 had a lovely lunch as always the bull puts on such a delightful spread that was an amazing amount of food wasn't it everyone yeah a nice round of applause for the bull I'm Lynn podium I am the chair of the business advocacy committee and I'm also your hostess if I we always do this at every time so just so you know can I have all of our business advocacy committee members please raise your hand that way you can look around the room and if there is any questions any concerns any needs you have and you feel more comfortable directly talking to one of us we are always willing and able to have those conversations with you Bill is gonna take my picture I'm gonna smile the boys all in my mouth staying open right oh there's Lynn again thanks Bill you made me look thinner right okay good that's all that matters Prevea where's Kelly where's Kelly thank you Kelly is with Prevea and Prevea always does such a wonderful job hosting our meal here so thank you to Prevea we have a few little committee member notes for you today you'll notice on your table there is this wonderful marketing programming item please make sure you take one if you will hopefully are getting these at your business I know personally we got to this this week and we were very excited about it it gives you a nice rundown on everything from now until June 18th there is one small item that is missing from this and I believe this is members from advocacy help me out I it's April 14th at 1 30 is our ribbon cutting yes right okay April 14th at the ribbon cutting over at the brand new now see look at that I just ran out of words John help me air quality monitoring station I really do know what I'm talking about but when it's not written down and I'm talking to all of you at once it's a little overwhelming so air quality monitoring station for those of you who don't know we've been working for a number of years to try and make sure that your air quality is actually where it should be so this air quality station is it's a temporary right now but we're doing a ribbon cutting out there and we'd love to have all of you come and join us if you can so that is April 14th it is not on the card because we had to change it around at 1 30 and it's on the highway 42 if you have any questions about where that's located the chamber can get that to you and I think I'll leave the rep no I'll say these now first Friday forum next month May 2nd right here at the bull we've got the Wisconsin taxpayers alliance and we are lucky to have Todd Berry coming to join us and then June 6th trends in health care for the future and dr. Rye will be with us and if you haven't heard dr. Rye speak he is wonderful and that's not going to be about the Obamacare thing this is about really about what our health care is going to be looking at like in the future is that more correctly stated yeah excellent so today we are very well very very welcome to have three incredible speakers for our panel we're going to be speaking about early childhood development we have Paul Bartlett he's a CEO and president of Volrath company he has had leadership positions at the color company and at John Deere he's been happily married for 23 years to his wife Beth and they have two children a 15 and a 12 year old Paul raise your hand yes good job we also have Dennis Winters he's a nationally recognized expert on human resource challenges in the competitive global economic environment he has served as an advisor to private industry government agencies and elected federal state and local offices Dennis Winters currently current titles are chief of the office of economic advisors acting director of the Bureau of Workforce Information and technical support and labor market information director for the Wisconsin Department of Work Development I do not want to have to put that on his door that is a lot that's a big mouthful he is also happily married and he is currently reliving his college days vicariously through his three children gotta appreciate that Pam Cougie is our last speaker on our panel she is the principal at the early learning center she has been the principal this is her now third year third year there and she has been 21 years at the ELC she is happily married with two kids who are 17 and 15 and I have to tell you so I'm putting a little personal note in this she is the social worker who diagnosed my son Eric thank you and welcome all you're all right I feel like it's karaoke time or something so I'll do my best to to measure up to the what was it a wonderful or fantastic speaker so we'll see I'm usually shy shy in public forms and those of you know we don't laugh please and never ask me to speak on a Friday because whatever shelter I have is usually gone on a Friday so this will be fun but so I was asked today to walk around a little bit too so I was asked today to give the business perspective on early childhood learning and literacy so I'm not exactly sure what that means but I'm gonna I'm gonna give it a shot you know I've been in this community for 15 years the company I've worked for at work that I work for has been in the community for 140 years and from a personal and a corporate standpoint we're very committed to the community we have been for a long time we continue to be and we're expected to be well into the future but you know we do have you know some concerns as we look at in the future and I'll come at it from more of a business perspective about where's our employee base going to come from in the future for folks that we want to hire locally and then also what kind of community are we going to have to attract people into the Sheboygan County area because both of those are very important from a corporate standpoint and from a personal standpoint want to be able to grow a business and we want to be able to live and work in a community that we feel safe and as vibrant and as exciting so I'll kind of share my views and how early childhood learning and literacy fits into that at least from my corporate viewpoint perspective you know so a couple of full disclosure points I'm a parent as the introduction said you know as as a parent my children were direct beneficiaries from early childhood learning experience in the birth of three range we had home visiting you know sometimes you think that maybe folks that come from a professional environment don't really benefit from that but I'll tell you some of you probably remember being a first-time parent and you're like where the hell is the instruction manual on this thing and you know I'm really smart but I feel really stupid with this thing and and you know that experience of going through it my wife and I had learned a tremendous amount about the importance of brain development and learning development at that stage that led like so many other things in life I said wow this is pretty good and then I got drafted into helping support early childhood learning youth development in the community and so the other full disclosure is I'm kind of on board with early childhood learning youth development mentoring education so you can't accuse me of being a unbiased speaker on the subject so but unbiased I'm not but I'm also not an expert I've knocked around in the subject for long enough and I'll probably use some words at the experts that are on the table cringe a little cringe at a little bit but I've probably gotten to the point where I I've reached on the subject I've reached what I call the holiday and express level of competency if you remember those commercials of I may not be the expert but I've stayed at a holiday and express so first when I'm looking around the room I got to do a little bit of a survey here because it's not quite the audience I was expecting how many people here are involved in government all right there we go how many people are involved in education or child development or youth development all righty how many people here actually run a business all right those are the people oh now you're calling a non-profit to business Bob all right so not that I'm you know I'm not even to go close and and and try to lecture a lot of folks governmentally and already involved in youth development and education in the room but you know for the business folks of the room you know you know how many of you is the kind of audience participation done how many are locally wish that you had a deeper broader pool of employees to hire from right or maybe we're all satisfied you know when you recruit people into the area one of the questions that I'm always asked by prospective couples with kids is how are the schools what are the ACT scores what are the SAT scores I mean how many of us would want schools that are even performing at a higher level so people are excited about moving to the area putting their kids in our educational system how many of us donate money to the community to help make it a better community most of us in the room how many of us would love to have those dollars spent the most efficiently in the most bank for the buck I don't think anybody's gonna raise their hand and say hey waste my money please I worked I worked hard for it I you know I I gave some taxes uncle sugar and now let's piss away the oops sorry sorry it's Friday you know let's get rid of the rest of it so you know I think to me the subject of the day early childhood learning literacy is something that is a tremendous lever on all four of those things that we can move our community forward and in for the for the business folks and manufacturing folks in the room and I'll get dinged from my friends for dehumanizing the subject here but you know I I think about child development or educational system somewhat in terms of a manufacturing process a couple things I know you know I'm not an educator but I know manufacturing the better raw material going into your manufacturing process the better the output is and it's a heck of a lot of people to make it right the first time and try to rework and fix the product at the end of the process so how is that time the subject of the day you can all get hired for quality control now but you know at the at the I missed my life one more survey question then it'll come around how many of you remember the movie field of dreams you're all old how many of you remember the line from the field of dreams build it and they will come all right I'll get back to that a little bit almost forgot that so if you think about the kind of the raw material going in an educational process it's really the kids you know depending upon the community you live in their energy are entering our educational process at usually age four or five you know depending upon the programs that the school systems have the problem with that is if you look at the research the most important period in a child's life in terms of brain development depending upon what you look at is birth to three or birth to five so some of the key times of a children's development is the time we're generally speaking as a community we don't have consistent structured programs focused on those of those of those children so what does that matter well and I obviously I'm not killing you to death at PowerPoint Dennis has a very good PowerPoint that summarizes some of these things but if you look at the body of research the development of a child by age five where it becomes literacy or their learning development is a huge predictor not only a power they're going to do in school but the bring-on effects of after the K through 12 education how they're going to you know are they going to go to technical college are they going to go to university even things that might surprise you like are they going to go into bankruptcy someday are they going to become a social problem that has to be remediated there's a huge level of predictive power that comes from where a kid has been developed by the age of five it is one of the biggest levers as a society it is a community that we have to really improve the communities that we live and work in from a selfish funding standpoint from a business standpoint whether it's for paying taxes or we're donating money if you look at the data the leverage I'll say the financial leverage between remedial social services and preventive social services such as early childhood education and upon what you look at it safely 10 to 1 so the best investment we can make in terms of shifting the community forward is focusing on the front of the problem on the quality of raw material going into the process and not trying to rework issues that have been developed at the end of the process so that's kind of the the business owner view of of early childhood education and a bit selfish but if if you look at all the data and I'd encourage after the other speakers are done they'll probably be some reference points in their presentations but to do a little bit of research and you know because obviously at least the three of us are advocates on the subject believe it strongly but the research out there is compelling and factual and powerful that this is an important lever that we can push it out of community so obviously I'm a supporter of it obviously I think it's a huge leverage issue for community if we commit to youth development and early childhood learning in that whole continuum over time we can shift significantly shift not only employment base in the area but also the quality of life in our community but it'll come back to my field of dreams this this is always a very difficult and I'll speak now as somebody who's who's trying to raise money to support these type of efforts preventative social actions for lack of a term whether it comes from private donations from or from a governmental side our tough sell sometimes because it's a bit of a it's a bit of a field of dreams thing build okay we're gonna invest in kids that are birthed to three four five well when do you when do you see that return on investment you see it 15 16 17 years after that it's not probably an appropriate world word it's not as sexy as you know there's a remedial problem somebody doesn't have a house somebody's in a bad relationship somebody needs food at the food bank or whatever the case may be and those are all issues we need to address in our community so I'm not denigrating those but it's a lot easier to raise money get people excited either from a taxpayer side or from a private donation side that here's a problem we can fix it today you can see it an immediate return on your investment much more difficult to sell the message about investing in the future but the returns on that investment and the impact in the community that we live and we work in and from an employee point an employer point that we I want to run a successful business in are so huge that we really need to focus on it and from my opinion we need to commit to it from a community basis so that is my Kool-Aid speech hopefully you tasted the Kool-Aid a little bit hopefully I didn't say anything that made the experts cringe they are the experts I'm just a strong community advocate so with that thank you for your time and your attention and I'll pass it on to Dennis I made a little bit expert but that avenue is pretty narrow probably and I've been fairly new to this whole thing I've only been working on it early childhood development that is for about 10 years and so but where I've come into it as an economist is from the economy perspective and this and some of you in the room know I can talk for ad nauseam on the topic but in the 10 minutes I've got a little something I think a critical point as we look at it from an economic perspective and return on investment for there because we're trying to change the dialogue a little bit in conversation to go part in the terminology the warm and fuzzy of the the health care and daycare providers and things like that more into the critical language of the business community and the value on returns and investment and kind of showing it to them and we make some progress there because we've been told by folks like Tim Sheehy the MMAC out of Milwaukee that quit bludgeoning us with data we get it tell us what you want from us so I'm going to bludgeon you with some more data but it's to empower y'all so you can talk a little bit about the about the concept of what it means so as we go on in the new economy economic development and workforce development are interrelated interaction I would submit that as time goes on talent is going to be more and more critical for economic development but try to boil this down into an equation that y'all be able to grasp okay so here we got ed equals ed education equals economic development and that will be more and more in the case so we have to maximize the education side of things going forward and to do that what's the best economic investment tool available well this is it it's early childhood development and this is these numbers are from the Perry preschool project it was a it was a controlled double blind statistical experiment so scientific as you can get it took about 136 kids out of Ypsilanti Michigan put them through divide them up put them through early childhood care program and those that didn't they measured them they found them again at 27 years old I think all the six of them or something like that at 40 years old and asked them the same questions and look at the economic returns on that well it turns out that if you spend $15,000 on these kids when they're in four-year-old kindergarten for the benefits are $260,000 unless net present value returns okay so it's an apples and apples comparison this is the investment the cost these are where the benefits are spread across that okay and you've got welfare reduction more education earnings taxes paid and in this huge big one reductions in crime somebody told me a statistic they said if you don't have a high school degree you're more likely to go to to be incarcerated at some point then you are if you smoke to get lung cancer that's a pretty bold statement exactly what it means I don't know but if we can make that kind of connection on cigarettes and lung cancer and we're doing it worse with our children I would think that would resonate at some place so this is a 17 to 1 return our roll neck out of the Minneapolis Fed and Rob Greenwald brought it down to 16 percent annual realized rate of return try to replicate that year after year after year it's pretty hard to do and I look at this again and my interpretations are a little different but these are some of the things out how they've broken it out and the blue lines are those that went or the black lines are those that went through a high-quality program in the Perry preschool and and the lighter lines is those who didn't and you can see all this you're more likely to be employed you're more likely to make a decent living what that means for your household the community you're more likely to own a home so you're making a lifetime investment you're putting down rips in a community you have an interest in that community you had a savings account an economic perspective here again your little head of the game you're contributing you are building a source of wealth as you go forward and that's critical going forward and it never been on welfare as an adult again it brings down back into social services and things we need I hear when I ask business people what are the two things that you worry about they usually give me three one is too many regulations high tax burden and can't find enough town well this is a solution to two of those tax burden and the talent side of it the tax burden comes out we were talking at our table a little bit you know the cost of putting a kid in public education right now is about 10-12 thousand dollars per year per kid the cost to do to incarcerate somebody is about 30 thousand dollars per body per year which would you rather pay kind of a judge to be used to kind of tongue-in-cheek it when the kid came up in front of the judge where you want to go to prison or you want to go to college your college is cheaper and then some other ones an avicid area another another program I brought these in here because a lot of those returns we talked about are not just long-term returns but they're immediate reduction in special education reductions in grade repeaters more high school and college graduation we've done some work we'll talk about a little bit immediate on the case of 12 and I just put this one up here you can see all these are big benefit cost ratios the point I'm trying to make here though is that all these studies these are scientific studies the different names of them they're all about the same they're all a little different different environments a little different program but they all generated the same similar congruent results which tells me that this is even more powerful for all of these because it's replicated and replicated and even if they're not exact they're showing the same kind of results as we go forward so here's a whole list of these are about the big five that we talked about the Perry preschool is kind of the granddaddy of them all so time after time and that's got the biggest results because that's how they've tracked these kids the longest right and so you get the compound returns on it as they get over there was a study out here that again on the short term stuff the economic returns to Wisconsin's education system by feel or Bellefield and winners put this out a few years ago and it looked at the cash flows through the K through 12 system for the Wisconsin as a whole and for Milwaukee and broke it down this way the cost to do this in about 207 million dollars the big number right where do you get that money but the benefits and just the fiscal flows K through 12 is a hearty 141 million okay and that was because we had fewer grave repeaters we need a few substitutes there was less teacher absence on and on and on okay of the things that immediately day-to-day and then Clive took this and the extended into the other variables we know that are post education this this yielded us about a 68 cents on a dollar return in the state about 78 cents for Milwaukee where they've got more problems and then we put it through the model we got a 1.64 so every dollar we put in this we got a dollar 64 cents back positive return investment this is as close as we've gotten home for looking at these numbers so you add all this up the difference is about 66 million dollars still seems like a big number but it's less than 1% less than 1% of the state education budget huge return 17 to 1 the individual society 80 I think that's the next slide imperative for workforce development right and economic development I think in this slide nope I'm gonna go back here huge returns the individual society 80% the returns go to the community go to the the civil population 20% that goes back to the individual himself or so huge returns as we go forward and they're spread out so I kind of sum it up at this and this is abbreviated off of talks I could give you to explain it more but what's the greatest job me over here and all the time from academics and from on the street business people as we need skilled creative interactive occupation skills in the people what are the returns 17 to 1 80% of the public huge returns on these investments is a fiscally prudent tiny fraction of all the money spent in public schools and the return work done by Robert Leach in Wisconsin it's about eight years before we turn over into actually positive cash flows and I say what is your next alternative investment well it's not a new mall okay free economic development going forward it's all gonna be about talent and if you don't have a talent you're not gonna need them all I want to tell this story a little bit I'm a I'm a I'm a birth or actually I'm a prenatal to eight kind of guy and it's all broken up in zero to three zero to five zero to eight I'm a prenatal to age eight because the studies out there showing even the prenatal care can affect a child's birth weight not to mention other problems going forward and the reason I'm birth to eight is because as a workforce development consultant economist I knew I'm gonna tell this story I knew that third grade reading scores were a big indicator of academic success I took that as face value okay you know that we go forward with that until one day my daughter was getting a third grade reading award and it's a dutiful father I went into class you know that tiny little chair and the principal comes in and he says this is very important yeah okay I gotta get back to work too but then he goes on to say because this is very important because up until now you've learned to read from now on you read to learn that's why third grade reading scores right are indicative of further future success academic and economic that's what brought it all together for me right and that's why I'm looking at this thing eight years old eight years old the okra for academic and career success and that's a lot to ask from a kid coming in a kindergarten doesn't know which way is up right to get him to read in two or three years a lot to ask from the kid the teacher the community everybody involved so this is why I tell this story because this is what it all came together for me physiologically socially economically etc etc this is some work done by James Heckman professor at University of Chicago he's about to retire this is one of his capstone projects and he's also happens to have Nobel Prize in economics and he did some work he's actually done a lot of this work and if you if you want to find out a lot about everything involved kind of here on this side to heckman equation calm and there's a whole website out there laying a lot of information excuse me heckman equation calm and that's h e h e c k m a n and one of the things he did is he looked at cognitive and non-cognitive performance scores and and one of the grass he's got is this one and I'll go through this one this happens to be for math but it's true for reading and other things and he laid this out and this doesn't really tell you anything that you probably don't already know this is scores by percentile this is age 6 to 12 years old and these are income quartiles so you look at this craft and it says all right well rich kids do better than poor kids right and there's you know fairly if it gets the spreads out a little bit more as wealth goes up okay they all kind of know that we see it day in and day out in and we see it in the statistics but what professor heckman did we've kind of sets him apart from a lot of it is he corrected for the mother's education attainment level actually he corrected for everything else and these graphs came right together it's not a function of income level it's a function of the mother's education attainment level when you think about that makes a lot of sense right who's the first teacher who's talking to this kid every day day in day out right showing them stuff so this is where it came together and a lot of poverty is temporary okay so this is where it comes together it's the mother's education attainment levels the biggest factor on a kid's future so we for me I turn this and I said that we've been doing all the social policy I'll use it I'll use the Friday weakness back ass words okay education is not a function of poverty but we've been dealing with that we've been trying to put these kind of programs in for a generation or more poverty is a function of education and the new economy it's gonna be more and more so as we go forward and we see the dichotomy going whether you have talent or you don't have talent in the modern workplace and you would have had given me another two hours I would have laid all that reasoning out for you but now I've got a series of quotes now but this is the one that strikes me and I've seen David Brooks he was a keynote speaker to a convention there a conference we were at in DC one time by five years old it is possible to predict with the pressing accuracy who will complete high school and college and who won't five years old we see it already at that age and as we talked about you know in business you fix it now instead of fixing it later and we spend billions on the media education right we take a kid that didn't do well for ten years sitting in a desk to listen to somebody and what do you do you sit him at a desk and have him listen to somebody this is huge I've got about 12 of these things from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from the National Association of Manufacturers actually I was talking to a woman last week the WMC in Madison from the National Manufacturers Alliance and they've got statements out talking about how important this is for business and industry going forward as far as some of them talking about national security issues so that's what I've got so now that we've heard why early education is so important I'm going to share with you today about I think it's one of the state's best early learning centers that we have in the state right here in your own community it's part of the Sheboygan area school district the early learning center I've gone to many many conferences throughout the state and really what we have here in Sheboygan is one of a kind I don't know that a lot of people living in Sheboygan actually realize that so we're gonna talk to you a little bit about what we do have here at the early learning center this is an example of our population the people that we serve pretty much any child who lives in the Sheboygan area school district attendance area is able to come to the early learning center they can come we have a child find screening at the age of three so any parent can bring their child through a screening and we do a developmental screening to see if they have any special needs and then if they do we do a referral to get them into early childhood education at the age of four children can come and attend 4k so it's the beginning of their school experience at age four they do not need to have any type of need this just breaks down the different students that we have the demographics and then our enrollment at the early learning center we have over 600 students that attend half of the students attend in the morning we have a morning session and an afternoon session it is a half-day program and different types of classrooms like I said three-year-olds four-year-olds can be in a self-contained special education classroom if they need that extra help and then we have 16 classrooms that children are receiving regular 4k education we also consult with head start where we have a cooperative agreement where they we have two head start programs in our building also at the early learning center just listed things that I view as things that we do very successful we have a pyramid model PBIS program which all the schools do in the district we start at very young at the early learning center where the children are learning appropriate behaviors for school this also continues in the home and I'll talk about that a little bit later how we get that information out to the parents at the home we give screenings just like other elementary middle and high schools have to do assessments there is a state assessment now that we do give our 4k students and they are compared to other students across the country to ensure that what we're doing they are learning and they need to be where they're at we use a valid curriculum based on the Wisconsin early learning standard we also look at and work closely with the kindergarten curriculum to ensure that what we're teaching the students we're preparing them for kindergarten when they enter kindergarten the other thing I wanted to touch based on is the 21st century skills a lot of people are very surprised that when they walk into our building that the students are already working on ipads smartboards computers it starts very early when they enter school and it's amazing many students come in with those skills already and it's just a tool that we use that they can be educated with and it's very helpful they go on because they're going to need that once they go to elementary school and then we are celebrating our 25th anniversary this year we the early learning center has been here for 25 years in Sheboygan it started out it was in two separate buildings and then for the past 19 years we've been at our current location and we're going to be having a big celebration in October where many people will be invited to that to come and celebrate with us the 25 years that we've been here we also have challenges one of the challenges I see is that being recognized at the different levels there are many people in the Sheboygan community I think that still don't really realize and think that it's a daycare setting and it's so much more than that so we've been doing different things at the different levels trying to communicate exactly what we do and what we have here in Sheboygan the diversity and the severity of the students that we're seeing come into us at age three at lunch we were in a conversation about the mental health needs of students coming in already at age three and how severe that is 10 15 years ago you didn't see a three-year-old coming to our schools already diagnosed with mental health needs so that is a real challenge and you have to be really prepared to be able to assist those families and those students with those needs another huge challenge I think we face is figuring out how we provide intervention when children come to us we are their first typically their first school experience sometimes they've been in a priest or a daycare where they've had some type of education there but it's hard to weed out is it developmental when they come to us and they're not me reaching our standards or is it that they really do have some learning issues so we do have a full-time interventionist at our school and we are very strategically trying to intervene with students that aren't scoring on standardized instruments where they should be so that intervention is already beginning at that point this is just an example of the behavior model like I said the PBIS system that's in place in all the schools it starts basically very basic we teach the students what are appropriate behaviors when you enter school and then some students respond the majority of students eighty percent of students respond very well to that some students need a little bit more intervention and then even a few need even more than that and we have all that in place what during that 4k year for them to provide them those assistance in the hope that when they leave our building and go on to elementary school that they know those behaviors and then we also have an education component for parents where they can learn what's appropriate behavior that's probably the number one thing that we hear as teachers in the school is I don't know how to control my child's behavior what can I do we have lots of different ways that we address it with the parents one of those ways is through our home visits we as part of our program which I believe is very important the research really supports that is that it's not just having the parents send their children to school they a lot of times need that education component also many parents send their children to school for the first time and they've had such a negative experience with school from their past experiences that they don't even want to walk in the door so it's our role to make those parents feel comfortable and let them know that schools a safe place schools a good place that they can seek us out for that help too so one of the ways we do that is our students come to school four days a week and one one of the days of the week they do not come to school our teachers visit with those parents so each parent will have a visit from their teacher one-on-one with the teacher and their child present where we share with the parent what the child is doing at school we give parents ideas of how they can help their child at home and that's very unique for our program I know many other early learning centers early programs throughout the state they don't always have that component built in and I think that's key so the next slide is a small video of some examples of how that takes place so basically here the teacher is going over with the child a learning activity that took place in school you don't see yet but the father is sitting right next to him and in this particular video they ask the father what makes these visits important to you why do you what do you like about these parent teacher visit he basically said that this particular child his child the first couple weeks of school did not want to come to school was crying it was a very hard separation he had never been in a daycare been away from parents and by the fourth fifth sixth week of school he loved coming to school always good so and the dad had to say to that he enjoyed this because he was able to take something home with him at every visit we are able to give the parents something that they can take home to work on that's similar to what we're doing I guess in ending I would invite anybody that hasn't been to the early learning center if you'd like to come through take a look see what we have to offer right here in Shevoi again it's a wonderful facility lots of learning lots of education going on so thank you one of the reasons one thing that I will say about American education right now you look at international studies American kids do very well they don't do as well in A3 and they do poorly when they graduate so when you say a choir of American preschool seniors not doing as well it must be something going on not before they start school but after they start school otherwise it wouldn't be doing so well before the grade and they are having the preschool advocates who are keep pushing the problem as before kids are 5 before everybody dies in on this for a long period of time you've got to remember and so far as American schools are failing they're failing more in middle school and particularly high school and our kids are still doing very well for the grade the studies that I read when they talk about a lot of preschool will tell you that you can get a child to do better when they're five or six years old therefore that goes about saying when I think what I was in school a long time ago I can think of kids whose parents taught them to read and they could read in the first grade but I didn't know how to read them on the other hand the same studies will show that by the time you're in the third or fourth grade everybody's the same so you get caught up it doesn't matter you just start and I bring that up just because we're always at a time when people are saying we need more government and something here or there and I guess since I've been in public life there have always been people you know pushing more early early early quite frankly since I've been in state government we've gone from half day kindergarten being the norm to all day kindergarten being the norm to half day four year old as a matter of fact Wisconsin is one of the leaders of Wisconsin there are very few states with good money you can call that you know early education more in the early education of the state of Wisconsin I'm just going to tell you there are two sides to that story and there are always going to be people looking out there to say that the norm ought to be you know get the three year olds in school I personally believe the results are mixed on that and I think you're overall concerned about where kids are when they graduate at age 18 out of high school I would look at more why our kids get so much worse than international tests between fourth grade and 12th grade and what's going on between 4th or 4th grade right now our kids in international grade and 4th grade and I'm sure to see a lot of my friends and you have me but I want you to be aware of this is of their disagreements on this and there's another side thank you for your son do you want to address that sir I agree with you in the sense that we get our kids up to speed early and it fades and I agree with you that you have to follow through on the investment to keep those kids at premium level both for their own good and for competition globally as far as I think what other point you made there that I did have a bit of a problem with oh yes thank you well and and and professor heckman would tell you that he started out this whole college initiative he was looking at the narrowing of America's competitiveness versus global and he looked at R&D investment didn't find the problem there he looked at our graduate schools didn't find the problem there looked at our colleges didn't find it high schools didn't find it elementary schools he had to drill all the way down to early childhood development where he found the beginnings of the discrepancies in the relative gains or loss whatever you want to look at of America's competitiveness so he's he started out looking at the top end ended up at the bottom you want to do it by age in reverse so you know I would say you know I would say you know I give me one of the flaws in the lot here is it presupposes that nothing that that it has been conditioned in a child before fourth grade, has any impact afterwards. And I'll use my factory analogy that says, I have an assembly of product going online. There are defects that occur at the end of the line that have been put into the assembly process early on in the product line. So, you know, I would push back a channel, I think the day that you write that, and I would create the data show of the diagram that you're talking about. But to me, the law of the lot is that you're not accounting for any differences, which may not be evident yet, and more at a very low level. But that would be my respect of this agreement with the data. Do you guys have one more thing to add? Because obviously it's a public cost for the sake of the other. And all the post-graduate costs are borne by the public incarceration. And this is what I will do. You might be worth the public's interest to invest a little bit early on, try to abrogate a huge problem on the back end, where we know the costs are not. If you do something to mitigate some of them, it may be a public agreement. Right, right. There are people who question the quality of the hearings. But still, 50 years later, as well as every small study, they're still within the chart, they're really shadowed by the editors who talk about it. And if you Google it, you will find both sides of the story. But I'm telling you, I just want to point out, when I probably met with a channel business, this has been with anybody. I'm trying to erase it both so early right now. What? Yeah, but you can't introduce yourself. Do you mind doing that now? I just want to point out, when you hear a presentation like this, it's always unbelievable, right? If you Google things, you will find there two sides of this story. Well, I like the people who have always been pushing you know, the government might have a four-year-old and the government might have a three-year-old and it's going to be better off if they hit. I won't disagree with their problem with some families. It's going to be better off having the government to have the kids. But to make it a national policy, the results are next. And it's so far from there that schools are failing. Statistics will probably show that we should focus our change on high schools. I think the question is, in the fourth grade, many of the companies educate on student. After fourth grade, there's more companies don't have a policy. And so that the kids who are involved with the government actually change. And now they're saying that we should look at them. We might have a lot of them here, but we have to look at all parts of them. Yeah, the studies that were listed up there, Terry's preschool and the others, very soft, mild, it doesn't matter how old it was. There is an age-appropriate curriculum for young children. It tends to tend to be working with families. It's not only working with the children, it's working with families at home that have written the results. It's very valid from their standpoint and doesn't matter if it's still in the system. Two, three, four, and five. Okay, go. I'm going to start over. I'm not going to start over. But based on this news release, there's $500,000 that's going to be available to work with organizations that develop public-private partnerships around early education. And there was no more information on how we might be able to apply for some of that $500,000. Do you know anything about that? I do know a little bit. I mean, the race to the top was a big grant that we got, I think, $21 million onto that. So the Department of Children and Families has got a program to try to develop initiatives for that. A lot of it goes into the budget-tutile data system out of DPI. But out of the era of money, the American Recovery and whatever act that came out of the meltdown, the economic meltdown, there was money put forward to, and we got a slice of it. I say, folks, to develop private-public partnership and we've got about $300,000 of that of which we let just about all of it out in matching grants through the Celebrate Children Foundation and we put the grants out that they had to be matched at half, $0.50 on the dollar. We had 16 recipients at one awards. It turned out that the matching came in at over one-to-one. So the communities that we put it out to rallied even more resources than we expected. So I asked for $2 million out of that race to the top for public partnerships, or at least I suggested it should be to that level and we've got, what did you say, $500,000. So we're hoping we can leverage that money as well as we did the previous money and exactly when all that's going to be let out and awards received and granted, I don't know. I have a question and that is regarding English as a second language. I noticed some of your statistics dealt with that but how does that play into the early, you know, learning language or English as their second language. They come to the Early Learning Center and they are given a language test and they are given a level when they enter the school district one, two, three or four. Most of the children coming in at age three or four when they speak another language other than English are given a level one. And then they are able to get extra services within the school district by an ELL teacher which is a certified teacher. So they can enter and get those extra services right away. And parents also have the right if they don't want those services to sign them out of that but 99% of parents will take it. Number three. Speaking to that, we talked a little bit about the 30 million word gap of kids that are between the kids who have been read to and cuddled and nurtured and those that hadn't. Can you speak a little bit more to that with someone and explain how that works with regard to, you know, brain stimulation and the development of the brain? I just took the microphone out of your hand. I didn't mean to do that. Do you want to speak of this speaker number four? I'm the Executive Director of the Family Resource Center. The Family Resource Center has a home visitation program that's here in Shmoyne County for the last 15 years called Parents as Teachers. There's good nods out there. Good. It's an evidence-based program that dials it back to what I call early learning. I think the one of the most important things that we need to do here is we need to distinguish between early learning and early education. Everything about today was about early education, the four-year-olds, and I think Paul hit its spot on when he said the raw material. I used to teach before I got into this position. I taught first grade back in the mid-80s, so please do your math. And even at that time, we saw the gap. We saw the gap between those who came to school with and without skills, without the readiness skills. I can only imagine how it has increased through the years. And I taught at a private school, and it's kind of amazing, Paul. Sometimes you and I line up with our thinking before we even talk about it. I would come home and I'd say to my husband it's all about the raw material. It's all about what is handed to me. I could teach these kids on a dirt road. The kids I was getting. I would guarantee that I could teach Paul's kids when they came into my system on a dirt road. Now we need internet access on that dirt road. But I could teach them based on everything they got from zero through four. And my home visitation program at the Family Resource Center is getting a parent educator into the home from the time the child is born. Because I agree to a point that we can take children out of their learning environment in their home and put them in day care. And we can put them in four-year-old, you know, kindergartens. We can pull them out of this home and put them in three-year-old kindergartens. But the bottom line is at the end of the day children go home and they go to parents. And the home is the first classroom. The most influential classroom. How many speeches do you have to listen to? Thanks mom. Thanks dad. Most influential. Mom. Dad. And the most influential part of the culture is that we do not recognize the parent as the teacher and nor do we engage them until the hit of early learning center. Four years old and now we're going to work with you parents. We're going to engage you in education. And we need to engage parents immediately from the time that that child was born. And to tell you truth, that's a great window of opportunity because when you got your parents are very impressionable at that time, they really wanted to know how to do this. The behaviors you're talking about at four years old, those parents had those questions when the kid was two years old. How do I deal with these parents? How do I deal with this type of behavior? That's enough for my area. I wish that the home visitation program across the state home visitation program is only being used for those at risk only those parents who need it. It's not being used for first-time parents. And I can tell you right now I can identify about four first-time parents in this room who have used home visitation because they saw a good tool and they said I want the best for me and I want the best for my kid. Ideally home visitation should be first-time parents throughout all Shiboyne County has access. That's what it should be. That should be our norm here in Shiboyne County so that when that raw material turns up at the four-year-old program we've got great raw material and we're not pulling kids out of homes. The 30 million word gap real quick because I have a feeling I might be pinching upon number five and I'm sorry. The 30 million word gap real quick is a 1995 study that you can look up RIS, ELY, RACELY and HEART. NPR has had that study many times and just Google 30 million word gap. In fact, Chicago has a great initiative about 30 million word gap. They're ahead of us. It is saying that it studied 45 families from various social economic levels and they meticulously go out of this, went into each of those families' homes and they recorded an hour worth of conversation and they went back to the little laboratories and they counted every single word. You guys are going to predict what happened. The child that came from Paul Bartelt's home, the most of our homes, has 30 million more words than the child who comes from the lower socioeconomic class. So you come to four-year-old kindergarten and you look at that. Susie Johnny has 30 million less word exposure, vocabulary literacy skills. So when you talk about what are the signs of spring, I have a feeling Joe, your kids could tell us all about the daffodil, about photosynthesis, about the warming up of the earth. While maybe this other child could say flowers come in spring. That's good. Flowers come in spring. Who's going to have more success as reading? And by the way, those socioeconomic kids that were lower neglected, they were not abused. Their parents cared about them. They nurtured them. They just didn't have that middle-class, upper middle-class learning style. Okay, undone. Thank you. Can you answer my question? You know, the discussion about the academic angle of whether Perry's study is accurate or not was very interesting. But I think we have an opportunity here with 25 years at the Early Learning Center. Is there any effort or idea to actually study the outcome of the children that have benefited from your program and see what we're doing right here, which really matters to me more so than the academic world? I almost won't give you the microphone because I want to answer that. Yes, we are always in the process of looking back at our data. Looking at data to drive our instruction. Where do we go with it? Are we going to research the past 25 years? No. I was going to say, maybe something that you're really exciting this year is seeing how it is their 25th anniversary is maybe as a community, we should be asking for an open house day when those kids can come back and write about their successes in full. Anyways, right? That would give you a lot of that information. I know I said I was going to let you talk, but I'm going to talk now. I did say in the beginning that Pam was the social worker on my son's case. My son is now 17 and a half years old and when he went to the ELC, he did not speak. He would say the word ghee. Anybody have a question about that? That's really a hard one. He was asking for a cookie, but he had a hearing loss during an developmental stage. He didn't get the kh part out and he'd only get the ghee part. My husband has a Ph.D. and I have a bachelor's degree with a technical degree after that and I own my own business. So it wasn't about our economic development, it was that we were first time parents who were a state away from our parents and every six weeks we saw our parents and they said, there's something wrong. Can't him just fine? We knew better, right? First time parents. We had no clue. But it took one of my very dearest friends to say to me, I'm going to ruin our friendship today. There's something wrong and you never speak to me again. I'm okay with it. Okay. I'm program director for the chamber and I'm going to throw out a little bit of the challenge. I think we need to do a program like this again later in the year and I'm going to bring each of you with the it's a 17 to 1 return on investment to bring 17 friends that aren't here already and maybe we address the early learning challenges. We address some of the other challenges in learning and the comment that was made about parents we've had lots and lots of discussions about how do we get to the parents? How do we get them involved with what's going on and if we multiply the audience maybe we'll catch something we'll catch a wave, we'll catch whatever and just get the message around our communities so that people really do understand the really significant importance of this. And the other person that I want to thank is John because John was the one who suggested that we do this. John and Dennis had a conversation in November before the first Friday forum in November and John came to me afterwards and said we have to do an early learning program. So John, thank you. I think we are really seriously out of time I think we went way over because I looked down at Joe's phone it said 127 a long time ago. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you once again I'm sorry we've run over but it was a really wonderful conversation.