Especially given the apparent interest from some school board members about special/additional programs, I was planning to highlight Head Start's use of Tudor in my letter/s - especially the value of quality early childhood education to a low-income neighborhood population, particularly in light of the early childhood care issues we all know too well. I haven't seen that called out (sorry if I missed it!) so wanted to check if there was an angle I wasn't seeing, or if anyone knows if the program that's in our building would relocate somewhere where the current neighborhood kids couldn't go?
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I asked this question at the forum on Tuesday. Kids Corps, Inc. rents space through ASD on a Memorandum of Agreement. There used to be a list of all ASD-KCI Collaborative sites on ASD's website but it is gone now. I know it has changed quite a bit in the last 2 years. But basically the answer was they would work with KCI to find an alternative site for their classrooms at a nearby school (like maybe Kasuun). They would have to relocate. It's ideal when PreK and Head Start classrooms can exist in the neighborhoods they serve for accessibility reasons, but the move district wide is definitely more towards centralization. Nunaka Valley for example is going to serve as a PreK hub for ASD's 90 PreK classrooms. Also, just to add, there is a lot of interest and community planning right now going into utilizing ASD space for child care. JIm Anderson from ASD and I worked together over the summer on some city planning projects around child care specifically, and I know they're looking at an RFP to provide employer-based child care in their unused buildings. Finding a contractor to take it on was the biggest hurdle last I heard. And UAA has been eyeing Lake Otis Elementary as a potential rental for providing employer-based childcare for UAA's staff.
If we want more info about where Kids Corps specifically stands in all of this, let me know. I can reach out to ask their Exec. Director (our day jobs overlap quite a bit) or give you her email to reach out :) My guess is they are so entrenched in their own daily operations and challenges, that having skin in this game is a low priority right now. Either way I don't know that it'll make much of a difference honestly for how it impacts which schools close. Although Andy Holleman was interested in hearing about the other programs that are in-house at Tudor.