It’s no secret North Carolina’s child care system is in crisis. Parents are struggling to pay for care. Providers are fighting to stay open. And while state lawmakers recently passed a measure delivering some temporary financial relief, the money is far from a permanent solution.
Still, there are some bright spots like Ready for School, Ready for Life (known by the shortened name, Ready Ready), a collaborative effort between parents, schools, public agencies, businesses, and philanthropic groups in Guilford County. The initiative, supported by more than $150 million from private donors and groups like the Duke Endowment and Blue Meridian Partners, aims to prepare children for kindergarten and early literacy.
The non-profit organization brings together more than 350 groups offering early childhood assistance and operates a web portal to help families in 60 categories, including childbirth classes, reading programs, housing or food aid and mental health.
“Guilford County and the Ready Ready program are trying to connect the dots on early childhood in a way that no other county in the country has tried to,” said Leslie Boney, the author of a recently published Public Ed Works series examining the program. “Everybody should be paying attention to what they’re doing.”
Boney has significant experience in government and public education, and previously served as director of policy research and strategic planning at the N.C. Department of Commerce, vice president for international, community and economic engagement at the UNC System, and vice provost for outreach and engagement at N.C. State University.
The Thread spoke with Boney about what makes Ready Ready unique and how North Carolina could again become a national leader in early childhood education.
The following Q&A has been condensed and edited for clarity.
The Thread: What does early childhood education in North Carolina look like right now?
Boney: I think the only similar comprehensive early childhood effort that North Carolina’s had began more than 30 years ago with the creation of a program called Smart Start. That program was primarily government-driven, but had kind of a similar point of origin, and that was some new research on brain development.
So in the early ‘90s, North Carolina made a substantial and ultimately notable investment in a series of early childhood interventions that were intended to make sure that every child in the state came to the first day of first grade healthy and ready to learn. That investment has continued over a number of years, and I think what changed in the mid-2000s was that some people in Guilford County began to read the next generation of research about brain development. And what they discovered was that the more we learned, the more it became clear that in order to make a meaningful difference, early childhood interventions needed to come much further upstream than we thought earlier. In fact, they need to begin before birth.
So they began rallying a small group of private foundations and public entities in Guilford County to begin coming together to imagine what it would take to fundamentally transform the lives of every child. They worked for about 10 years on the front end of trying to figure out how to collaborate with one another in order to make a huge difference.
What transformed that effort began in about 2017, when the Duke Endowment–the largest philanthropy in North Carolina–was also looking at the same research and trying to find a place in either North or South Carolina where they could make a big dent on something they hoped would be transformative related to early childhood. And after looking at potential places, they saw what was happening in Guilford County and determined that would be the best place to try out the ideas.
What made them choose Guilford?
Based on what I’ve understood, the set of things that the Duke Endowment saw were a combination of public and private nonprofits that had already learned to work together: Businesses that were beginning to realize that it could be a competitive advantage if they offered more family-friendly policies; education groups, both in higher ed and K-12 who were recognizing the importance of sharing information about young people; a commitment to the value of feedback and input and ideas from parents; and some preliminary signs of willingness on the part of doctor’s offices to help send a message to parents that there were a range of services available to them.
Starting from scratch somewhere else, I think, would have taken several more years.
What lessons did you take away from writing about Ready Ready?
One of them is just an observation that in the 1990s, the government took the lead. And that’s just not possible in the environment that we live in 30 years later. In order to make a big bet, you need something like a major philanthropic organization to step forward.
In the long term, philanthropy is not going to be able to support this at the level that they have been. That groups [like the Duke Endowment and Blue Meridian Partners] have been willing to step forward and put major funding up for a long time, that they’ve been willing to step forward and take the kind of risk and make the kind of investment that government has historically, I think is unusual. And I think it’s really important as far as making progress on determining whether these interventions work or not.
The other is that other counties besides Guilford are watching this carefully. And while it’s unrealistic to expect that they could attract the same level of philanthropic investment, I think they are already beginning to learn some lessons about the importance of bringing all of the assets that they have at the table, listening to families, being willing to commit to learning and investing over a long period of time, and slowly building public support for an early childhood effort.
Are there other places in the state using Ready Ready as a model, or creating their own programs?
One that I would lift up that has been developed in parallel with Ready Ready is an initiative by the Early Childhood Foundation called Family Forward NC. That is an effort to get businesses to pledge to take a serious step to make their businesses more family friendly, more supportive of young parents and their children.
Right now, the biggest adopter of the Family Forward NC principles are businesses in Guilford County. The last time I looked, roughly half of the businesses are in Guilford, covering more than 10,000 employees. And as those businesses step forward, others and other counties are going to look at that and say ‘Well it looks like these businesses are not only doing something that is really good for their employees, but is also having positive benefits for the businesses.’
They are increasing retention: one survey by the U.S. Chamber determined that something like 60 percent of young parents who leave businesses do so because they don’t have adequate childcare. So if businesses figure out a way to subsidize childcare or begin offering childcare on their own, they’re going to have a competitive advantage.
Other counties are particularly interested in the integrated database, which doesn’t sound very exciting. But the integrated data system the Ready, Ready program has developed is a way of making sure that when a parent comes in to a new place asking for help, the place has an opportunity to access information about what’s already happened with that parent. So they avoid duplicating services, but also they don’t have to wait months later to find out that a child maybe has a learning disability, or they do not discover later after recommending that a parent drive a child 50 miles away that the parent doesn’t have a car.
When and how will the data on Ready Ready come out?
I think the data is going to come in in stages, and that’s one of the big challenges the program has. Even with the 12-year investment that the Duke Endowment has made, the children born this year aren’t going to be three until 2027, they’re not entering kindergarten until 2029, and 2042–the year they’d become adults–is a long way away.
So I think they’re going to need to be gathering process-related data: how is the process of collaboration going, what can you see about, for example, the number of businesses adopting new policies? What are the early indicators once they reach age three, when they reach kindergarten?
One indicator I know the General Assembly will be particularly interested in is what this is doing to the number of people reading at grade level by the end of third grade in Guilford County. But that’s a few years off. And as patient as the investment has been and as long term as it has been, the real indicators that everybody can understand are not going to happen until after 2029.
P.R. Lockhart is a Greensboro-based reporter for The Assembly and a Report for America corps member. She previously reported for the Mountain State Spotlight and Vox, and studied psychology and journalism at Duke University.