Teacher Jayne Jones writes on the whiteboard in the new 3- to 5-year-old classroom in the Early Education Center in 2022. A Lilly Endowment grant is helping the schools provide care to younger children at the center.
A $500,000 grant to Brown County schools announced Tuesday will enable the district to expand its services to provide child care and early education for infants and toddlers. High school students will benefit, too, as the program will provide dual credit to those enrolled in BCS’s early childhood education (ECE) program.
“This will be the first time that this county has ever had a licensed child care center for kids of that age,” Deborah Harman, director of student support services at BCS, said after reporting to the school board that the district has received a half-million-dollar grant from Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Early Years Initiative to support the program.
“This is a grant that’s about expanding early care and education for infants and toddlers,” Harman said. “… Right now we only have a preschool class and an older toddler class,” she said, “so this will allow us to have 10 more toddler seats … and eight infant seats, so we’ll basically be able to have birth-to-5,” she said of the age range the district will be able to serve at the Early Education Center in Nashville.
She said the program will be open to anyone in the community and the cost of care is estimated to be $27 per day per child.
The new program will be in addition to preschool programs already offered to support older children at BCS, Harman said.
According to the school district, space in the Early Education Center, 235 School House Lane, will be reconfigured to add an infant room, a second toddler room, a laundry area, health room, and a family education area.
“The facility will be the first of its kind in Brown County and unique within the Indiana Uplands Region with its connection to dual-credit coursework for high school students,” BCS said in a press release announcing the grant. The region includes Brown, Crawford, Daviess, Dubois, Greene, Lawrence, Martin, Monroe, Orange, Owen and Washington counties.
“We believe that Brown County High School’s ECE Program located at our Early Education Center creates a much-needed area pipeline by graduating credentialed early educators ready for hire within our community and throughout the Indiana Uplands Region,” according to BCS.
Read more about this initiative in the Oct. 30 issue of The Democrat.
