Real Stories

Parents in the Frog Hollow neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut have good reason to worry about their children’s education. More than half the freshmen who enter Hartford’s public high schools never graduate. In this largely immigrant community, school readiness classes in Spanish and English help parents prepare their children to start off well and go the distance. Mio Serrano is their teacher. This is her story.

School Readiness and Immigrant Families

"Just because you have a child doesn’t necessarily mean you know all about kids and what they need,” says Mio Serrano. “They don’t come with instructions.” Mio is the mother of a busy and curious toddler, Emilia. After her daughter was born, Mio stayed home to care for Emilia and took delight in watching her grow. But she sometimes found herself frustrated, in tears even, over her daughter’s behavior. “She’dthrow her cup on the floor and I’d pick it up and she’d throw it down again,” Mio says. “I’d think ‘What’s wrong with my child? Why is she acting like that?’ I didn’t realize she was trying to learn how the world works, testing cause and effect to see what would happen. I’m a first-time parent. There was a lot for me to learn.”

Mio now offers classes designed to help moms and dads better understand their children and how they grow and learn. She says her students are eager to help their kids get ready to start school and do well once they get there. Many of them are Spanish speakers, immigrants from Puerto Rico (where Mio was born) and Central and South America. The eight-week course, conducted in Spanish and English, is offered by HART (Hartford Areas Rally Together) with a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections Initiative in Hartford. HART works with residents to address issues intheir community. HART launched the Walkers and Talkers Program to help parents in the Frog Hollow neighborhood make sure their children are ready to do well in school. Mio coordinates the program.

“I recruit parents wherever I find them,” she says. “At parades, schools, clinics. I even go up to pregnant women on the streets to tell them about it.” Her students, in turn, become “walkers and talkers,” talking up the program’s benefits to their families and neighbors.

Parents in Frog Hollow have real concerns about their children’s chances of success in school. More than half the freshmen who enter Hartford’s public high schools never graduate. A scant 7 percent go on to college. Only 13.3 percent of the children in Frog Hollow live in families that earn more than $30,000 a year, compared with 65.9 percent in the greater Hartford area. Seventy-one percent of Frog Hollow residents are Latino. English language classes are hard to come by and literacy rates are low.

Before Mio could assist other parents, she needed training herself. After coming to HART, she began studying early childhood development and received on-the-job training in the Walkers and Talkers school readiness curriculum. She even translated the core curriculum into Spanish for her students.

What she learned transformed her relationship with her daughter. “Children’s brains are twice as active as ours,” she notes. “They’re learning all the time. I know I can help Emilia’s language development by singing, talking, and reading to her every day. I’m more patient with her now, I enjoy our time together, I can’t wait to get home to her at the end of the day. When it’s reading time, she gets the book and turns the pages herself.”

Mio visits each of her students at home before classes begin. A public school administrator told her, “they’ll never open their doors to you.” But Mio has found that the respect she shows her prospective students earns their trust.

“I visit moms who are struggling to get the rent together, very poor; who have problems with slum landlords. I try to come with the right attitude. I don’t judge them. I’ve found that if you come with a caring heart, they’ll let you in. And then they’re more comfortable when the classes start up.”

Classes meet once a week. “They’re becoming friends, and I think they’ll stay connected once the classes are over,” she says. Parents and children eat lunch together and then the children play in child care while the parents talk. “I introduce ideas in a relaxed way, and we read aloud from the curriculum. They talk about the things their kids have done that week and share ideas and experiences. That’s what they love most. It’s a way for them to connect, to have a social life and a break from their children.” Assessments show that participants are reading to their children more often and spending more time engaged in activities together.

“It’s really opened my eyes to learn more about children and what they need. It makes such a difference when I’m with my daughter,” Mio says. “Just simple, fun things I can do with her every day to give her a good start—it’s made a world of difference to both of us.”

Snapshot

•           Connecticut is one of the top two wealthiest states in the nation, yet Hartford ranks as the second poorest city with a population over 100,000 in the U.S., trailing only Brownsville, Texas.

•           Between 1990 and 2002, the Hartford labor market lost 33,500 manufacturing jobs. Families in Connecticut with the lowest income (the poorest 20 percent) suffered the greatest decline of income anywhere in the nation. The average family income in Frog Hollow is $17,250 and $26,012 in Upper Albany; both are Making Connections neighborhoods.

•           Hartford is home to a growing number of immigrant families from Central and South America and Puerto Rico. Seventy-one percent of Frog Hollow’s 9,000 residents are Latino. Approximately 4 percent of families in Frog Hollow own their homes.

•           Eighty-five percent of Upper Albany’s 7,000 residents are African American or Caribbean. Twenty percent of the residents of Upper Albany own their homes.

Just the Facts

•           “Investing in quality early care programs is the absolute best way to use funds,” according to a report from the National League of Cities. “The benefit is seen both immediately and in the long term...Crime rates are lowered, graduation rates are raised, businesses benefit from educated and committed workers, and the city sees a huge return in tax revenue from the increase in the workforce. The phrase ‘invest in kids’ is thrown around a lot, but when taken literally, it can be the smartest investment a city has ever made.”

•           The Office of the Mayor of Hartford has established an Office of Young Children to expand and maintain universal health screening for Hartford newborns and their families, provide every Hartford family with young children access to quality family support on a neighborhood level, and afford universal child care and early education to every Hartford child.

•           In her 2005 State of the State address, Connecticut’s Governor Rell endorsed pre-kindergarten education, and she increased state funding and established the Connecticut Early Childhood Education Cabinet.

•           Connecticut’s General Assembly passed the School Readiness Act in 1997, allocating $40 million a year to create and sustain new spaces in high-quality preschools for 6,500 children statewide.