THE PROMISE, THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE OF PRE-KINDERGARTEN: IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES, CAPACITY BUILDING AND SUSTAINABILITY
Suellen Lawrence Gourley, Ed.D.
University of Pittsburgh, 2006
Charles J. Gorman, Advisor
School districts in Pennsylvania were able to receive grant money to implement pre-kindergarten through the Accountability Block grant program from the Pennsylvania Department of Education. This study focused on five schools that implemented pre-kindergarten during the 2004-2005 school year, studying the struggles during the first two years of the programs and how the schools used strategies to build capacity to sustain the pre-kindergartens. Grant money disappears eventually and with strong competition for educational dollars, ways to build capacity to sustain effective programs like pre-kindergarten are necessary.
Site visits were used to gather the grant documents, observe the pre-kindergartens for a full session and conduct interviews with the principal, teacher and parent at each school. These three sources of data provided evidence of implementation issues, capacity building strategies, and how these strategies are connected to the sustainability of the pre-kindergarten.
The findings indicate that the pre-kindergartens that are most likely to be sustained are those implemented by schools that use three capacity building strategies of knowledge and skills, collaborative culture and allocation of resources. The schools have and continue to seek knowledge and skills about early childhood education; consciously, purposefully and collectively create a collaborative climate; and allocate appropriate and adequate financial and human resources are promoting the sustainability of the pre-kindergarten. Transportation is a key resource for sustainability. Full-day vs. half-day programs, universal vs. targeted, quality of the program and the curriculum were not issues in the sustainability of the pre-kindergartens in this study.
Pre-kindergarten in the public school needs financial commitment from school boards and the state. Adding this program to the basic education subsidy for each school would enable all Pennsylvania four-year-olds to have access to pre-kindergarten. The Accountability Block grant could also help promote sustainability by building a framework within the grant for school districts to absorb the costs of the program over time and not risk eliminating the program when the funding is gone.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04172006-164600 |
| Date | 25 April 2006 |
| Creators | Gourley, Suellen Lawrence |
| Contributors | Charles Gorman |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04172006-164600/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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