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Broadcast spotlights state's pre-K efforts
From the Nashville City Paper
By Christine Buttorff
September 20, 2006 - Tennessee's pre-kindergarten program was highlighted as a success story Wednesday during a live satellite conference broadcast to more than 200 locations nationwide.
Pre[k]now, a national early-childhood education advocacy group, sponsored the broadcast, while George Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC Sunday morning political talk show This Week , served as moderator.
Gov. Phil Bredesen participated via video link from Vanderbilt University and told Stephanopoulos that the key to Tennessee's Pre-K success is a bipartisan consensus within the Legislature. Bredesen said he hopes the Legislature will continue to work with him to fund expanding the program, which is currently limited to at-risk children.
“I think we all agree that the at-risk students ought to be the first place to go,” Bredesen said. “But what I would like to do over the next year or two is get the Legislature to open that up so that we no longer differentiate,” between at-risk children and the rest of the state's 4-year-olds.
Diane Neighbors, chair of the Tennessee Alliance for Early Education, said Tennessee established a high-quality program early on.
“The components that set us kind of head and shoulders above the other states is we have small class sizes, good teacher-child ratio,” said Neighbors, who also serves as a Metro councilwoman-at-large. “We have to have qualified teachers. We have to have support systems in place and it's a voluntary program.”
The state's Pre-K program serves about 13,000 at-risk children.
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