In Favor of Centralized pre-K in Fairfield Schools

We are the educators of the Fairfield Public Schools Early Childhood Center. We respectfully request that the Board of Education thoughtfully consider our input when engaging in decisions which impact the future of our school. When considering a centralized versus decentralized approach to preschool education, it is our collective professional opinion that decentralizing our program by dispersing us across various elementary schools would be a disservice to the children we are responsible for educating and to their families.
Points to consider: We currently provide a comprehensive, carefully structured program which views children in a holistic manner. All children participating in our integrated and social skills classrooms have access to skilled special education teachers who are presenting a developmentally appropriate curriculum, weekly social skills instruction provided by a school psychologist or social worker, and weekly collaborative support from speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists. In addition, we offer monthly parent workshops to support parents and twice yearly workshops for community preschool directors and their staff. The Early Childhood Assessment Team screens children on a monthly basis and is a large component of our child find process. Being housed in one school building supports our collaborative process and allows us to be a unified force for growth in the children and families we serve. Collectively, we work on executive functioning skills, emotional regulation, language development, independence in adaptive skills, self-advocacy, pre-academic skills and social skills. Separating us would be, in our opinion, diluting the impact we can make. We are a highly unified force with general parity and homogeneity across classrooms within our building. We are stronger together.
The majority of our children transition successfully to kindergarten. For the minority who have struggled upon entering kindergarten, we view this discrepancy as related to the exponential increase in academic and social demands and do not feel these challenges will be ameliorated by a setting change, that is a potential Pre-k through 5 program.
Our children and families are vulnerable. This is their first experience with the special education process. It is very important to us that we provide them with the care and counsel they need to navigate what is often a difficult time. Part of this process is in connecting with other families who are sharing a similar experience. We have a close knit parent group who are highly supportive of each other. We feel that decentralizing us would interrupt this process of acceptance for our families and would be unfair to them.
Staff members with the greatest seniority remember a time when our program was decentralized and have spoken to this approach as being only marginally successful. The integrity of the program was undermined. Due to the disjointed nature of that model, implementing program changes was difficult. With our current model, there is an inherent flexibility to alter programming as appropriate, i.e., the opportunity for a child to move into a less restrictive environment as progress is made. A clear need for a centralized program was seen and our program was born.