Explanation
Mayor Ginther’s vision for Columbus, America’s Opportunity City, is to create access to a high-quality pre-kindergarten education for every 4-year-old. Addressing early childhood learning means bringing awareness and resources to a critical learning stage in childhood development. Children who come to school ready to learn are more likely to succeed academically and in life.
Children who participate in high-quality pre-kindergarten experiences significantly improve their early literacy, language, and math skills. Ample evidence shows that children who enter school unprepared fall farther and farther behind. Students who get a poor start in their earliest years are likely to struggle in high school and subsequently, fail to graduate.
Through Early Start Columbus (ESC), the Office of Education provides high-quality pre-kindergarten services to children throughout the City. ESC is however, only one of many efforts working to increase the kindergarten readiness scores of children in Franklin County.
Early Care and Learning, Inc, (ECAL) operates the Caring Communities, a birth to age three program that utilizes mixed-age group classrooms to provide a continuity of care approach to center-based early learning. The program operates in 17 centers across the city, all of which are ESC centers. The program is expanding into ten (10) additional classrooms across the city this year and has plans to continue that expansion over the next several years.
This contract will be entered into in compliance with relevant procurement provisions of the Columbus City Codes Section 329.30.
FISCAL IMPACT: This ordinance authorizes an expenditure of $45,000.00 from the 2023 Office of Education’s General Fund operating budget.
Title
To authorize the Director of the Office of Education to enter into a contract with Early Care and Learning, Inc, (ECAL), a non-profit organization that specializes in creating continuums of early education; and to authorize the expendit...
Click here for full text