Latinos wait in line for preschool spots

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Updated: April 19, 2011 5:04AM

I was on a panel on covering Latino education issues in mainstream media last week when an audience member criticized this newspaper’s recent story on Latino kids’ relatively low preschool attendance rates.

“Your coverage put the blame on parents when in reality our schools are overcrowded and we have no access to preschool programs,” an attendee said passionately.

She was referring to an article that appeared in the Sun-Times last Tuesday under the headline “Preschool attendance lags among Latino children.” The deck headline felt like a slap in the face to me, too: “Culture, language gap may be to blame, experts say.”

Those who did not flip the page with a dismissive, “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know” learned these facts from a report by University of California-Berkeley professors: Only about 35 percent of Illinois’ Latino 4-year-olds attended some type of preschool, compared with 66 percent of white children, 63 percent of Asian and 54 percent of African-American children. The U.S. average is 48 percent.

The news story focused on explanatory factors mentioned in the report, and by the lead researcher in an interview, such as that Latina moms are less likely to have attended college and less likely to have read to their children than their black or white peers. Also, that the custom of sending young children to preschool has not yet taken hold in Latino households — no surprise given that three generations typically reside together. Furthermore, the story said the report noted that Hispanic families might face barriers such as the inability to confidently communicate in English or fears about’ legal status.

Any or all of these help produce this result: In Illinois, Hispanic children start kindergarten, on average, five months behind white children and one or two months behind African-American children.

But the news story didn’t include another factor that keeps Latino children out of preschool: There are far fewer preschool centers in Latino neighborhoods than in white and African-American neighborhoods. This lack of supply contributes to gaps in early learning even before kids start kindergarten.

Lest you be left with the outrageous impression that Latino parents are too backward, too fearful of immigration agents and too unsavvy to maneuver the school system, which offers almost every bit of information in Spanish, here’s what Marta Moya-Leang, director of CPS’ Belmont-Cragin Early Childhood Center has to say about preschool access:

“I have 280 students in our center and there is simply not enough space,” Moya-Leang told me. “There’s no funding to expand because it’s not a mandated program, and we don’t actively promote the program in the community because since the day we opened we’ve had waiting lists to get kids into the school.” Two hundred children are waiting for the next opening.

“Our school runs three shifts from 8:30 in the morning to 6 p.m. at night, and let me tell you that the families who find a way to get their toddlers to a 3 p.m. start time, coming through dark and cold, are committed to those kids’ education,” she said.

There is no question that the Latino community faces serious roadblocks, but Hispanics are known to be unusually reverent of education as a path to economic empowerment. I have no doubt that as recent immigrants are acculturated to understanding that preschool is an important first step in the education process, this will change. If enough preschool classes are made available to meet the demand, that is.

In his closing remarks to the assemblage, study author Bruce Fuller, of the University of California-Berkeley, responded to the crowd’s concerns about how their culture was portrayed by sharing this great advice: “Culture is always in motion, there’s nothing fixed about it — values, beliefs and commitments change. We need to get beyond these labels.”