is the future for preschool education and education for young children.”
The DeLacey Center is part of a three-year research program called Project Transfer, which focuses on educating the whole child. The federally funded project seeks to combine educational concepts with health and social services that cater to the needs of the family. It’s the same principle as the preschool program Head Start.
Eight schools in Carpentersville and Elgin are participating in the study, which seeks to help children make the transition from preschool to elementary school by stretching the Head Start concept through the 3rd grade.
In partnership with Elgin-based District U-46 and Barrington-based District 220, District 300 is one of six public school districts to participate in the study out of 32 demonstration sites nationwide and is the only project in the state.
Within the three districts, 214 students and their classmates are participating in Project Transfer, which is funded by the Department of Health and Human Services.
“What Head Start’s 27-year history said is for schools to deal with the whole child, his wellness, family involvement, education and social services,” said Jane Schumacher, principal at DeLacey. “We need to expand beyond traditional education.”
Head Start embodies the belief that children from low-income homes have the greatest chance to succeed academically if their families receive support through social agencies, health services and parental education. Without that intervention, experts say children are more likely to do poorly academically and socially.
Unfortunately, the gains children receive from one or two years of Head Start diminish by the time the student reaches 2nd or 3rd grade, said Sharon Winkelman, education facilitator of Project Transfer.
“It’s like being given one shot of penicillin. That doesn’t work. You have to give them more,” said J.S. Fuerst, a retired professor from Loyola University of Chicago who conducted a 15-year study of 680 students with one to two years of Head Start preschool.
If students receive Head Start support through the 3rd grade, Fuerst’s research shows that 80 percent of girls graduate from high school compared with 50 percent for those with only one year of Head Start. Boys fare more poorly, with 48 percent graduating from high school compared with 42 percent without additional support.
Project Transfer’s goal is to provide that kind of support.
Young Courtney Hoskin’s academic future looked promising after he attended a Batavia-based Two Rivers Head Start program. The educational and social services provided during those preschool years helped him adjust to kindergarten at Perry Elementary School in Carpentersville, his mother, Charlotte, said.
But four years later, those benefits have faded as the Carpentersville 3rd grader struggles with school work and often is in trouble at school.
Charlotte Hoskin believes that her younger daughters will be spared a similar fate because of the innovative experiment at DeLacey.
In September 1991, District 300 received the first of more than $1.9 million in federal grants to oversee Project Transfer’s three-year program. Funds for the study are expected to be extended.
The study will determine what effect a child-centered education, increased parental involvement and on-site health and social services have on Head Start children through the 3rd grade.
“We’re trying to look for success in school,” said Linda Kolbusz, Project Transfer program development coordinator. “Once (the children) are successful in school, they want to stay in school.”
With a view toward centralizing District 300’s preschool programs, the DeLacey Center opened its doors in 1991 to house all of the district’s pre-kindergarten students in classes of up to 15. A magnet school, DeLacey also has combined classes of up to 27 pupils of various ages for those students in kindergarten through 3rd grade.
The whole family concept begins at DeLacey’s front door. For parents’ convenience, the Head Start office is next to the entryway. A few feet away a brightly colored lobby with cozy couches greets visitors. Staff members offer their hellos, a hug, a cup of coffee and, if needed, someone who speaks Spanish.
Color-coordinated hallways are decorated with student art work, and a bulletin board is covered with projects the children complete at home with their families once a month.
Classical music plays in one classroom as children study at tables decorated with plants and illuminated by a lamp’s soft light.
“You feel like you’re home here,” Schumacher said.
Rejecting the traditional educational approach where children reach certain curriculum goals by the end of the year, the Project Transfer teachers reshape their curriculum to fit their students’ needs.
This child-centered approach to learning, for example, recognizes that children with little exposure to the English language at home struggle to learn the alphabet. Rather than force the child to learn his letters and sounds by the end of kindergarten, these teachers move on to other subjects for several months before trying again with their students.
“We finally realized that we can’t make a child fit into our molds,” said Linda Anderson, a primary teacher at DeLacey. “We have thrown out the idea that children have to be at a certain place at a certain time. Hopefully by age 8, they’re all at the same place.”
Anderson, who taught traditional kindergarten for six years, revised her teaching methods from handing out worksheets to discovering what the children want to learn. She then teaches based on their interests. Student Tashae Curington picked pizza. So Anderson taught fractions with pizza slices, writing by composing menus, addition by counting money and cooking by making pizza.
For 6-year-old John Steinhable Jr. of Carpentersville, the process seems to be working.
When John first attended preschool at the DeLacey Center three years ago, he shied away from his teacher and played in the corner by himself, said his mother, Liz Steinhable.
“He was scared to death,” Steinhable said. Now the kindergartner teaches his family songs in Spanish and sign language, as well as reads and spells.
“I think the school has done wonderful things for him,” Steinhable said.
The child-centered focus also helped Ebony Starks, 7, make a smooth transition from DeLacey to her base school in Elgin. That kind of transition is one of Project Transfer’s goals.
But the Elgin resident still misses DeLacey. “If we did everything right, we would get a pen or pencil,” Ebony said.
The road to success is paved with more than child-centered learning, however. Because parents are viewed as their child’s first and best teacher, their participation in their child’s education is crucial, according to Winkelman.
Unfortunately, one of Project Transfer’s biggest hurdles is getting parents involved, said Ron Brandt, principal of Sunny Hill Elementary School, a District 220 Project Transfer facility in Carpentersville.
“We can only go so far with the children and can’t help them more because they have problems at home,” Brandt said. “If we get parents to support the idea that education is important, their children are going to do better.”
To lure parents into the schools, Project Transfer sites offer family and adult education classes as well as health clinics and social services, such as a Women, Infants and Children well-child program.
Charlotte Hoskin’s family joined FAST, an eight-week program where a dozen families meet weekly at school to prepare and eat dinner as a family, sing songs, play games and discuss parenting problems with the staff.
“It helps you grow your family together,” Hoskin said. “You don’t know how important it is to sit down and eat with the family. Now we do everything together.”
Parenting classes helped Steinhable, who first became a mother when she was 16. “I needed more education to raise all my children,” said Steinhable, who described DeLacey as “a shoulder to lean on.”
Elgin Community College provides a GED program and courses in English as a Second Language. Federal and state grants also fund parent support groups and classes in teen parenting, domestic violence and single parenting.
Nancy Umbdenstock of Carpentersville said she felt overwhelmed by her 9-month-old twins. After she called the DeLacey Center, a trainer visited her home to show how to make inexpensive educational toys that promote child development.
By combining the services and funding of many agencies, Project Transfer offers families on-site support without duplicating efforts or costs, Winkelman said.
“It’s not one program, but a collection of programs,” she said.
This one-stop shopping approach means that families receive immunizations, physical and dental check ups, lead screening, mammograms and a host of other services at DeLacey.
Although overall results of Project Transfer will not be available until September, national and local education evaluators praised the program for what it has accomplished so far.
Last February, a national team of five evaluators from Civitan International Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham visited the eight local Project Transfer schools.
“There is tremendous enthusiasm at the federal level for what is being done in Chicago,” said Craig Ramey, director of Civitan. “At this point, the program is gaining extraordinarily high marks for its quality, its sensitivity to the character of the participants in Chicago, and its breadth and flexibility of focus.”
Local independent evaluator Sue Pinzur Rasher, director of OERAssociates, an educational resource center in Wilmette, echoed those comments.
“It’s a model for enhancing a child’s educational experience,” Rasher said. “If you’re really serious about educational reform, you have to go with a full-fledged model that addresses all the needs.”
Although hard test data is not yet available, Rasher noted several positive signs in Project Transfer schools: parents involved in school programs, children comfortable in classes, a streamlined system for health and social services, less family moves out of the area and children and teachers who were more excited about learning than their counterparts in traditional schools.
Tribute especially was paid to the DeLacey Center.
DeLacey has “excellent potential to become a model for a 21st Century school,” Ramey said. “It is judged to be a place that exemplifies developmentally-appropriate practices and the way to involve parents and children overall.”
DeLacey parent Charlotte Hoskin agreed. “Whoever created (DeLacey) created the perfect school.”
For the educators, Project Transfer has been a success.
“We have been able to achieve what we dreamt up three years ago,” Schumacher said, “and that’s exciting.”
