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Child Care Training Opportunities Improve in Newberry County
| Name | Marlyne R. Walker | | Situation | Families and youth in Newberry County face many challenges when it comes to issues of child care education. According to South Carolina 2003 Kids Count data, there is a wide gap between lower and higher income children before they enter kindergarten. With 23.7% of children living in poverty in the county, and other issues such as a lack of high quality preschool programs and poorly prepared teachers, the problem is complex. There is pressing need for preschool children in Newberry County to develop school readiness skills in order to close the achievement gap in school performance. | | Response | To confront this compound problem, the county agent, in partnership with Newberry County First Steps, a South Carolina school readiness program, and Newberry County Adult Education, has established a team of certified child care trainers to provide a series of training sessions (a total of 15 credit hours for child care providers and 20 hours for the directors). The training meets the requirements of the Center Of Child Care Career Development South Carolina Child Care Training System. The county agent’s role in this program was to conduct 5 credit hours of training and workshops in nutrition education to child care providers and teachers. Child care training was offered by mailing letters to child care facilities in the county serving children. Follow up telephone calls were made to the child care facilities to determine level of interest. We trained a total of 52 child care providers representing 11 child care facilities and affecting 575 preschool children.
| | Impact | Each participant completed a Child Care Training Workshop Evaluation. From the nutrition workshop, participants stated because of this workshop I will: Try to eat & feed my children from the food pyramid; be a more knowledgeable care giver; expose the children to new ideas about nutrition; be more conscious of foods that I eat myself; improve my student’s eating habits; be a better child care provider; know more about the food groups; learn more about right eating habits; try to eat more nutritiously. |
Last update8/15/2007
This website is maintained by Bryan Smith.
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