Welcome, Special Introductions, and Opening Remarks by Host/Moderator: Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune

Update on Brain Research and Opportunities for Making A Difference in Young Children’s Lives … a Conversation with Dr. Bruce Perry

Video:  The Tulsa Perspective

The Tulsa Area’s Challenges and Opportunities for the Next Five Years - Panel  - see report for speaker bios

Dr. Doug Stewart, Pediatrician - health

Howard Hendrick, Director, Oklahoma Department of Human Services - child care

Cathy Burden, Superintendent, Union Public Schools - education

Pete Churchwell, President, AEP/PSO - community and public engagement

Questions and Comments on Progress and Needed Future Action - moderated by Karen Larsen

Mayor's Call to Action

Closing Video

Summation and Thank-You's

 

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PRESENTATION HIGHLIGHTS

This is an exciting morning for the City of Tulsa. On behalf of the citizens of Tulsa and all the partner organizations for this event, I want to welcome you to the 2002 Tulsa Community Conference on Early Childhood Development.

Five years ago my predecessor, Mayor Susan Savage, convened a summit on early childhood development. Over 350 civic, education, health and social service leaders and public officials from the Tulsa area and other parts of the state attended.

They gathered to learn about new research on how young children's early experiences impact their brain development. They also learned how that research should guide parents, teachers, physicians, child care providers, and others to best prepare children under age five to enter school healthy and ready to succeed.

Since that time, a great deal has been accomplished here in Tulsa and around the state, thanks largely to the good work that many of you here today have done. And today, I'm very proud to convene this follow-up conference to celebrate our progress and renew our commitment as a community to its most vital goal, early childhood development and education -- getting our children ready for success.

Research on early brain development over the past decade has stimulated great interest among policymakers, educators and parents. The research has indicated the huge potential for early learning during the first years of life and the lifelong negative consequences of neglect of children during that critical early period.

I think in the last ten years, the long heritage of work in developmental neuroscience has trickled over into actual work with children, so that we now appreciate more about how the brain develops. We recognize that babies aren't this little passive hunk of tissue, that they're very actively learning; that their brains are incredibly explosive in the way they change.

We're learning more and more about how incredibly rapid learning is before children can use words to communicate. In the first year of life, for example, there are these neurobiological processes taking place in the brain so that the child absorbs and learns things that they will use in one way or another for the rest of their lives. The experiences in childhood —  in infancy, as a baby, even before they can talk —  are growing the neurobiological capacity to think when they're 40 years old.

Ninety percent of the brain, the physical growth of the brain, takes place by the time a child is three years old. And that doesn't mean that it's 90 percent functional; you're not thinking —  you know, you don't have 90 percent of the functions that an adult has. But it's a little bit like building a skyscraper, where you take 90 percent of your budget, 90 percent of your time, 90 percent of your effort, and you put it in the foundation, the superstructure, the wiring, the plumbing. And nobody's occupying the building, it's not functional, but everything you did in that first 90 percent of your effort is going to determine whether the electricity works right, whether the plumbing works right, and all the other functional characteristics of that building.

The brain is always capable of change; when you're 70 years old, you can learn new things. In order for you to learn new things, your brain has to change. So you can have a stroke when you're 60 and lose language, and if you practice, practice, practice and if not too much of your brain was damaged, you can reacquire your language.

The problem is that different parts of the brain are differentially plastic. The lower parts of your brain that mediate all kinds of regulatory functions, like heart rate, blood pressure, and emotional functioning, are much less capable of change than the top part of your brain, called the cortex. So in a very real sense, your brain is capable of changing throughout life. But its foundational systems that really allow you to do that 90 percent I'm talking about, are much harder to modify. And you certainly can't change the brain of a ten-year-old with the same kinds of experiences that you can with an infant.

Research work with high-risk kids and work in all kind of animal models shows us that whenever a child or an animal feels threatened, it impairs learning and the acquisition of information in a lot of ways.  Children who are having consistent, predictable nurturing experiences in a safe environment can literally express tremendous potential to do all kinds of things — to be empathic and humane, to be good thinkers, to be capable of tolerating stressors. All these capabilities that we want to give our kids get built in early in life as a function of our broad genetic potential and of the way experience expresses that potential, so that if you don't have the right kind of experiences at the right time, that potential is not going to be easily expressed.

We worked with children who were raised in very, very deprived environments for just one year. We worked with a child who was raised essentially in a cupboard; wasn't touched, wasn't talked to, wasn't rocked, wasn't cooed to.  Then that child was adopted by a loving, caring family, and they gave that child ten years of consistent, predictable love and nurturing. But the child still had profound problems with language, with forming relationships, with behavioral impulsivity, that were caused by that deprivation in that first year. And that's exactly the case, that because so many things that happen in the first three years of life, when you don't get those experiences early, you have these deficits that make it so much harder —  and so much more time, so much more money, so much more effort —  to recapture potential as we get older.

In a sense, trauma and neglect shift your curve of potential down, so that a child who has the genetic matrix to be incredibly good at all kinds of things is going to be average, and a child with the genetic matrix to be average is going to be impaired. And the child who has the genetic matrix to be just on the edge of okay is going to be a disaster, and that's kind of what we're learning.

In our work and the work of other researchers in this area, there are literally physical differences in the brains of children who have been neglected and/or who have had early life trauma, and in some cases it's just a stark difference. In our work with severely neglected kids, for example, their brains are much smaller and they have what we call cortical apathy, which looks like they have Alzheimer's disease, but they really don't.

We're trying to decrease the number of kids that enter the special education system, the juvenile justice system, the mental health system, because we know that each one of these systems has an increased utilization by children that come from these high-risk, chaotic, abusive, neglectful environments. And we also know that some of the most effective crime prevention programs are home visitation models, where high-risk, isolated mothers who have children are getting support and services so that they can provide high-quality early childhood experiences for their children.

Most of us want to do the right thing for our children, but it's remarkable how many of us, including myself, can get all kinds of education, and yet when they become parents, realize that they don't really know that much about this. 99 percent of the time we've been on this planet we lived in hunter/gatherer clans, 40 to 50 people, continuous dynamic interaction; there wasn't any privacy, and when you grew up, you spent time with people of all different ages. And so by the time you became of childbirth age, you had experience, hands-on experience, taking care of young kids, and whatever the prevailing childhood beliefs of the society were, you knew what they were.

We actually know more about children than at any other time in the history of our species, but that information tends to be over in these academic domains. The front line person, who's going to be either a child care provider or a parent or a judge or a lawyer or somebody who works with these kids, often doesn't know very much about normal, healthy development.

You are the best toy that you can get for your child. Spend time with them. And not just quality time; it's quantities of quality time. It doesn't matter if you come in and spend ten minutes with a baby a day and say, "Oh, this is really great quality, interactive time, I love you very much, and I'll see you later." You need quantities of that time when you're an infant.

It's a funny thing. I mean if you came from outer space and you looked at the biology of the human being and then you looked at the way we treated our infants compared to the dollars we invest in middle age and elderly, you'd go, these people must not understand the biology of their own species.

Where we spend our public dollars to change the brain —  mental health, juvenile justice, public education — they’re designed to change the brain. You're not trying to change the pancreas or the spleen, you're trying to change the brain. It's that time when the brain is less malleable. I mean it's plastic, it's capable of changing, but it’s harder. And then when the brain is most capable of changing, the first three years of life, we spend almost nothing; almost none of our public dollars go for that. And I think that this mismatch between opportunity and investment is something that we'll have to remedy, and it need not be that much money.

The human brain has the genetic potential for written language and for all kinds of inventive things and remarkable creative, empathic capabilities, but those have not always been expressed. I think if we were able to provide consistent, predictable experiences for our children, we would have so much more invention, productivity, creativity. We would have much less crime. We would have just a world that would be much healthier to live in, and more fun.

I think unfortunately the rate at which we are creating high-risk situations for young families is greater than the rate at which we are remedying these problems. So I think that we're going to have more and more disconnected, selfish, self-absorbed individuals, and I think we're going to have more kids at risk. And I think that we're going to get worse before we get better, but I am being optimistic today. In fact, I know that we can get better. But I tend to be optimistic. I know that we can get that right. In every generation, we have an opportunity to do it right. If we act on what we know about the importance of early childhood, we will see these transformations that I've been talking about. And in 2030, the world will be a much happier and healthier place.

That's fascinating. "The parent is the best toy," I love that. That rang so true.

Oklahoma’s legislators are going to have to struggle this session with budget shortfalls. We have to make sure that this issue gets on the forefront and that we let the legislature know that for every dollar you put in, you’re saving so much from the back end -- those huge amounts of money, millions and millions, that we spend on corrections.

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(Karen Larsen, narrator … playground scene:) Each day, at scenes like this across the state, the future of Oklahoma is at play, not caring about the national debt, not interested in our balance of trade or any of a dozen things that grace the headlines of the daily paper. They're doing what they do best, having fun, being a kid. Yet at the same time, educators, parents, and other involved members of our community are considering somewhat more substantial issues, questions like what are the best ways to get our youngest children ready for school? How can we ensure that they are successful in school and ultimately in life? What kind of future will they have, one ripe with promise or one of unfulfilled expectations?

(Teacher:) I've seen over the last ten years the percentage of poverty-level children increase every year, until at this time, with 41,000 children that we serve, 52 percent of those children fall into that category. It makes a tremendous impact on the classrooms when you get children coming into the classrooms who have not had the experiences that would provide, for example, the core language development, and that is the fundamental key for reading success, their oral language.

But over the last ten years, what I see as the major impact is that ten years ago in my classroom, I might have had three or four of those children, when the district level was somewhere around 28 percent. Now you're looking at half of the children — 10 of the children, or 11 or 12 of the children in a class of 20 to 23 are in that same situation. So it becomes very overwhelming for a single adult responding to the needs of all the children in the group and having a very needy group of children. Now again, in the large urban school setting; it's not 10 children out of 20. In some of our schools, it's 20 out of 20, and that, again, makes a huge difference in terms of how a classroom teacher can respond to the needs of those children on an individual basis. It's overwhelming.

(Teacher:) I feel that it's getting tougher as a teacher. I feel like my experience is that with some of the children, I'm really having to take a lot of time preparing things that I normally didn't have to prepare, not in the means of, you know, my lesson plans for the week, but I feel like I'm having to play part mommy, part nurse, part teacher. I'm having to do a lot for these kids besides just be a teacher.

We experience a lot of parents, though, that are not watching their children; they are not watching Sesame Street, they're watching Jerry Springer. I see that personally. We see children who are running around unsupervised. I see some homes with absolutely no signs of children living there; no books, no toys, no artwork on the wall. Those are very sad environments.

(Teacher:) The home assessment gives you a great picture of the experiences, the realm of experiences that they have had in their first five years of life. And sometimes it's shocking, when you see that they have lived for five years and they still cannot tell you all their colors, or they still cannot hold the scissors; you have to show them how to hold the scissors when they're doing the assessment. They are not counting to five; they cannot count out five of the blocks. They can't hold their pencil; they can't tell you when their birthday is.

(Teacher:) At Union we've been very fortunate in the last two years to have a week of kindergarten assessment before school starts. What it allows us to do is know where the children are and immediately adapt and adjust our curriculum so we are ready to start with the children who are coming in.

(Teacher:) The mission of the four-year-old program is to ensure full readiness for our four-year-olds, so that when they enter into kindergarten, they will have skills exposed to them or introduced to them that will ensure a likely success. At the end of the school year, the children will at least walk away from this program with a better understanding of such items as their shapes, their colors and numerals, and they'll be able to enter into the school environment more at ease. They will have had the opportunity of socializing with their peers. And also at the end of the school year we hope that we will have had a firm connection with their families.

You can always tell a child that has been in a four-year-old program or who has had appropriate early childhood experiences. It doesn't always have to be a four-year-old program, but it's appropriate experiences at a child care center or with moms at home that know all the things that they need to be doing to get kids prepared for school; it could be a church program. But you know almost the minute they walk in the room.

We get information from that assessment, and a lot of it's because they get to sit one on one with that child and do the assessment, and as they come in the door and you greet them, and you have a child who's shy and still hiding behind Mom or they're a little apprehensive, and then you have those kids that come in and, "Hi, my name is Johnny. What are we going to do today?" I'm like, you've been to Pre-K. I just know that you've had some kind of experience that has given you confidence to walk in this door and go, "Lay it on me, I'm ready to go.'"

(Teacher:) The children who have not had the preschool experience come to us at least, I would say, two years behind academically. And so our job is to try and make them grow two years in kindergarten, and then we have to also try to make them grow two years in first grade, and then in second grade we'll have to try to make them grow two years in that grade so they can eventually be at grade level by third grade.

(Father:) They've been teaching my daughter a lot about colors and shapes here recently, and they read things. They send her home with different books, like The Green Book. They go around collecting different pictures of different colors or shapes, and they teach my daughter a lot of, you know, triangles, the shape of a triangle and stuff like that. It would be great if every student could go, and I recommend — I highly recommend every parent to get them into the four-year-old program. This is a great program.

(Mother:) In the four-year-old program my child has learned structure. He's learned how to socialize well with other children, respect for elders. If I wasn’t able to get my son in the four-year-old program, I would be very frustrated. I'm not a teacher. I do teach in my home as often as I can, but I'm in no way schooled or have the stuff that they have there at school for the kids to learn.

(Teacher:) In many of our schools the mobility rate is over 100 percent. But what that means in the classroom is that if you have 22 children, you will have a core group of kids that will be there for most of the year. But you have 10 or so kids that are in and out or are replaced with other children; the movement is great. You have families whose priorities have to be survival, so they might be in your district for a month or two, and then when the money is not available for rent, they're required to move someplace else. One of the things that helps is if these children have been in a four-year-old program or have had early childhood experiences provided. Wherever they are, if they begin their kindergarten year with those experiences, if they start the year on a level, having successful experiences, at least if they are moving from school to school, they can stay with the kids; they can stay with their class. And that's part of the resiliency for those children; it would at least help them be somewhat more successful wherever they have to be, because they got to start out with the skills that they needed for success.

(Teacher:) The child who has not had quality preschool experiences and is already struggling to get a hold in their learning, the experiences aren't there. The academic and cognitive skills that they need are not there. Most importantly, they just haven't had the very important experiences in their lives. They start school behind; in the first grade they're already struggling. They're already, you know, realizing that the other kids know something that they don't know. They're looking for it. And the first-grade teachers, we're still trying to fill in those holes. We're trying to provide experiences, do the hands-on things that build those. But, you know, many of the kids are ready to move on; they've had those experiences. There's a big difference; there's a lot of gap in the ones who have not.

(Teacher:) Children aren't the only ones that learn in our four-year-old program. In fact, we have family literacy activities held once a month where we invite the families to come and participate with their children in our classroom environment, and at these meetings we as teachers model certain things, like reading stories to children and how we track print and how we discuss the pictures and the story. We've gotten comments before from parents that said, "I didn't realize that I needed to read with my child, because my child can't read." And we’re able to show them that your child can read, they're able to read the pictures, they're able to tell the story, retell the story, that all of these little things that we might find insignificant are directly correlated to success in reading.

(Teacher:) It's the parental involvement that's such a difference to some of the kids in my classroom. The parents that are involved, the parents that keep in contact with me, communicate with me, the parents that read with their children every night for just ten minutes, the kids that count things as they're going along the road in the car — those environmental things, they need to be exposed to those things all the time.

(Teacher:) Children who have had the preschool program, many times they’re our most-involved parents. When they get here, first of all they are getting a quality preschool program. The parents are made to feel wanted; they're made to feel welcome in the classroom, they're made to feel a part of their child's education. They're already seeing that connection. By the time they reach our kindergarten and first-grade classrooms, they want to be involved. They want to be a part of their child's education and they're looking for homework. They're looking for books to read with their children, they want to take them to the library. Those kinds of things are very important.

(Teacher:) As a kindergarten teacher, if I could get up on a rooftop and holler, I'd probably hope that every parent and every adult heard me say read to your child, talk to your child, play games with your children. That's how it happens, and those early years from one to five are vital; they can't be replaced. If we don't do it in those years, it’ s just not going to happen.

(Narrator, Karen Larsen:) Today we have begun to explore just a few of the host of issues that we must face to ensure that our youngest children get a healthy head start in life. That is exactly what early childhood development is all about — giving parents, educators and other child care givers a basic understanding about the tools, techniques and ideas that can fuel our children to reach their potential as adults. Yet the question remains: Will early childhood development come of age in Oklahoma? That answer is up to us, for what steps we take, what initiatives we undertake, will reflect our commitment to assure that every child is ready for school and well-prepared for a lifetime of success.

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The Tulsa Area’s Challenges and Opportunities
for the Next Five Years - Panel

Now I'm excited to introduce our distinguished panel. They're going to discuss for us the Tulsa area's challenges and opportunities for the next five years.

The first panelist is Dr. Doug Stewart. Dr. Stewart is a full-time Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the College of Medicine, OU Tulsa, and he teaches also at OU College of Public Health and the OSU College of Osteopathic Medicine. He has been in Tulsa for 21 years and he has served as a community pediatrician, a local health department clinician, a physician for people with severe developmental disabilities, and a health administrator. He is an active member of Tulsa's Family Health Coalition and has extensive experience serving Medicaid-eligible children and families.
 

Thanks for the invitation. I am a big cheerleader for the Community Service Council of Greater Tulsa, and I have a tendency to be somewhat of a demographer and epidemiologist for the population.

Of the challenges and opportunities in Tulsa, so much of it really isn't in the domain or control of health care for children. We have referred in pediatrics to a lot of the challenges of the new morbidities for a couple of decades now -- things like nutrition. We know that in school-age kids, for so many children the only hot meal a day they have is their lunch, so with the advent of some breakfasts and things, I think that we've come a long way. But we are still quite the fast-food nation; there's been a lot of press about childhood obesity that can start at a very early age. We're very interested in pediatrics, but it's much more than just what pediatricians can do. We all need to be aware and be advocates for nutrition. WIC, the supplemental nutrition program, is something we do very, very well in Tulsa and we need to continue to build on that. One of the measures of the success of WIC is that we just don't even find iron-deficiency anemia in infants any more, just because of the coverage of WIC for children that live in poverty. It has just been an amazing success story.

Promoting literacy, again, is not something that at all is the purview of pediatrics. Yet when Dr. Taylor came back to Tulsa after her fellowship, she brought "Reach Out and Read," a literacy promotion program that pediatricians could be involved in, and we've been able to participate in that for years until it seems like over the past year, we don’t have any more books. My clinic takes care of some of the poorest kids in Tulsa, and we are firmly convinced that the only books that those kids might have that are age-appropriate are books that they received free when they came to our clinic for well child visits beginning at six months and continuing on up to five. You know, something simple like that is a challenge, but there’s some gratification in knowing that we can help address these issues.

Domestic violence and child abuse, again, is not something that we necessarily have an intervention for, but pediatricians need to be a part of the complex and wonderful systems in Tulsa. Some of our leaders got together, I guess about ten years ago — the Tulsa Police Department and prosecutors and fantastic public health leaders like Felicia Collins-Correia. We work really hard to try to make sure that the new generation of physicians are aware of the impact of that.

Things like substance abuse and poverty are something that we don't have a very easy answer for, and oftentimes the root causes of things like that, but we’re trying to remain ever-vigilant.

Some environmental conditions have a directly measurable impact on cognition and brain development, like lead toxicity; we don't have as much of a problem as some of the older cities in the United States. But we look at things like environmental tobacco smoke exposure, and even the less toxicological view on environmental health, where children should have a safe place to play that's going to be free from unintended injury.

Within the areas that we more traditionally consider medical, we've made some headway in immunizations. Over the past year when we started having vaccine shortages nationwide, it's had a tremendous impact. In my short career I've seen some great advances in the prevention of some of the more common causes of bacterial meningitis in babies with a vaccine that came out about fifteen years ago. Our residents hardly ever see that disease any more; it has been replaced by another bacterial-caused meningitis that we developed a new vaccine for a couple of years ago. Great promise there, except that that vaccine is so expensive that it immediately doubled the entire cost of vaccinating a child to go to school when that came out. So that's a real challenge for policymakers.

Culturally competent care is an issue in Tulsa. Jan Figart has been a great champion for that. We try very hard to recruit physicians that speak Spanish, because we feel that's better than having interpreters; we are working on core competencies and training physicians to include things like this. About 10 to 15 percent of the families that we serve speak Spanish primarily. And then —  again, it's not necessarily pediatrics but very close to home, and affects health — we've got some great challenges in dental care for kids. That has all kinds of implications as you know for nutrition and self-esteem.

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Thank you very much, Dr. Stewart.

We're so proud to have our next speaker here. Howard Hendrick was appointed Cabinet Secretary of Health and Human Services by Governor Keating in January, overseeing 13 state agencies. Since 1998 he has also been the 14th Director of the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, leading a staff of 8,000 employees, administering a $1.3 billion budget, and overseeing more than 30 state and federal human services programs. That's a lot of money and a lot of employees. Previously Mr. Hendrick served in the Oklahoma State Senate for 12 years. He holds an MBA degree and a law degree from the University of Oklahoma. He served on the Governor's Task Force on Early Childhood Education. He's a member of the Steering Committee for Oklahomans for School Readiness and is a strong leader on behalf of improving early learning.

On a personal note, I first met Howard in the late 1980s in the State Capitol. I was working down there as Assistant Attorney General. Howard was a state senator, and he was one of the state senators who was respected by both sides of the aisle, respected by all state agencies. He was steady, competent, a hard worker, and he was a joy to work with. When he was appointed head of DHS, I was an assistant DA, working the trenches of child abuse and neglect, and there are always some new frustrations with DHS and who headed DHS and what it was and what it wasn't doing. But after Howard came on board, I know that here in Tulsa everyone noticed a real change in the way DHS operated, particularly in the child abuse and neglect area, and Howard brought the change. I knew he would, and we're so proud to have him heading up that very, very critical agency.
 

Thank you for your friendship. It has been many, many years.

Well, it's a real pleasure to be in Tulsa and congratulations on all that you're doing here today. I guess I only have two points I'm going to make; I've been given ten minutes and it's pretty hard for any politician, especially in the Senate, where you don't have any limits on debate, to limit anything to ten minutes, so I'll do the very best I can.

The two points I want to make, I'll tell you right up front. First of all, the number one predictor of childhood IQ is maternal education. The number one predictor of childhood IQ is not maternal IQ, it's maternal education. Well, when Mom is away at work, who's going to be the surrogate mom in terms of that child's development? Some caregiver, some significant caregiver. Whoever that child is going to spend time with, that's going to have the same effect as Mom if Mom's not there. So the educational level of that person is vital; that's number one.

And point number two I want to make is, dose-response matters; dose-response matters. Now, let me just give you a little bit of history of my coming to understanding about this issue. When I was in the Senate, I would characterize myself as an reluctant supporter of early childhood programs. I supported them, but it was kind of like, okay, but what value really is it? And primarily my thinking was influenced greatly because of some really anecdotal studies of Head Start. Some of the studies of Head Start in the late '80s indicated that there was no statistically significant difference in third-grade reading scores among kids who did and did not participate in Head Start. And I said, okay, well, these are fine programs, but you know, there's a fade-out effect by third grade, so why do we want to go spend this money here? It's okay, we can do it; it's better than not doing it probably, but okay. I wasn't very excited about it, but I did it.

But shortly after I took this job I actually got an opportunity to sit down and review the research done with the Abcedarian Project in Chapel Hill, North Carolina done by Craig and Shara Ramey. I had a chance to talk to Dr. Ramey about his research and came to understand a lot more about what was done in that project and why dose-response matters.

I came back to Oklahoma and did an analysis of our own participation activities to see what effect dose-response has on early childhood consequences. In the Abcedarian Project, Craig and Shara Ramey in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the early '80s took a hundred kids, all of whom were in poverty, all of whom had single-parent households, all of whom had authoritarian childrearing activity. This was before the days of Medicaid expansion where you had good access to health care and those kinds of things even for kids in poverty.

And they took these hundred kids and put them in two groups. To solve the ethical dilemma of what you do with human subjects in a study, they made sure that the control groups were better off than if they didn't participate in the study. They made sure the control group had adequate nutrition, adequate health care and adequate social services, but that was about it. That's more than they would have gotten had they not participated in the study. But they took half the kids and gave them a very developmentally rich early childhood experience all day. All day, and this is where dose-response matters —  all day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, birth through five — master's-level teachers; a very developmentally rich experience for all these kids in poverty.

When they tested these kids at age five, guess what? The kids who got it did lots better than the kids who didn't. There really wasn’t any rocket science to that. But what they did next was they took half of each of the two sets of kids and split them again. They took half the kids that had the developmentally rich early childhood experiences and put them in a very rich K-through-second grade program. How rich was it? Twelve to one teacher/pupil ratios, individualized learning plans, summer academies, master's-level teachers — a very rich K-through-second grade program, more than you get going to a private school. And they took half the kids that had this early childhood experience and just enrolled them in regular kindergarten, first and second grade; nothing special.

Then they took half the kids that were in the control group in early childhood and put them in the very enriched K-through-second grade group, twelve to one teacher/pupil ratios, summer academies, individualized learning plans, all those things for those kids who were in the control group for early childhood. Half of them got this very developmentally rich K-through-second grade program. And then they put the other half of the kids that were in the control group for early childhood into regular kindergarten, first and second grade.

They tested these kids at the end of second grade, and no big surprise about part of it: Half the kids, or the kids that got all of this, did the very best. They used the Woodcock-Johnson instrument, universally recognized as a very developmentally appropriate instrument in assessing child development. And of all these kids, the kids that got everything did the best and the kids that got nothing did the worst. But the kids who got the early childhood program and went to regular kindergarten, first and second grade, nothing special, did statistically significantly better than the kids who didn't participate in the early childhood program but got a very developmentally-rich K-through-second grade program, twelve to one teacher/pupil ratios, summer academies, individualized learning plans. They didn't do as well as kids who were in just regular kindergarten, first and second grade but got very enriched birth-through-five programs.

What they did next was nothing, until these kids turned 15. At age 15 they tested all these kids again and got exactly the same results. The kids who got everything did the best. The kids who got nothing did the worst. The kids who got the early childhood experience and went to regular kindergarten, first and second grade did lots better, even at age 15, than kids who missed out on the early childhood experiences but got twelve to one teacher/pupil ratios in K-through-second grade, and all the other things that went with that group.

Another thing happened. They looked at some other effects. Forty-five percent of the kids who were in the control group for early childhood were in special ed by the time they were age 15. Only 15 percent of the kids who were in the enriched early childhood experience were in special ed by the time they were 15.

Seventy percent of the moms of children who were in the control group for early childhood never graduated from high school. About 70 percent of the moms whose kids were in the enriched early childhood program, completed high school and got some college. So there's a nice family effect — when your kid is reading at a higher grade level than you are, maybe there's something for you by going back and advancing your own experiences.

So dose-response matters, because when they went back and looked at the Head Start programs, the overwhelming majority of the kids were only there part of the day, and the early childhood program here was all day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, birth through five.

We looked at our Oklahoma data. We did a little analysis of the child care that we subsidize in the Department of Human Services. On an average month we subsidize child care for about 45,000 kids; 29,000 of those kids are under age six. And over 90 percent of the 29,000 kids that are under age six that we subsidize are in child care centers all day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, birth through five. It sounds like exactly the same kind of recipe you find for Ramey's research group.

So we began to say, what we need to do is just change child care. And so what we've begun to do, and we've been very successful the last three or four years, is we've created the stars program. We grade child care, and the higher the number of stars, the more quality there is associated with it. We're not trying to run anybody out of business, but what we're saying is we want to subsidize child care for our kids, for kids of lower-income families. We believe all licensed care is adequate care for care, but it may not be developmentally rich for an academic experience unless we can get folks to participate. So we've invested tremendous amounts of money in terms of elevating the education level of caregivers. Traditionally child care is entry-level pay out of a workforce. So the question is, what can we do about changing that workforce in child care?

What we did was we introduced an agreement with the regents for higher education and said what we would like you to do is, at our expense, we want you to hire people at all the two-year colleges in the state and have those people go out and recruit employees for the various child care centers and train them on the college campuses of these two-year colleges, and replace their workers while they're coming to class. We won't give them a two-year college degree, but we'll pay for what is the equivalent of something between eight and twelve hours of college credit that's developmentally appropriate for the care that these kids are involved with. And so we'll pay to increase the education level, and then, by the way, as a condition of us doing this, we want you to commit that every one of these persons that come to your college campus will be assessed for their respective reading skills, and if they don't read at at least a tenth-grade level, we want you to remediate at your expense their reading skills to at least a tenth-grade level.

It's really been a great partnership between us and the regents. Last fall was the first year we did it; this is the second year we've done it. Last year in the first year of operation we had over a thousand child care workers enrolled in two-year college campuses, improving the educational level of that workforce. We're very excited about what is happening in terms of changing the workforce that delivers child care. They don't need to have a college degree, but if we can get them on a very rich curriculum that's developmentally appropriate for child care, that's great. And then we supplement their wages to keep them in that workforce, besides just giving them the training.

We've made a lot of progress. To date statewide, of all the child care that's delivered in the state that we pay for, 65 percent of the participants who are in center-based child care are receiving child care at better than one-star care. So we’ve made tremendous strides.

Dose-response matters. When I came back and did the analysis of Head Start in 1999, in that area, about 70 percent of the kids who were then in Head Start were in part-day programs. So what can we do? Many Head Start programs have started coming together with child care centers and are beginning looking at extended day together or with schools. If a child is going to be out of home, why not keep this child in a developmentally rich experience out of home? And so a lot of partnerships have begun to be formed between Head Starts, schools, and the various child care centers to make sure that the quality is here that you are seeing here today.

So, there has been a lot of progress. We've come a long way.

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Thank you, Director Hendrick.

Our next speaker will be Dr. Cathy Burden. Dr. Burden has been an educator for more than thirty years and is Superintendent of Union Public Schools since 1994. She was the first woman to be honored as the Oklahoma Administrator of the Year for the year 2001 and 2002 by the Oklahoma Association of School Administrators. She's a strong leader in education in the community and at the state level. Dr. Burden plays an important role in many boards and committees, some of which are listed in your program. She is currently serving as the co-chair of the Tulsa Success By Six® project described in your commemorative report.

And another quick personal note: I first met Dr. Burden back in the early 1990s when I was an assistant DA. Dr. Burden is such a class act, and she worked so hard on children's issues —  drug abuse and drug prevention issues at that time, and she's building the premier health club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, out there right now near the football stadium. I want to be the first member of that health club. It's a wonderful facility. You've done such a great job; we're so glad to have you here today.
 

Cathy Burden

Thank you, Mayor. I appreciate being invited here today. I know that I was invited as a representative of public education, but I want you to know why I really came: I came to bring the perfect child for you all to see. My grandchild is here visiting this weekend; that's been the little noise that you've heard in the back. You've been very tolerant of all of those little cooing sounds. Isn't she verbal, considering she's only nine months old?

I want to thank you for inviting me. I want to recognize first the many strides that have been made in the city of Tulsa and in the state of Oklahoma over the last few years, thanks to many of you in this room. In many ways Oklahoma, surprisingly, has taken a leading role in some of the issues about early childhood education, particularly those that are supporting four-year-old programs. Oklahoma is one of only three states in the nation, along with Georgia and New York, to fund free pre-kindergarten programs for four-year-olds for any parent who wants it, regardless of income. Last school year in Tulsa County 4,424 children attended such a program, which is a tenfold increase over the number of children who were served in schools by this program just seven years ago. Today four-year-old programs are viewed as a continuing and important part of the public school, tied to the established curriculum and offering a continuity that allows children to feed into a kindergarten program without disruption.

Oklahoma has also taken the lead in planning for an all-day kindergarten program though the funding may now be in jeopardy, unfortunately. Beginning with the next school year, the law says that all-day kindergarten programs will be funded at a higher weight than half-day programs, which brings an incentive for districts to develop those programs. If the law continues in its current form, by the year 2006, all districts will be required to offer a full-day kindergarten program.

Public education is now recognized all across the country as the thing that is going to stimulate our economic growth. Education will enable our citizens to respond to a changing technological world. And schools, rightfully, should be held accountable for producing a quality product. However, our schools are being held accountable over things for which they have little control. Students are coming into schools at age five too often unprepared to take advantage of academic opportunities provided. It is the early years, from birth through the age of five, that are critical to a student’s later success and quality preschool as well as all-day kindergarten program will certainly provide the proper start that children need to benefit from academic instruction.

Tulsa-area schools have taken a leading role in providing for proper developmental assessment. Well over 2,000 kindergartners in Tulsa Public Schools and Union Public Schools have been provided individual assessments before beginning their kindergarten year. This exemplary screening gives teachers an opportunity to evaluate their level of readiness and mastery of pre-basic academic skills so they can tailor the classroom experiences from the beginning to the needs of the individuals.

Other activities, including the Success By Six initiatives that are coordinated by the Tulsa Area United Way and the Community Service Council, have built awareness and have tried to increase the standards and accountability for care facilities by implementing the Reaching For Stars project that Mr. Hendrick mentioned. The State continues to make grants available for the Parents As Teachers program, which is one of the most valuable programs that I think schools and communities can offer. It serves young families, offering guidance and assistance, assessment and education for parents, who sometimes feel alienated because they don't have the support of an extended family. Right now in the Union Public School district, we are serving 150 families, and we have many more families on the waiting list who would love the opportunity to have a home visit by a family educator who offers developmentally appropriate activities and advice.

We've come a long way, and we have a long way still to go. Our challenges are still very great. One of the most interesting challenges is growing the diversity in our community and the fact that many young children come to us when school begins, not only needing to learn their pre-academic skills but to learn the English language. Union students report that they speak as many as 85 different languages in their homes. Now, we're not that big. We're the ninth-largest school district in the state with 13,500 students. Twelve percent of our students report that they come from bilingual homes. The growth in the Hispanic population has been particularly significant. The 2000 census indicates that there's an unprecedented growth in the Tulsa area in the Hispanic population over the last ten years. It has grown 181 percent. There has been a 108 percent growth all across the state of Oklahoma, but more so in our area. 7.6 percent of our state’s children under the age of five are from an Hispanic origin. In my school district alone, we have over 10 percent of our students who report their ethnicity as Hispanic.

If the language difficulty is not enough of a challenge for teachers, the most overriding challenge that we have every day is helping the children who are affected by poverty. I'm not just talking about poor; there are families that have few financial resources that still provide adequate support for their children. A few of the 25 percent of the children who live in poverty in Oklahoma are coming from poor but educated and hopeful families. I'm talking about the families who are now affected by generational poverty. These are families who in addition to a lack of income have lives compounded by addiction, violence, early and multiple pregnancies, poor parenting, incarceration, unfinished basic education and hopelessness.

In these circumstances, children are born into environments of chaos and neglect, and of course they do not present themselves at the schoolhouse door for kindergarten ready to read. Unsurprisingly to any of us in education, a study by the Economic Policy Institute shows that there is a direct link between socioeconomic level and the child's reading and math ability by the time they hit school. The achievement gap for children from poverty is established before they ever begin school, and typically children from poverty enter school one-and-a-half years to two years behind.

When the Center for Educational Statistics studied a nationally-representative sample of children entering kindergarten, they found that poor children were significantly behind other children in all areas - academically, socially, emotionally and in terms of their health. Kindergarten children in the lowest fifth of the socioeconomic status came from families who owned just 38 books, compared to those in the top end that owned 108 books for their kindergartners. Twenty percent of the poorest kindergartners had a computer in their home, compared with 85 percent of those children in the top income level. Children from poorer households spent more time watching television, 18 hours per week, compared to only 11 hours per week for those in the highest income status. Evidence of such disparity is found in children's achievement scores as they enter school, as they are measured during school, and into adulthood. As a matter of fact, we can see that even at kindergarten level, children at the highest socioeconomic levels score 60 percent above those in the lowest level when they are tested in math and reading.

Definitely, as a public school representative, I'm here to say we should expect to hold our schools accountable. We should expect our schools to increase achievement for all students, regardless of circumstances. But it is totally unreasonable to expect schools to completely eliminate large pre-existing conditions and inequalities without special resources, particularly when they're already under funded and over-challenged. The impact of poverty on children must be countered by early and frequent early childhood experiences. We must intervene early, and we must continue to increase the amounts of time and the amounts of quality that the programs have, or they'll never catch up. Half-time, part-year programs are models that are unsatisfactory today, particularly if a child returns to a disadvantaged home.

We have changing families in our society today. The need for early child care and education is no longer an issue that is owned wholly by the family, because so many children are spending time in child care and education facilities that are outside of the home. We need to see that the investment in early child care is the same kind of investment that we need to make in public education. It is an investment in our future.

Today there are more women in the workforce than ever before. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2000 more than 60 percent of the mothers with children under the age of three were in the labor force. The role of women has changed in our society, and the majority of women who are workers contribute significantly to their homes. As a matter of fact more than half, 57 percent of them on average, produce more than half of the incomes in their homes. So their wages are there to help provide essentials, and also contribute to a better standard and quality of living for their families. Recent estimates indicate that approximately 68 percent of three-year-olds, 78 percent of four-year-olds and 84 percent of five-year-olds are receiving some kind of care outside of their homes, which translates into well over 7 million preschoolers in child care. The quality of those programs and the quality of education that those young children are seeing in such settings lays the building blocks for future academic success.

Just like in the quality of public schools, early learning opportunities should be viewed as an investment in the quality of our community and the future workforce of our society. These programs are cost effective and prevent later, more costly and sometimes ineffective remediation and special programs. Enriched early child care and education programs have long-lasting effects.

Longitudinal studies have shown gains in IQ, in reading and math scores, in lower detention rates, in higher high school completion rates, and significantly lower rates of juvenile arrest than for children who did not participate in such programs. Even upon reaching adulthood, participants who have taken advantage of early childhood programs that have been of high quality are more likely to attend four-year colleges. They are more likely to have not been arrested. They have mean monthly earnings double those who have not participated, and they are much less likely to receive public assistance.

We've known for a long time that for every dollar invested in quality early childhood programs, society reaps many benefits; as much as $7.16 a day in welfare, special education and criminal justice costs. The benefits to society make that hefty price tag that we're all worried about for early intervention well worth it, and easily offset by lower arrests, higher tax revenues and a better-prepared workforce.

Over the last decade, every state has made a considerable commitment to support early childhood initiatives in some form. Today every state subsidizes kindergartens for at least a portion of the school day. Twenty-five states pay for kindergarten for a full day, and eight states require full-day kindergarten. Only nine states in the country do not require kindergarten. Thirty-nine states provide state-financed pre-kindergarten for at least some of their three- to five-year-olds, which is up about tenfold from 1980. Annual state spending for some programs now exceeds $1.9 billion. Today six states use kindergarten screening to gauge school readiness, and 15 states require diagnostic or developmental testing of pre-kindergartners.

Despite the growth, however, with state efforts and federal funds, access to high-quality early childhood education remains out of the reach of most families today, particularly those who we might classify as "working poor." Today's families pay 60 percent of the cost of child care, governments pay 39 percent, and the private sector contributes less than 1 percent. None of the federal programs reach more than a fraction of those children who need their services, and states' financial commitments to early childhood education vary widely; so do eligibility requirements and the number of students who actually receive services.

Despite the large jump in state efforts, federal spending still outpaces states' efforts three to one. Early care and education will improve only if states build an infrastructure to support high-quality programs. That means a continuation of rigorous standards and regulation for early childhood providers of all types; an adequate system for training; credentialing and paying early childhood workers a decent wage; better methods for tracking progress and measuring success; and a streamlined government structure. Achieving those objectives will require a significant and stable source of revenue. Other states have done it; let me give you some examples.

In 1998 in California, voters approved a 50-cent tax on tobacco products to help support just early childhood education initiatives. Arkansas recently enacted a surcharge on beer that is earmarked just for early childhood care, and Georgia's pre-kindergarten program is financed through state lottery proceeds. Nationally as well as in Oklahoma, the current revenue shortfalls do give us pause. They could pit the services for youngest children against funding for K-12 education. The universal education program for four-year-olds that has made Oklahoma unique among states may be a place that can be viewed as a place to cut when the legislature reconvenes. Most of the states have subsidized such a program only for children who are in severe financial need. Certainly I expect that the kindergarten program that is to be implemented by 2006 that will require all-day programs may be either postponed or shelved if in fact the budget does not come back, because it will tax the system tremendously to support the additional costs of that program.

Despite the gloomy economic news however, the message about the importance of early childhood opportunities provides an unprecedented opportunity for early care and education advocates. Every candidate for governor wants to be the "education governor." Every person running for the legislature wants to improve schools. Every poll shows that parents are more concerned about the quality of their child's local school than anything else on the agenda. School improvement, student performance, academic achievement; these have become the mantra of our time. Well, we all know that investment at the time when children are most receptive, when they can develop rather than overcome failure - that is the key. This is the time to live up to the vision that John Dewey stated generations ago: "What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must be what the community wants for all of its children." Thank you.

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Mayor LaFortune

Thank you so much, Dr. Burden.

Our next panelist is Pete Churchwell. Mr. Churchwell is a long-time Tulsa corporate and civic leader. He became president of PSO in 1996 and Oklahoma state president of AEP/PSO in 2000. Mr. Churchwell has chaired the Steering Committee for Oklahomans for School Readiness and was a Governor's appointee and chair of the Governor's Task Force on Early Childhood Education.

He has provided leadership for the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce annual campaign and the Tulsa United Way campaign. He helped spearhead corporate support for the successful 71-percent voter passage of the 1999 Tulsa school bond election. He chaired the state's 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission, the Oklahoma Education Oversight Board, and the Council on Education and Workforce Development, and has been active on many other boards at the local and state levels. He is also heading up the new Oklahomans for Future Progress that is engaging the gubernatorial and other candidates to address early childhood education.

Can you imagine a man as busy as he is who's done as much for our community on the critical issues that are facing us? Pete Churchwell, we're very glad to have you up on our stage.
 

Pete Churchwell

I notice that the flyer said "Presentations by local experts." I certainly don't consider myself an expert on early childhood issues, and I'm not nearly as local as I used to be since I now live and work in Oklahoma City. But maybe being fifty miles or more away from Tulsa does help me qualify as an expert in some cases.

As I looked at my fellow panelists today, I decided it would probably be best to represent myself in the way I really view myself, as an average Oklahoman, a working person, a parent and a grandparent. Because of some of my involvement in children's issues, I've learned an awful lot about kids over the last few years, particularly Oklahoma kids. I was a person that was raised in a two-parent, brother-and-sister family with a stay-at-home mom. I raised my three children in a two-parent situation with a stay-at-home mom, and I've come to realize over the last few years there's a lot that I didn't know and that my parents didn't know about raising children.

I think over the last few years, the most important thing that I learned is that I think every parent, every family member in Oklahoma, needs to know what I now know.  It's the responsibility of each of you in this room.  We're talking about from an average parent’s and average family’s point of view; we're talking about education, we're talking about information, and we're talking about sharing what we know with as many people as we can, about the importance of nurturing and caring for young children and helping them to become prepared and ready to succeed, not only in school but in life.

So what do we know? A lot of what we know about young children as average Oklahomans, as working people, as parents, you've already heard from some of our other panelists. We know, for example, that in getting Oklahoma kids healthy and eager to learn and succeed, particularly our at-risk children, we have more of a challenge in Oklahoma than many other states. And I can be corrected on this, because I know the numbers are changing, but the last time I looked at the numbers, over one-half of all of our Oklahoma children between birth and age five live in an at-risk environment. We know that poverty, as you've already heard, and illiteracy are the most compelling social and economic issues in the state of Oklahoma. We are the seventh-poorest state in America. The problems that we face, in our public schools and in numerous aspects of our economy, including our problems with young children, are not going to get better overnight; in all likelihood they will get worse.

We know about the high incarceration rates that we have in Oklahoma. We know that we rank in the bottom ten states in indicators for healthy births, particularly for women of low education. And we've already heard that we know about the direct link between a mother's education and a child's ability to succeed in school. We know that all parents, rich and poor and every category in between, want the best for their children, and they are hungry for information about how to be the best parent they can be. I was hungry for that information. But like many of them, I didn't know where to go to get whatever information was available.

For the first time we know now, as a result of a poll that was conducted by the University of Oklahoma on behalf of Oklahomans for Future Progress —  and I'll talk a little bit more about that organization in a moment —  we know that 92 percent of Oklahomans agree that the needs of young children should be the top legislative priority. It's clear from what we've heard today and what we know, what you've heard from top officials of the State of Oklahoma, agency officials like Howard, the medical community, from one of the very top educators in the state, that public schools and teachers, even heroic teachers like Andy McKenzie, cannot do it all. They're going to have to have some help on the front end, when those young minds are most open to learning and growing and being prepared for success in life and in school.

We know that 97 percent of Oklahomans agree that high-quality child care should be available and affordable for parents who need it. Eighty-eight percent of Oklahomans believe that we should raise awareness of what children need when they are cared for inside and outside the home. Ninety-eight percent agree that young children should have early childhood experiences that ensure they enter school prepared and ready to succeed, and nearly 90 percent agree that we should expand family literacy programs.

You've already seen and heard we know more today than at any time in history about how young brains develop and how important those key early experiences are to future success. We know that the brain achieves 90 percent of its total growth in the earliest years of life, and we know what poor odds there are for recovery for the kids that miss those critical developmental experiences.

We know that parents, educators, religious, business and civic leaders across this state are actively taking on the early childhood development challenges in their communities to help secure Oklahoma's future. Communities like Ada, Bartlesville, Durant, Enid, Guthrie, Coweta, Muskogee, Norman, Oklahoma City, Ponca City, Shawnee, Stillwater, and Tulsa all have aggressive Success By Six® programs in place or are starting programs at the community level to focus on children's issues in those communities. And that's where real success takes place, at the community level.

We know that much of what has happened across Oklahoma in the early childhood arena is because of actions that began in child-friendly Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa is to be congratulated for its historic, often groundbreaking efforts to help young children. It makes me very proud to be from Tulsa.

And finally, we know that there are people who do not support our activities and our approaches. There are those who have turned a bipartisan effort into a partisan political issue by claiming that people like yourselves, people like folks on this panel this morning, are involved in actions that undermine the family, that undermine traditional family values and undermine parental rights —  that the goal of early childhood efforts is to remove children from parents, to have them raised in state-run daycare centers and forced to attend preschool. These same people claim that "child advocates" —  and that's always in quotes; I never have quite understood why they put that — I mean, that's almost like saying "sniper" in quotes; that sort of thing —  that we are part of a nationwide plot to bend young minds to a particular way of thinking and a particular set of beliefs. I don't think there's any reasonable, right-thinking person in Oklahoma that believes this or has this agenda or is advocating this approach. This is a political smokescreen that allows these opponents to marginalize children's issues while they pursue their own narrow political agenda.

We need to focus our attention on these legislators who for whatever reason do not understand or appreciate these issues. And frankly, we can start right here in Tulsa. We have a very interesting bit of irony or dichotomy in Tulsa. The leadership for the early childhood efforts in the legislature has come out of the Tulsa area's legislative delegation. Representative Ron Peters, who is here, and Senator Ted Fisher from Sapulpa have led the fight for legislation in Oklahoma City. And at the same time, nearly one-third of the 30-member Tulsa-area delegation do not support legislation concerning children and encouraging the government and the private sector to work together. We've got work to do right here in our own back yard with our friends and our neighbors and people that we know. We haven't done a very good job of educating others as well as we've educated ourselves.

That's what we know; so what can we do with what we know? Well, I would suggest that we do two things today. For the time remaining between today and these November elections, I would ask you to get involved with Oklahomans for Future Progress. This is a volunteer organization that includes former governors Henry Bellmon, David Boren and George Nigh. Their goal is to see to it that candidates across the state have the opportunity to share their beliefs with the voting public on early childhood issues, so that we can all see where candidates stand on this important issue.

Second, I would ask you to get involved immediately with your local Success By Six® program, or get involved with Oklahomans for School Readiness, or better yet get involved with both of these organizations. Oklahomans for School Readiness is a volunteer organization whose mission it is to support Success By Six® programs across the state, to encourage the passage of legislation bridging the government and private sectors together to work on children's issues, to create public engagement and awareness programs, and to work with key state agencies to help better coordinate and deliver programs and services to young children and their families.

There's a tremendous amount of momentum behind these issues right now. But without your help and support, we won't be able to keep the ball rolling. Please get involved with these organizations. Talk to your neighbors; share what you know, what you've learned about early childhood issues and how important they are, and help us keep this activity alive and well. Thank you.

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Mayor LaFortune

During the mayoral campaign, I had dinner with Dan, and he mentioned to me, "You know, Bill, I've got a great campaign theme for you." I said, "What's that?" He said, "Why don't you try to use the theme of 'making Tulsa the most child-friendly city in America'?" Like that one? I already had my theme so I had to scratch it, but it was a wonderful idea and one that we should think about.

I've been asked several times here by the media during the break about why are we doing this, why this conference, and we talked about jump-starting, renewing our commitment to the community. I certainly believe that families should be the ones to provide early childhood education and development. It should be the families. But the question today from that statement is, what if the families aren't? Do we just allow those children to float along, knowing what we know now from what the research and statistics tell us? And the answer is an easy one: We don't. If we care about our children, if we care about our future as a society, we don't let those children just float along without any help.

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Mayor LaFortune, thank you so very much, and thank you once again for inviting me to return to the fifth anniversary of our Early Childhood Education Conference. It is so exciting for me as a member of the community to see how much Tulsa is doing and all throughout our state of Oklahoma. And as a mother I think it's even more exciting to see the opportunities that so many of our young children have today.

We heard early on in the presentation Dr. Perry talking about we know more now about children than at any time in the history of our species. That is an incredible statement. We are better educated now about our children's needs than ever before. With that, we are armed with knowledge, we are definitely dedicated to make a difference, and that is what we're here for today.

I get to be Oprah, just for a few minutes —  it's my job to stimulate the debate. Let's get some dialogue going. We know; we've heard from our wonderful panelists where we are. Let's find out where we can go and get some ideas going of what we could develop in our own community and indeed throughout the state of Oklahoma. Anybody want to dive in with the first question?
 
Gene Callahan (Superintendent, Tulsa Technology Center):  We are in the political season, and we have a big election coming up next Tuesday. What would be the panelists' first words of advice to your new governor regarding early childhood education?

Pete Churchwell:  Oklahomans for Future Progress and Oklahomans for School Readiness have had one-on-one and small-group sessions with all of the gubernatorial candidates, and all have expressed some level of interest and concern and willingness to be involved in early childhood issues, although all of them also continue to have a huge focus on K through 12. And my only point to the new governor, whoever that might be, is that you really just can't stay focused on K through 12. The issues of having successful Oklahomans are larger than K through 12.

Cathy Burden:  With the level of interest expressed concerning education today, I think that our leaders will need to develop a coherent vision for education that includes early childhood. We’ve made a lot of progress in raising awareness in the public’s eye, but now is the time to support and fund early childhood in a way that other states have done. We need to organize our funding and come together, so we’re not fighting each other for resources. We need to recognize that the total education package needs to be our focus. Then we need a vision to define how state revenues, federal revenues and local forces can be mobilized to make children our number one focus.

Howard Hendrick:  I think that no matter who gets elected governor, they've got a pretty difficult hand to play. You've got declining revenues, you have challenges with health care, you've got challenges with road infrastructure, you've got challenges with education, the prisons are packed. What are you going to do? I think what ought to be thought about is where can you bring some new resources that don't necessarily come in the form of cash? Because I think sometimes the first thing we think about is we’ve got to have cash to make all this work. And we do have to have some — there is a level of cash that we all have to have; but there are some things that we can do that really would make a big impact on kids, like healthier families, stronger marriages, better parental education, more engaged parents in terms of what are we willing to do with our personal time? How much time are we spending as parents with our kids? An increased level of parental involvement would go a long way to solving some of these challenges, and the willingness for all of us to admit that parenting is something that we can all improve on and we can all learn about. For a long time there was a reluctance; people would say, well, I have confidence, I know how to raise kids. I got raised, so I know what parents should do. It’s more complex, and the and the gap between the kids who have it and don't have it is widening, because it's not just emotional confidence, it's not just intellectual confidence or verbal development, physical development, nutritional development; it's also technological development. And lots of kids have access to technology and lots of kids have no access to technology; actually per capita in Oklahoma we have a significantly lower rate of per capita home computers than other states. This is going to be a very significant thing for our state’s economy in the long run. So I think the governor should use his office and the bully pulpit to say that all of us, whether we have money or not, can all do a better job of being emotionally and intellectually engaged with our kids and our spouses. One of the best things we can do for our kids is to love our spouse. I think stronger families would make a big difference for kids.

Margaret Kennedy (preschool program director):  Dr. Burden mentioned diagnostic pre-K testing, and I'm wondering, if you could do a whole battery of tests, what would you recommend for an entrance screening for the three-year-old program, four-year-old program or kindergarten for new students coming in that would be one simple test?

Cathy Burden:  Well, I'm not sure that there is one simple test that can be used across the board. I think that's the key in testing, that you will use a certain instrument as a screener that will give you lots of information about basic skills and mastery of the pre-academic skills. But you will not be able to truly diagnose a child with severe developmental delays unless you invest a whole lot more time and energy in the diagnostic process.

I think what we've done with the screener that has been developed at the University of Tulsa with the cooperation of the Tulsa Public Schools and Union Public Schools is an excellent instrument. This 30-minute interaction between teacher and student gives us so much more information. It is much more efficient than spending six months in the classroom trying to figure out where each child is and then starting your curriculum. Now, after having committed 30 minutes to an individual child, the teacher is ready to start the first day of school with tremendous knowledge about the strengths and weaknesses, the social development, the language skills, the motor skills, all of those pre-academic skills. A 30-minute investment is just so minimal. I just hope that all of the school districts in our area begin to take advantage of this opportunity. It also means that parents feel so much better about school for their children. After they've had a chance to personally interact with the teacher for a short period of time, they're ready to put that child on the bus and give them all the positive messages that they need about going to school to make it a good situation. So there are so many good things that come from that. Diagnostic testing would be on a referral basis. Once the teachers really have a chance to evaluate more thoroughly a child's needs, if there is a problem, then I think there needs to be a program for in-depth diagnostic testing that would help us determine whether some kind of special need exists or whether some kind of special services are needed. The Success By Six® committee out of the Community Service Council will make sure that you have access to it at no cost.

Mayor Robert LaFortune:  As a part of the Governor's Task Force on Early Education that Pete Churchwell chaired so ably a few years ago, one of the major findings of that was that there are so many pervasive health problems that children come to kindergarten with. I don't think there's been enough discussion in this setting today to reflect the severe need that we have for more health services for young children, starting from birth probably through age five. You can have the finest programs in the world at three years old and four years old and five years old, but what if that child is not healthy, if their teeth aren't sound, they're not getting dental services, and so on? Dr. Stewart, could you elaborate on some of the needs and the limitations that we face in our state in providing better services, whether it's through Medicaid or whether it's through our county health systems or so on. If you could just comment on some of those needs and elaborate on if there are any opportunities for this kind of group to bring some pressure to bear to get better services for these young people.

Dr. Stewart:  I would start with what I think would be an ideal: that every child is entitled to have a medical home, a place where parents could turn for some advice or could get some reliable screening in time of illness, where they could quickly get some care, and that care would be continuous; for as long as the parents went on maintaining that relationship, there would be some continuity of care. Since I've been a pediatrician, we've incrementally changed some things, all trying to make things better, improve access. For children who are in poverty and use Medicaid, we've tried to use managed care in a way that's really interfered with continuity of care, and there are even some issues where pediatricians have organized in the state with the Pediatric Project to try to change policy through litigation; you may have read about it in the paper. All these are attempts to tweak and change and improve access to care so that kids will have a primary home. It doesn't have to be with a pediatrician; it can be with a family physician. I think there's still room for improvement for mid-level providers. Over the past five years we've gone from one to two pediatric nurse practitioners in our clinic. There are plenty of kids out there that need service, and there's room for everybody at the table to come to bear. And like you'd mentioned with rural health, that's even more of a crisis, and there’s a lot of room for improvement there. Part of that is I think a maldistribution of providers. I think we've gotten the primary care physicians in the state to take care of kids and just kind of iron out all the barriers to free access and reimbursement. Mental health is a horrible problem. Perhaps we need to think about reinventing what constitutes a visit so Oklahoma's got room to use mid-level practitioners, or maybe we need to also provide services out of offices. Schools tend to be in the middle of the neighborhoods. I think that maybe school-based or school-associated services might answer the need for some folks. But the whole health care non-system —  I can't call it a system because it's so fragmented —  affects every one of you. I think sometimes if you just look at kids, it ends up being an interesting microcosm. About the only people that seem to have something of a system are people that have Medicare. 

Christie Roberts:  I represent a child care center that has gone from one-star plus to a nationally accredited center. (Applause!) I want to ask all the legislators that are here today to continue to fund those programs to help with the continued education of the teachers. I have several teachers that have gone back to school and gotten higher education. I also chair the subcommittee for the licensing revisions committee and want to hope that the legislature also continues to fund higher reimbursement rates for centers that give high quality care. The third thing that I'd like to address is the mental health issue in child care. We're seeing younger and younger children that come to us with critical mental health issues, and we're expecting a teacher that hopefully has her CDA, that we're paying at the most $7 an hour on average, or that ’s probably above average, to deal with these problems, and they're not educated to do so. If we get help that comes in, we have to pay a private practice person $75 an hour, and we're expecting those teachers that make minimum wage to handle these issues along with twelve other children in the classroom. Do any of you have any ideas on how we can handle younger mental health issues?

Dr. Stewart:  It's a disaster. You talk about a microcosm of something that's really dysfunctional, and we've got people in our communities with expertise. It’s just a matter of resources, to get people matched up and accessed.

Audience member:  An all-day training is planned on November 8 at the Schusterman Center. This is under Nancy Vonbargen’s directive through Mr. Hendrick's agency. This started from Linda Ransom, who is very concerned about how many children in her center have mental health programs; and her teachers were not equipped; and so we started to get involvement. 

Fred Harris (state legislator): If any of you are discouraged about the number of legislators here today, remember we're eleven days from the election, and there are some out there fighting for their political lives. So in defense of my associates, that's probably why you don't see more of us here. With the bill basically, I'm not going to ask questions about the bill because I can read about that. I mean, I can read the bill; I know what the bill says. But I assume that that's one of the reasons for the timing of this conference. Please don't categorize legislators that are against this legislation and have been against this legislation in past sessions as buying into the whole anti-state argument and all that. No, the majority of the opposition doesn't buy into that emotional argument. A lot of them are sincere legislators that are trying to make sure that we don't open the door to another bureaucratic organization. The legislators are sincerely interested in making sure we get the best bang for the dollar and making sure that we don't create something that's going to be have the opposite effect and suck money away. So having set that background, one of the arguments that's made is we have something like sixteen programs and agencies that are there to a great extent to fund preschool, early childhood development. Maybe it's an agency that has, you know, so many millions of dollars, and a portion of their agency is supposed to have a responsibility of preschool development, early childhood development. So the argument is made, if that hasn't been effective in the past, and this legislation is supposed to bring about coordination of those agencies and programs, those sixteen programs and agencies that are taking hundreds of millions of dollars now or at least tens of millions, why can we believe that this bill will bring about coordination, when the governor and the legislature oftentimes can't get agencies of government, commissions and various bureaucracies to coordinate together? That's one of the arguments that is a tough one to answer. So I'd like to hear the panelists.

Pete Churchwell: Well, I can give you my answer, and it's really pretty simple. During the Governor's Task Force, one of the things that he found out, and all of those sixteen agencies and a bunch of other people involved in the Task Force, they readily acknowledged then, and I think they would today, that largely they remain in silos. They know what goes on in their agency and what services and programs they provide, but they don't know very much about what goes on in agencies next door or down the street that may provide similar services or could provide services, because they're already in every county in Oklahoma for example, where some agencies aren’t. And I think during the Governor's Task Force there was a lot of recognition on the agencies' part that they could —  particularly if they were mandated to —  work more closely and cooperatively together. I think evidence of that is that every one of them have a willingness to do that. I can't speak to how willing they are to cooperate with the legislature specifically or a particular legislator in a particular area, but in total, every one of those agencies has stayed involved on a voluntary basis with Oklahomans for School Readiness, and they continue to cooperate on a voluntary basis. So I think the time is right for some type of a partnership, a committee, a board, a commission, something that includes members of the public and private sector, the government sector and the private sector, along with the state agencies, along with parents and religious leaders and businesspeople, working together to better coordinate and oversee and report on the effectiveness of all of the issues and all the things we've been talking about here today that ultimately would allow the legislature to better apportion and appropriate funds where they're going to get the most bang for their buck. Now, that's just the way an old business guy sort of sees it. The bill does not call for any significant new funds. In fact, we've said if you need to hire staff, you would raise private money for that staff. If the focus is on improving the lot of children in Oklahoma, better understanding and reporting of the status of children and then better coordination between government and the private sector and these agencies, that just seems to make sense to me, Fred.

Howard Hendrick: To have a great state, relationships matter. And probably the informal relationships are often more powerful than the formal. Next week I'm going to have a retreat with the thirteen agencies that are in the Cabinet Secretary’s area. I've been the Cabinet Secretary for eight or nine months or so, and we've had several Cabinet meetings, but we haven't gotten away for the purpose of figuring out what we can do collectively to improve the health and well-being of Oklahomans. I'm not aware of any other Cabinet Secretary for Health and Human Services or any other Cabinet Secretary who's ever had that kind of a retreat for anything. But we're able to do it because primarily the folks within my network have strong, shared respect. And so we're going to go away and collectively learn about each other's agencies better and figure out what it is that we do well and what things we don't do well together. And we're going to have some panelists come and talk to us about a variety of needs, and we're going to collectively try to construct a very modest set of recommendations to whoever is elected governor, so we can help make a smooth transition to whatever administration is successful. If you don't have any forum, you're probably not going to have a chance to grow relationships. This deal would not create a program, where you have command and control kinds of operations. But we've got a lot of programs. What we need is to figure out a way to deliver those programs in a more coordinated way, in a more prioritized way, so that they're delivered in places where the need is the greatest. 

Marty Clark (Head of School, Riverfield Country Day School): While we're pulling agencies and groups together, I would like to see what we can do to pull together what we can do to help families. It seems to me that’s where a lot of this starts, and children are not having —  you mentioned the idea of having the mother home and siblings around and so on —  children don't have that opportunity any more. And even though many of us provide what we think is very good child care for young children, it's still not the same as being home with Mom and Dad. And the hour they spend driving through McDonald's for their dinner is not such a quality time. Parents don't know often what they should do or how to do it.

Karen Larsen:  How do we make changes at home? I found myself, Marty, wondering the same thing as we were talking about reaching the at-risk parents, the at-risk children, the ones who need to make the biggest difference in their lives. How you get that message into their heads that they need to make a change.

Pete Churchwell:  Well, I'll just give you one viewpoint. There are a lot of agencies and people in communities that are engaged in trying to help parents. From my point of view, the problem is not necessarily the number of people and resources that are available; it's helping people who want help to know how to go about getting it. And I think right now, at least from my point of view, the Success By Six® programs in the communities where they exist, do this. Not every community has a Community Service Council, a one-stop shopping center, if you will, that has become recognized in the community as a sort of a single place that you can go as a parent to ask a question, to get referred or get your question answered. In other communities, my experience is that parents flounder. And frankly, if you look at the utilization of a lot of the federal programs that are worked through various state agencies, they're underutilized. So somehow we are not engaged at the community level with outreach programs, with information, with enough news, advertisements or whatever to make it easy for parents to know that if I've got a youngster that I'm concerned about health issues, here's a number I can call. We have in Oklahoma a very innovative marriage initiative program, and they just issued their report. As I read the report, one of the problems that they're having is they're not reaching as many people as they would like to. And so I think, you know, as we move on through this, I still say that most of the focus should be at the community level. When you've got the Success By Six® people that go across all of the community's socioeconomic levels —  you've got businesspeople, educators, day care people, agency people —  you begin to make it easy for folks to get information. I kind of think that's where it has to be. I think no matter how hard the powers work —  you know, it's kind of like leading a horse to water but you can't make him drink —  the powers can do everything that they can do, and they'd be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, have good programs, well coordinated. But if people don't know about them, know how to access them —  and most of the time they're not going to get that information by calling Howard — they're going to rely on a neighborhood or a relative or somebody they know at the bank —  you know, somebody they trust —  to say that I'm having a problem, I don't know this or this isn't happening. I think part of the answer to your question is well-rounded community-based programs.

Karen Larsen: And perhaps even centralized, you know? As Dr. Stewart was mentioning, perhaps we need to provide a conduit of information at those locations where the parents go every day and enact them from there.

Howard Hendrick: We have a website, www.okparent.org, that has a lot of incredible resources on it. It's really a terrific website. But Pete's right; the families that we're talking about aren't coming to this kind of a meeting, and many of them don't have access to the Web. And so you know, it's good for us to have this up, we need to have it up for all of us to refer people to, but many of the people that we're really trying to contact don't have that kind of access. I think Pete's hit it on the head in terms of saying, you know, we're doing the best we can, I think, in terms of getting more and better programs out there. We're under construction with a kind of new idea that's still at the talking stage at this point, but we've done some focus groups with ten hospital CEOs across the state with the idea of encouraging them to consider changing their paradigm for childbirth. We did this. If you go back and look at history, in 1993 in Oklahoma, we established paternity in 19 percent of the out-of-wedlock births when the national average was 45 percent. Today we establish paternity in about 90 percent of the out-of-wedlock births, primarily because we have voluntary turn-in of acknowledgments, because hospitals chose to get involved in the situation. And basically when they got involved in the situation, they were able to discuss this with fathers who said, "Yeah, I want to be responsible." Well, what we're talking to these folks about is changing their paradigm for childbirth and considering —  this is something that they would have to do; this is a cultural change for them. This is not a program you'd come in and do. It's something hospitals would have to culturally adjust to; instead of looking at childbirth as a medical procedure, what if you look at childbirth as the creation of an institution, namely a family? And so even before the child is born, whether the father and mother are married or not, what about putting together a curriculum of 24 hours or so of relationship education, nutrition, looking at the videos like we saw today about how important early childhood is? Getting together a curriculum for parents before the child was even born, so that they can appreciate the gravity of what they're getting into and hopefully maybe their interest will be piqued enough to where they can gather the skills to be better parents. It's going to have to be culturally-sensitive, ethnically-sensitive, all those things. But basically the feedback we're getting from this is very positive. And also we'd have to include some kind of employment skill services. With many of these typically young fathers, they're not even employed. So you’d have to bundle a lot of services to try to really create a family that's going to be economically viable. It's not just to have a family that is relationally competent, but it has to look at the entire institution of what does it take to run a family. And so at this point that's kind of on the drawing board. Nothing's out of the box, but I think people are kind of excited about what this could become. And we would include some of what we’re using with the marriage initiative, where whether they're married or not, they at least need to know how to communicate, what kind of skills. They're going to have a relationship with this child and with each other, whether they like it or not, for as long as they have a child. We ought to try to at least figure out a way to work together. 

Tom Baker:  You’ve talked about the role of state government in funding and coordination. I really believe what Mr. Churchwell has said about the effectiveness of local programs. What would be your expectations or suggestions or desires of local government?

Pete Churchwell:  My answer —  and I don't mean this to sound like I'm taking the easy way out —  but my answer is if every community sort of modeled Tulsa, in the relationship between state and federal agencies here in Tulsa, city government and their involvement in Tulsa, and the relationship between United Way, the Community Service Council, Success By Six©, Tulsa is a pretty good model, with goals and plans of how these agencies work together. And Tulsa has been at it for a long time. Dave Bernstein and Bill and a lot of other people in this room —  I don't know, with the relationship to the police and the courts — I don't know that Tulsa necessarily needs to do a whole lot more. Now, some of you who are really in the trenches with these issues on a day-to-day basis might have a different view of that. But just as a citizen and as a parent in Tulsa — and Oklahoma City is moving in exactly the same direction. They're working very, very hard right now to do the very kinds of things Tulsa has done; you've got a little bit of a jump on them here but they're catching up, as we all know. In many areas they’re catching up very, very quickly and have surpassed us in some things. So I don't know that I have any specific recommendations on things that we ought to do dramatically differently in Tulsa than we're doing today.

Karen Larsen:  And with that I'd like to add, in my career here in Tulsa, once light is shed on a problem in our community, I have yet to see some resource not brought to bear, whether it is your neighbor, whether it is a church, whether it is someone's parents stepping in and helping out. I think the key, as it is in so many cases, is shedding light on the problem. And with that, I want to commend the Community Service Council for putting together yet another project like this, and the Mayor. The information in this book is so exciting to see. Just in the past five years, to me, reading about the growth and improvement in the programs -- the stars program, the four-year-old programs in schools, improvements in teachers' programs -- from my own perspective, which saved my sanity in the early years of my childrearing, it’s so exciting to see the improvements. At the same time, I encourage you, as long as we see children in the video like the ones that we saw earlier today who look up at their teacher with hope in their eyes and that desperate fear that they're going to give the wrong answer — as long as we have young children like that in our community, I encourage us all to become informed and involved. Thank you very much for letting me be a part of your day, and with that, thank you to our panel, and I will turn it over to Mayor LaFortune.

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Call to Action:  Mayor LaFortune

At this point I think we've all gained a clear understanding of the history and the opportunities and challenges before us.

I do believe early childhood development begins at home, and the best place for Tulsans to make an impact on the lives of their children is through their families. There is no denying what we’ve heard here today about children who are not receiving developmental support from their families, for whatever the reason is, whether it's finances, et cetera. These statistics are heartbreaking. But like Karen said, it's shedding light for the community, letting Tulsans know who don't know what's going on elsewhere in the community. And that's especially true when you think about the potential, the tremendous potential these children have who are facing these circumstances.

What this is about today is to recommit ourselves as a community to preparing our children for school, so they can reach their potential. I don't believe government programs are a panacea for all of society's ills, but the fact remains it's obvious that many families in Tulsa need help. We adults can choose our circumstances, by and large; the children cannot. They need our help. In Tulsa, we watch out for our kids, and we're going to renew that effort today. There’s no excuse that any child is left behind in the city of Tulsa.

On behalf of the city of Tulsa, based on my own personal commitment to children and families, I'd like to announce that, first (and I think this goes to the question, Councilor Baker, some of the questions he was asking), I'll continue to work with the Metropolitan Human Services Commission. Brenda Miller is here. She's done yeoman's work in representing former Mayor Savage and myself on that commission. I think as we move forward, one of the things that we're going to support and attempt to create —  and again, this goes to Councilor Baker's comment —is the creation of a formal Tulsa-area partnership for early childhood development, a partnership that can include representation from all sectors of the community and will work to ensure that they are acting effectively, both individually and collectively, to improve early child care and learning. And its first task, as was touched on earlier, could be to assure that all those who have roles directly affecting the early development of young children, from parents to judges, have the needed skills and knowledge to deal with this issue.

And second, let's make sure the city of Tulsa is doing its part well. One thing I know we can do is work with the National League of Cities; we can find out what they're doing there — what other cities, other mayors, other city councils are doing in terms of early childhood development. Why reinvent the wheel? There are some wonderful programs in other cities. Let's look and see what they’re doing and let’s bring them here if they work and statistics show they work. I think that'll allow the city to remain updated, as it should be, on the issue, and to take new and innovative steps where it's feasible. And we need to bring the city departments together to make sure they're doing everything in their bailiwick they can do to work on this issue and be more effective.

We also need to work on a regional basis on issues that affect all of us here in Tulsa, and it should be the same way with early childhood development. It should not be an issue that's left behind in the visioning process the city and county are currently engaged in, and I can assure you it will not be left behind.

I'm looking forward to getting more involved in the Tulsa Avid Readers Program, to begin a Leaders Read Program, where we convene leaders from business, health, education, social services, religious institutions, and other areas to encourage them to volunteer a few hours a month during 2003 to read to young children in child care centers, Head Start sites, and schools. And I'm doing it myself, personally. What did I commit, 80 hours or something like that? It was a lot. I can't think of any better way to spend the day than reading to children. That is the most wonderful experience, and I look forward to being involved in that program.

As we've touched on here already today, leadership in government is absolutely key to the ultimate success of any issue as important as early childhood development. We have a few messages, as Tulsans, to share with our new governor, whoever that new governor might be.

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"If I could tell the next governor what to do with education, I would suggest we start by throwing out most of the remedial programs, stop throwing money at remediation. I know that we do have children that need remediation, so you can't throw it all out, but it needs to be put into early childhood. We need across-the-board four-year-old programs, and I would like to see three-year-old programs go into most schools. Many children need these early type experiences. They are severely lacking in life experiences. And at the schools, we have the opportunity to set these children up for a life full of education before they get jaded, before they feel failure. At the early childhood level they're so excited and they want to learn. We have made some progress. We do have an assessment, we do have some early childhood programs that have been developed. And if I could just say, just stay at it. We're not finished."

"If 90 percent of the children came to us with a quality preschool experience, at even a Title I school, it would be amazing as far as what those kids could accomplish. I would say that 80, 90 percent of them would be first-grade level by the end of first grade, and when they went to second grade they would be on grade level, and it would just continue for their school career. It would just be an amazing, amazing thing. It gives me goose bumps thinking about it."

"The Governor of Oklahoma, he is the closest person to having a magic wand or to being the wizard behind the screen, and I would give anything to have the influence that he will have to make the changes necessary for kids in Oklahoma. I think it would be the most exciting thing to be in that leadership role and know that the decisions that I was leading or encouraging with our fellow legislators could make such an incredible, powerful difference in the lives of young children in our communities of Oklahoma in years to come. What an amazing thing, to have that kind of influence and to know that you can make that kind of change."

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Special Recognition and Thanks

I want to thank everyone for being here today. It's been an exciting and challenging morning. I think the time, to me, has just flown by, and it's just been a great jump start to our community efforts on early childhood development.

If you'd like to stay and eat, there's a wonderful cafeteria. As I understand it, there's also a very excellent child care center here, and if you'd like a tour they will provide that for you.

So, again, let's go out and let everybody know what we know, and that's going to be the number-one key, letting everyone else know the statistics and what we need to do here in Tulsa and in the state as we go forward. And as we told the press earlier, there's an election a week from Tuesday. Let the candidates know between now and then in every way you can how you feel about this issue, and find out where they stand on this issue.

Thank you all very much.

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Members of the Metropolitan Human Services Commission:
- City of Tulsa
- Oklahoma Department of Human Services
- Tulsa Area United Way
- Tulsa City-County Health Department
- Tulsa County
- Tulsa Public Schools

Community Service Council of Greater Tulsa

Metropolitan Tulsa Chamber of Commerce

Tulsa City-County Library

Tulsa Community Action Project (Head Start)

Tulsa Technology Center

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Thanks

Special thanks to all who helped make this conference possible – and to the many people whose vision and work have filled these past years with progress for Tulsa’s youngest children!

This conference was partially funded through a grant from the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, administered through the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy, and a Bank of America/United Way of America Success By 6© grant.

Thank you to QuikTrip for additional financial support.

Special thanks to Tulsa Technology Center for hosting the conference! The conference committee appreciates the help of Dr. Gene Callahan, Superintendent, Sharon Schwab, Director of the North Peoria campus, Teressa Hunter, Media Specialist, and Kary Merlock.

Website and presentation summaries by Sharon Clark ... email with comments or suggestions!  (Note/disclaimer: the text of these presentation summaries was prepared from transcriptions of tapes made at the conference ... this explains the conversational/informal style of some of the speakers' comments.)