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by Joe Sullivan

Augmenting health care for senior citizens and strengthening our schools were ballyhooed issues in a befuddling presidential campaign now blessedly concluded. But scant attention was paid to the needs of another segment of the population that are crucial to the nation's future: namely, our youngest citizens.

True, Al Gore paid lip service to a need for universal pre-school and George W. Bush sort of said "me too." But anyone who's waiting for government at any level to provide more and better early learning experiences, especially to disadvantaged kids, shouldn't be holding their breath.

Initiatives are going to have to come from within each community, and Knoxville is fortunate to have an organization that has taken more initiative in this regard than is the case in many other cities. That organization is Knoxville's Promise, the local affiliate of America's Promise that retired General Colin Powell launched three years ago. Knoxville's Promise has programs addressing everything from prenatal care to youth violence. But a cornerstone of its efforts is encouraging parents and child care providers to read to their youngsters from infancy on.

"It's not just reading to them. It's making reading a nurturing, warm experience so that the child thinks 'Isn't this fun?'" says Connie Steele, professor emeritus of child and family studies at UT, who is co-chair of the program known as Child Watch. "The broad base of everything we do is understanding language, but far too many children are entering kindergarten not knowing what reading is all about."

Study after study has shown that pre-school learning experience is crucial to student achievement later on. A recent one by RAND ranked it as more important than differences in teacher compensation, experience or degrees earned. Perhaps the mother of all such studies tracked a group of youngsters who participated in a pre-school program known as High/Scope in Ypsilanti, Mich., in 1962 through to their adult years. It found that the participants, compared to a similar group of non-participants, not only had much higher high school and college graduation rates but also many more lasting marriages and a much lower incidence of crime.

The year-old Knoxville's Promise program has targeted 11 inner-city child care centers for initial concentration of its efforts. A series of six workshops on interactive reading techniques has been attended by 80 to 90 child care providers from these centers plus teen-age volunteer readers from the Boys and Girls Club's Moses Teen Center. Two of these workshops were conducted by UT professor Jinx Watson and one by Dr. Loretta Long, who has played the part of Susan on Sesame Street for almost 30 years. Specialists from the Knox County Library System, starting with its education director Frieda Williams, have also played an important part. A tandem program, known as Success by Six, has been concentrating on 16 additional child care centers in the Mechanicsville, Lonsdale, and Beaumont areas.

While volunteerism is an important part of the Knoxville's Promise credo, Steele and her volunteer co-chair, Ann Ince, can rely upon an outstanding full-time staff. The organization's executive director, Madeline Rogero, is a former county commissioner who previously served as director of UT's Community Partnership Center. Its communications director, Tracy Farr, shares Rogero's passion for their goals and an ability to articulate them. Nine local foundations collaborated on Knoxville's Promise's funding. And as one measure of its effectiveness, a recent eight-minute video heralding America's Promise nationally devoted more than two minutes to efforts underway in Knoxville.

Still, Knoxville's Promise doesn't have all the resources it would like: most notably, more books and volunteer readers. "We don't have the funding in our budget for books, and many child care centers don't have nearly as many as they ought to," says Farr. The library system allows each state-certified center to check out up to 24 books at a time. But child care providers tend to work very long days, and getting to the library on a regular basis is difficult.

"It hurts me no end when I go into a center, and all the books are put away," says Steele. "Usually it's not because the provider doesn't care but because she's afraid they will get torn up and she can't afford any more."

For three- and four-year-olds, the federally-funded Head Start program kicks in with a four-hour-a-day, four-day-a-week curriculum for those who are eligible. However, eligibility is largely confined to children from households with incomes below the federal poverty line. For a single parent with one child that line is $11,250, barely more than the minimum wage. Even with this exclusionary standard, Head Start's 824 enrollees in Knox County only represent an estimated one quarter to one third of those eligible, according to program coordinator Nancy Thomas.

In addition to Knoxville's Promise, there are many other not-for-profit agencies trying to pick-up the slack. The Helen Ross McNabb Center, Child and Family Services and the Florence Crittenton Agency, among others, all have noteworthy programs aimed at everything from developing parenting skills to working with the very young who have developmental and behavioral difficulties. All of them are worthy of support.

For starters, though, readers of this column who have no-longer-needed books for tots and/or can volunteer some time to read them are encouraged to contact Knoxville's Promise at 523-2775.