When many of us think of California, we picture stunning beaches, the Hollywood Hills, Silicon Valley and some of the most beautiful parks and landscapes in the world.
What a lot of people don’t know is that California is also home to some of the most severe poverty in the nation, especially in the rural Central Valley region.
Save the Children runs early education, literacy, and health programs in 35 locations across the state, serving 10,000 kids. These programs are especially important given state cutbacks that have restricted or eliminated many education and health services, including many school nurses, who have been a vital lifeline for parents of very young children.
In the most rural parts of Tulare County, which has the third highest poverty rate in the state, services for moms and dads with kids under five years old are sparse, except for our existing programs.
Something amazing happened in Tulare this month: the county, which distributes early childhood education funding through a statewide tobacco tax enacted as part of 1998’s Proposition 10 Initiative, recently asked a number of organizations to submit proposals to expand early education services.
I am thrilled that Save the Children scored the highest of all organizations. We will be entering into a multi-million dollar partnership to serve hundreds of more infants, toddlers, and preschoolers in six locations.
Securing this grant is a testament not only to the efficacy of our program but to the efficiency of our innovative public-private model. Indeed, kids in our early education programs in the region score 12 percentage points higher than our national average on a key language test.
From Tulare to the entire nation, the childhood poverty crisis continues to affect far too many of our kids — nearly one in four, according to the latest Census data. To drive home the point about childhood poverty in the United States, The Huffington Post asked our artist ambassador Randy Jackson and me to write about this crisis as part of the site’s Spring Into Action series. I was thrilled to partner with Randy on this op-ed — he’s a terrific advocate, which you can see for yourself right here.
