By Mike Rutledge
NKyTribune contributor
Amy Bremer, manager of Boone County’s Success By 6 program, believes that a child’s preparation for success in school has to start well before the first day of kindergarten.
Through the United Way of Greater Cincinnati program, she helps families and preschools ensure that the children are ready to learn when they reach kindergarten, a challenge throughout the region, including Boone County.
Many people would be surprised by the size and scope of the need for the program, says Bremer, who started in her position in February.
“Even in Boone County, there are definitely large pockets of fairly significant need for early-childhood intervention,” Bremer said.
The goal of Boone County Success By 6 is to engage the community, to strengthen families and improve the quality of early child development, care and education.
One reason the county needs more intervention: Many children don’t have any preschool experience before kindergarten.
“We support child-development centers in the school system and preschool programs, but a large percentage of children coming to kindergarten are coming from home,” Bremer said. “Nearly 30 percent are coming from their home or their grandma’s house, because she’s watching them during the day.”
The challenge is how to best reach those families to offer assistance.
One way Bremer helps is by suggesting free programs, such as library story times or events at elementary schools that are open to pre-schoolers. There also are parks and recreation programs that help prepare children for kindergarten.
Being ready for kindergarten means many things, including having appropriate social skills to relate to their peers and having the cognitive skills to learn.
Success By 6 is based on the understanding that the first six years of children’s lives shape their futures, and the success of a community depends on the success of its children.
The organization’s long-term, comprehensive plan involves every aspect of child development during the first six years of life. The program brings together individuals, businesses, government agencies, non-profits, and schools, combining resources to make positive, communitywide changes for children.
Bremer is overseeing four new task forces, in the areas of quality early care, early childhood mental health, early literacy and child health.
“Those have only been in operation for about two months,” she said.
The initial evaluation includes doing needs assessments to determine whether there are projects that can be put into place to fill gaps in those areas.
“I’ve also been trying to provide some early-childhood support to the county’s 15 elementary schools,” said Bremer, who earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky in 2006 and her master’s from Eastern Kentucky University in 2008.
She has ramped up a program to evaluate where children are developmentally. Screenings are done for children between ages 3 and 5 who are not yet in kindergarten.
Boone County Commissioner Dr. Charles Kenner, a Florence dentist and member of the U.S. Army Reserves Medical Corps, said Bremer was a “rock star” in Fayette County before she accepted the position with Success by 6.
“I knew of her because of my Army mission activities with my (reserve) unit in Lexington, and she has worked on this kind of thing down there,” Kenner said. “She was one of many applicants we had here, we interviewed her and she is just fantastic. She has already showed a lot of direction and initiative revamping some things, and she has done a lot of networking to get the Success By 6 message out.”
Success by 6 received a grant from the Boone County Fiscal Court that supportstraining for child-development staff and can also provide developmental screener kits and all the materials needed to give children the assessments, Bremer said.
“The goal of the project is to screen as many children as we can, between the ages of 3 and 5, and then provide activities that parents can do to support those areas,” Bremer said. “If a need arises (to supplement the child’s development), we also provide resources to link them up to any sort of service that their child might be eligible for, if they don’t score in a developmentally appropriate range in that screening. Last year we screened about 350, and this year I think we’ll be well over 700 for the county; that’s a lot of kids.”
Success By 6 has existed in Boone County about a dozen years. It is revamping its website to help refer families to existing resources in the community, such as agencies that help with children’s developmental delays.
If you have a child or family who could benefit from the services offered by Success By 6, or know of such a family, Bremer can be reached at (859) 534-5810.