{"id":611767,"date":"2018-08-09T08:00:18","date_gmt":"2018-08-09T14:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=611767"},"modified":"2018-08-09T16:42:56","modified_gmt":"2018-08-09T22:42:56","slug":"creative-thinking-brings-child-care-center-to-jal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2018\/08\/creative-thinking-brings-child-care-center-to-jal\/","title":{"rendered":"Creative thinking brings child-care center to Jal"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_611772\"  class=\"wp-caption module image alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 771px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-611772\" src=\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/BBLunch-1170x946-771x623.jpg\" alt=\"Bright Beginnings Child Development Center\" width=\"771\" height=\"623\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/BBLunch-1170x946-771x623.jpg 771w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/BBLunch-1170x946-336x272.jpg 336w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/BBLunch-1170x946-768x621.jpg 768w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/BBLunch-1170x946.jpg 1170w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 771px) 100vw, 771px\" \/><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Xchelzin Pena \/ New Mexico In Depth<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Children at the Bright Beginnings Child Development Center gather at the family-style tables to eat lunch. Because the center is so new, parents need to pack or bring in food for the children, but the directors are applying to become a part of the state&#8217;s food program.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>A visitor heading down NM-128 to Jal would be forgiven for believing there were more people driving pickups and equipment trucks on the congested state highway than living in the small oil patch town of just over 2,100 people.<\/p>\n<p>Jal is an old ranching community \u2014 JAL was the brand of the John A. Lynch herd, brought to the area by settlers in the early 1800s \u2014 but today, oil is its economic engine. And that engine is humming.<\/p>\n<p>New Mexico\u2019s most recent oil and gas boom has filled Heaven in a Cup, a retro burgers-and-shake shack off Main Street, with hungry oil field workers. Encampments of RVs and campers have sprung up around town and the economic resurgence has helped refuel the tiny town that sits just across the border from Texas.<\/p>\n<p>Not all the energy is in the oil fields, though.<\/p>\n<p>In recent years, Jal has built a new elementary and junior\/senior high school, rebuilt its health clinic and updated Jal Lake Park. And the influx of oil field workers has led to an innovative new child-care center that brings together two state programs under one roof in a way that had never been done before.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"module align-left half type-aside\">\n<h3>About this article<\/h3>\n<p>This article comes from\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/nmindepth.com\/2018\/08\/07\/creative-thinking-brings-child-care-center-to-jal\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">New Mexico In Depth<\/a>. Sign up for\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/nmindepth.us6.list-manage.com\/subscribe?u=1d2ab093d81b992e50978b363&amp;id=9294743d38\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">their newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>Teachers at Jal Elementary identified the need for high-quality child care for many of those oil field workers and their families almost five years ago \u2014 and decided they were just the people to fill it.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBeing an early childhood teacher we got a lot of calls, asking about child care or programs that their children could attend,\u201d said Jamie Galindo, a special education teacher in Jal.<\/p>\n<p>The school has had New Mexico PreK since its inception in 2005 \u2014 but that\u2019s limited to 4-year-olds. Jal Elementary also provides preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds with developmental delays. Both programs are only half-day.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBeing a working mother myself, I really felt the need that child care was essential for our area cause there wasn\u2019t any. There wasn\u2019t even a regular in-home provider,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>Some parents would be upset if their children\u00a0<i>weren\u2019t<\/i>\u00a0classified with a learning disability, Galindo said, because they wanted their children in the school\u2019s program. And there was a teacher Galindo knew at the school who would drive more than 30 miles round-trip twice a day to drop off and pick up her young children in Kermit, Texas, for child care.<\/p>\n<p>So when a former superintendent called a meeting to ask for grant ideas, the early childhood teachers piped up with an unusual one: they\u2019d like to open a child care center at the school. The timing was right because the small district was in the process of planning a new elementary school, so they decided to build in a few extra rooms.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out that was the easy part.<\/p>\n<p>It took four years from the time those teachers had the idea until they opened the doors last fall on Bright Beginnings Child Development Center with Galindo and DeAnna Ramos as co-directors.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>First they had to win the grant funding for start up costs, and think through exactly what the center would look like. And then there was the red tape.<\/p>\n<p>Child care in New Mexico is funded and regulated through the Children Youth and Families Department. Jal Elementary \u2014 as a public school \u2014 gets its money and oversight from the Public Education Department. Jal had to figure out how to blend funding from the two agencies for child-care services in a public school.<\/p>\n<p>The state bureaucracy didn\u2019t know what to make of Jal\u2019s request. No one had ever tried to have a CYFD and PED program in the same location that served the public. The Rio Rancho school district, which provided advice to Jal, has a child care center, but it is only for school district employees.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAt first that was one of our struggles, trying to figure out how we were going to braid and mesh the fundings. \u2026 We actually got a little bit of push back first thing, saying that wasn\u2019t an option. Maybe just the first one or two conversations that we had, but then we started having more conversations (and) it started to be a possibility. Yes, we can do this,\u201d Galindo said.<\/p>\n<p>They got some outside help from the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jfmaddox.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">JF Maddox Foundation<\/a>, a Hobbs-based nonprofit that promotes education and community development projects in the southeastern corner of the state. It provided a four-year grant worth more than half a million dollars to help set up the child care center \u2014 buying start up materials and equipment \u2014 as well as connecting the teachers with early childhood education experts to develop programming.<\/p>\n<p>Maddox Foundation CEO Bob Reid said the nonprofit was interested in helping Jal Public Schools start the center because it was something that didn\u2019t exist in Jal.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey have been pretty crucial to creating the resource in that community,\u201d Reid said. \u201cThey\u2019ve done a magnificent job.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For its first four years, the Maddox Foundation is also giving Bright Beginnings a financial cushion. The aid will taper off as it becomes more self-sustaining and the school district takes over the operational costs. Bright Beginnings is a private, nonprofit child-care center that shares a roof with a public school. It is licensed and regulated by the state, and parents pay for the care. Nearly half of the children\u2019s families are eligible for child care assistance, which is paid for through CYFD, with parents chipping in co-pays based on their income.<\/p>\n<p>That shared roof has other advantages.<\/p>\n<p>Children in the half-day preschool programs just walk over to the child care area when they are done with class, making an easy transition for the kids and a convenient option for working parents.<\/p>\n<p>And the ethos of early childhood education and the training they\u2019ve received under New Mexico PreK bleeds into the child care rooms, Galindo said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBright Beginning is a learning environment where they\u2019re walking in and seeing pictures and labels and language. For me it\u2019s more preK than child care,\u201d said Melissa Cervantes, who put her daughter in Bright Beginnings before she was eligible for NM PreK.<\/p>\n<p>That learning environment was a godsend to Cervantes. She had been driving more than two hours round trip, twice a week, to take her daughter for a 30-minute therapy session in Lovington to treat a speech delay. When the center opened up, the therapists told Cervantes her toddler would be better off spending a few days a week at Bright Beginnings.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen we started therapy, she wasn\u2019t saying words, she was just pointing,\u201d Cervantes said. \u201cAfter a week or two of taking her over there, she started saying single words. Then after three or four weeks she was saying two words together. Like, I eat.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Cervantes went from taking her two days to four days a week, just so she could get the socialization and the practice of speaking to her teachers and playmates.<\/p>\n<p>Having a high-quality center also gave Cervantes the chance to go back to work part time, since she didn\u2019t have to drive to Lovington regularly and work with her daughter as intensely.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s also helped other parents who wanted child care options. There are nannies in town \u2014 with a town as small as Jal, everyone knows who they are, Cervantes said. And many people rely on parents and grandparents for child care, as she had done with her older son. But for people who want a more social and structured environment for their children, Bright Beginnings is something they couldn\u2019t get just one year ago in Jal.<\/p>\n<p>The demand was even greater than Jamie Galindo and her coworkers imagined.<\/p>\n<p>They started with three child-care rooms \u2014 one each for infants, toddlers and children from 3 to 5 \u00a0\u2014 and five employees before they opened. They\u2019ve doubled their number of workers since then and went to a maximum capacity of 50 kids in their first year, with a waiting list of three for each room.<\/p>\n<p>Galindo said she\u2019d love to serve all the children, especially because it seems like so few, but said she wants to maintain the strict ratios that allow them to offer high-quality services. The center is working toward national accreditation that would jump it to a five-star rating by the state.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a delicate balancing act, because she and Ramos want to offer high-quality early childhood education and care, pay their child care workers better, and keep prices affordable. It\u2019s one of the learning curves they\u2019re trying to master as they go from teachers in a highly structured public school system to quasi-entrepreneurs opening a child-care center from the ground up, with a model that has not been tried before in the state.<\/p>\n<p>And reaction in Jal?<\/p>\n<p>Well, the local chamber of commerce recently announced its teachers of the year: Jamie Galindo and DeAnna Ramos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The innovative new child-care center brings together two state programs under one roof in a way that had never been done before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":611772,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[234,125,3675],"class_list":["post-611767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-children","tag-education","tag-jal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/611772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}