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For more than 40 years, the Child Learning Center (CLC) at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences has been helping children around Boulder County get the most out of their education. That work will continue thanks in part to a $25,000 grant from the Millennium Trust.

“This is a very prestigious award which will expand our outreach programs,” says Susan Moore, director of clinical education and services for the department. “The Millennium Trust committee said how impressed they were with us and that they wanted to recognize the ties between CU and the community.”

The Millennium Trust was conceived in 1999 by former Boulder County Commissioner Josie Heath and Colleen Conant, former editor and publisher of the Boulder Daily Camera, to help offset the widespread anxiety surrounding Y2K.

Thousands of Boulder County residents donated the last hour of income for the year, creating the nest egg for the trust, which has now granted more than $1 million to help the county meet the needs of the new millennium.

The Child Learning Center was one of only three organizations out of 44 applicants, including the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition and Intercambio De Comunidades, to receive grants from the Millennium Trust this year.

“These funds will allow the CLC to expand our Community Outreach Program to share state-of-the-art practices and successful intervention strategies as well as continue parent education and support programs for young children who are dual-language learners or have an identified disability,” says Moore.

The grant, she added, will also help fund “Listos,” transition summer camp programs that promote bilingual language and literacy to prepare children for kindergarten.

The CLC was started in the early 1970s to provide a demonstration model of an evidence-based pre-school program for young children with language challenges and typically developing peers in a multilingual environment.

Dr. Barb Roscoe, coordinator for the outreach program and assessment program of the CLC, says the center employs a three-pronged approach to early childhood education: working with bi-lingual children, their families and early childhood teachers.

“We really believe that early childhood is the foundation,” says Roscoe. “If they go into kindergarten with issues, they will struggle. Some literature shows they never catch up. They continue to struggle without early intervention.”

Key to early intervention, according to Roscoe, are workshops and coaching for teachers, which the CLC provides. Coaching involves Roscoe observing the classroom to give teachers first-hand feedback about their methods.

“Teachers who get the coaching have much higher scores than those who just do workshops,” says Roscoe, who heads up the CLCs coaching program. “It gives the teachers the resources to improve.”

Parents, too, get coaching through the CLC. Parents are videotaped reading to their children, according to Moore, to help analyze that interaction and improve reading strategies. The positive effects, she says, carry over into all parts of life.

“We’re helping the parents understand that when they read to [their children] it’s about how they interact, how they carry it out into play, how they work with new vocabulary, playing with sounds in the context of every day life, bedroom routines, going to the bank, going shopping.”

The CLC is also using a system from the LENA Foundation in Boulder to track the amount a child is vocalizing and under what circumstances. The microprocessor, worn on the child, tracks when the child is talking, when an adult is talking and other information such as if the child is in front of a television.

“We use it to help round out the picture,” says Moore. “It gives another key component to understanding what the child’s needs are.”

The outreach program has been especially helpful for Boulder County’s growing Latino community, according to Moore, in part because of its focus on being individualized, family-focused and culturally responsive.

“We know, for example, that learning and succeeding is more than just learning English,” says Moore. “It’s important to strengthen the child’s original language to strengthen their ties to their family and culture. It’s easier to learn a second language if you are strong in your first language.”

Oakland L. Childers is a free-lance writer and editor.