Sunday, Feb. 07, 2010

Cadillac care

Cary is test market for posh preschool

A new private preschool in Cary will offer yoga in the morning, organic Whole Foods-catered meals for lunch, and learning with child-sized Smart Boards in the classroom.

The Grove School's "healthy body, healthy mind, healthy planet" approach touts the importance of teaching recycling and nutrition alongside math and music.

It's a tack that Knowledge Learning Corporation, which owns the KinderCare brand, hopes will be unique enough to launch an entire new line of preschools across the country.

The Portland company last month launched The Grove School in this affluent town, on Laura Duncan Drive, and in Plano, Texas, a wealthy suburb of Dallas. To grow elsewhere, it will have to do so against the odds.

The school commands monthly tuition upwards of $1,200 at a time when cash-strapped families are spending less on private school education.

Few children registered so far at Grove School. But school officials aren't worried.

"Children are our greatest asset, and parents know that," said Scott Anderson, a longtime educator who heads The Grove School of Cary. "By focusing on the early years, you are investing in the rest of their lives."

The benefits of high-quality early childhood education programs have been widely documented. But education experts say Grove School's lineup of licensed teachers, enhanced technology and sound, holistic curriculum would be most beneficial to youngsters who are least able to afford the tuition, which can be more than twice the average cost of child care in the state.

The school offers half-day and full-day programs, ranging from $605 to $1,215 a month, not including meals. They also offer before and after school two-hour blocks, which average around $174.

The competition

The costs aren't too far off from other private preschools that have survived the recession. Primrose Schools, a similar national chain, has lured parents with its "balanced learning curriculum."

Leslie Moore-Grivalski, owner of Primrose's schools in Cary and Morrisville, says that few parents have balked at the tuitions of almost $1,100 per month.The Grove School's costs are priced to match services provided and offer competitive salaries to certified early childhood educators, in-demand teachers with high turnover rates in preschools, said Ty Durekas, president of The Grove School.

"It is a big proposition for many families, it's a big expense," he said. "We think the right thing to do is to set the school up to be an educational learning experience and a quality preschool, and of course, there's a corresponding cost to that."

On an extensive Web site, Grove School curriculum experts share research on the benefits of programs such as theirs. They cite Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone project, which has seen pre-kindergartners in the program outperform the rest of their peers in the state. But that group of children was considered at-risk, not living in comparatively well-off Cary, which has a median family income over $110,000.

The return

"For this kind of program to really make a difference in somebody's life, it needs to be available to kids who really need it and who would not have a good early childhood environment without it," said Frances Campbell, senior scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Campbell is a lead investigator for the Abecedarian Project, a 30-year study that follows the progress of low-income children who received full-time, high-quality childcare from infancy to age 5 in the late 1970s.

The costs for that childcare were high, Campbell admits, reaching around $10,000 per child per year. But it paid off when the kids turned 21: Researchers discovered that for every dollar spent early on these children, taxpayers saved about $2.60.

"The benefits do seem like they endure and that they matter," Campbell said. "If you're talking about a rich child who has a lot of parental input anyway - parents who buy all the books and have more time to pay close attention - the argument doesn't hold as strongly. Kids who start out as advantaged, are going to end up advantaged as adults."

Viewing education through an economic lens has become more common in recent years. Grove School educators often quote one of Campbell's colleagues, University of Chicago economics professor James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winner and advocate for early childhood education, who found that, "the rate of return to a dollar investment made while a person is young is higher than the rate of return to the same dollar at a later age."

The need

Ron Haskins, a senior economist at the Brookings Institution, said the danger is widening the achievement gap because state-funded programs such as Head Start are still so far behind in quality.

"What you normally have in these expensive facilities are kids from middle and upper-middle class families who are already doing well so if anything, it increases the distance between them and the poor kids," he said. "We need better quality state and federal programs that low-income mothers can afford."

But inconsistencies and perpetual monetary shortfalls in public schools are what drove Anderson, the head of Cary's Grove School, and some of the school's teachers out of the system.

"The bureaucracy and politics can be disheartening," said Anderson, who has been a superintendent for school systems in Texas and Georgia. "Parents choose us, and that gives us more accountability. We are watching their children, they are writing us checks and we have a responsibility for meeting high expectations."

In a recession, with other area private preschools reporting fluctuating enrollments, it's hard to say if an outdoor vegetable garden or a small teacher-to-student ratio will draw families to the newly opened school.

But nobody faults Grove School's niche curriculum, or even their tuition - pricey, but not out-of-the-ordinary.

"I'm for all little kids for having a safe and enriched and inspiring early environment," Campbell said. "And I'm not discriminating for those who are already ahead of the game."