Research shows that 85 percent of brain development occurs by age three. By age five, a person's brain is 90 percent formed. Yet, less than four percent of public funding goes to support early childhood development and education.
"I call it the final frontier in education -- it's the place where we need to invest the most because we know it's a critical time of growth and development and if you don't invest at those times it won't change lives," says Maine's first lady Karen Baldacci, one of the architects of Educare Central Maine, the first program of its kind in New England designed to level the playing field for low-income children and their families by providing high quality childcare, pre-k classroom instruction and family support.
The 35,000 square-foot center, which is scheduled to begin this fall, will be located next to the George J. Mitchell Elementary School in Waterville. It will be used to raise standards for childcare workers, and serve as a learning lab for college students.
Baldacci says she hopes it will also be replicated in some form across the state. "We're not building Einsteins here. We're just taking kids and putting them in quality early care education environments where they're achieiving norm or higher than norm in school readiness skills: language, math and the cognitive skills children need."
As a kindergarten teacher herself, and as the head of the governor's Childrens' Cabinet, Baldacci is well aware of the fact that 46 percent of all Maine kindergarten students enter school not meeting readiness standards, and that Maine taxpayers spend about $300 million a year on special education to help kids who are behind in their learning.
Educare Central Maine, which will be part of a network of about 15 similar programs around the country, will track outcomes of the 200 at-risk, Head Start-eligible children who are accepted into the program. Teacher-student ratios will be kept low; kids will stay with the same teacher for several years, and Lauren Sterling, program director of the Children's Cabinet, says the kids' parents will receive advice and support about reading to their kids, raising their aspirations and reaching their own potential.
If they're having workforce issues, if they are unemployed or they were employed and are seeking new employment, really linking them and connecting them to work-ready and skill-building organizations and resources in the community -- it's really the whole-family, whole-child package, and it's not normally how we support families with young children."
Sterling says outcomes from Educare programs in other places such as Omaha, Nebraska, and Chicago, Illinois, have shown dramatic results in the past six years. "So, for example, of a cohort of children that entered Educare in their infant years and stayed all the way through until they entered kindergarten, 100 percent of those kids not only met, they exceeded in scores of their non low-income peers."
Findings from Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman show that for every dollar invested in quality early child care and learning yields between $7 and $16 in reduced special education, crime, unemployment and welfare costs.
But in times of recession, funding for early childhood development is hard to find. Enter Doris Buffett. "I'm not interested in dreamy ideas that may or may not, and possibly this and maybe that and so on because I just want every dollar to count when I'm giving it away, and I think education is the number one thing."
The sister of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, Doris approached Karen Baldacci about Educare several years ago after she read about a summit the first lady convened on early childhood education.
Funding will also come from the federal government's Title 1 program for low-income students and from Head Start, along with $2 million in stimulus money and a generous donation from Bill and Joan Alfond and other foundations.
But the center still has about $2 million left to raise, and Karen Baldacci says not all philanthropists she's talked to share Buffetts' views: "Some who said, 'We can't afford it, we don't need it, you are crazy. We don't invest in these kinds of things.'"
But like Doris Buffett, who is a former first grade teacher, Baldacci says she's convinced that building better childhoods is a way to prevent so many negative outcomes down the road. Tomorrow we'll find out how Doris Buffett came to that conclusion and how it has affected her vision of philanthropy.