As Mayor, Jane Campbell will:

Create incentives for high quality child care centers and trained child careworkers.

With more parents working outside the home, the demand for quality child care remains high. Across Cleveland, we have licensed child care centers, but our child care workforce is generally young and inexperienced in child development.. Staff turnover is high, and wages are low. We need to upgrade the profession with the help of our local colleges and universities.

Improve teacher education, especially in the early grades, by establishing a teacher training institute in Cleveland.

Ages four to ten are critically important in the development of a child. During this stage of life, a child's brain is developing rapidly. Teachers report that too many of our children come to kindergarten unprepared to learn. By the time children reach middle school, correcting problems in behavior and academic performance becomes far more difficult.
Our best approach is to concentrate our educational efforts earlier in life. Positive school experiences at an early age smooth the path to success in later years. We need to focus our schools on developmentally appropriate pre-kindergarten and kindergarten instruction and assessment.

Encourage each community to establish a set of simple, measurable goals for each school in our system.

We cannot improve what we do not measure. Unfortunately, many educational statistics are unintelligible.
The Campbell Administration will encourage each neighborhood to come up with their own measures and report cards for their local schools. We will encourage Cleveland State and CWRU to serve as resource partners in this effort.

Promote responsible parenthood and encourage parents to become effective teachers through programs, such as Parent Effectiveness Training.

Parents are a child's first teachers. Yet, we are not born with parenting skills; if we are lucky, we learn them.
Unfortunately, too many of our parents do not have the skills they need to raise their children. Parent education gives us a very practical step we can take to improve the chances of our young children as they enter school.

Fathers play two critical roles in providing economic security for their children and assisting in their education. Yet, a growing number of fathers fail to fulfill these roles. The latest research shows that even fathers who live outside the home can improve the educational prospects for their children.

Launch a citywide Starting Points initiative.

Sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, Starting Points represents a set of initiatives for young children and families. We can make significant improvements in the health of children by launching in each neighborhood a Starting Points action agenda around four strategies:
1) promoting responsible parenthood;
2) guaranteeing quality child care choices;
3) ensuring good health and protection for our children; and
4) mobilizing communities to support young children and families.

Establish early intervention reading programs with the goal that every child will read and comprehend well by the fourth grade.

Houston and Atlanta are two inner city school systems that have shown that early intervention programs work. We cannot hide from a basic truth: we know how to teach every child to read. But we are not meeting this fundamental obligation. More>>