As Oakland Family Services celebrates our 100th anniversary, we are looking back at how our Prevention, Education and Treatment programs have evolved over the years. This blog post is the second in a series of three and explores how our Education programs have developed and changed over time.

For more than three decades, Oakland Family Services has been providing high-quality early childhood education that has helped prepare thousands of children for kindergarten and beyond.

Over the years, Oakland County has had consistently high need for quality preschool programming for at-risk children.

“We consistently know that these families need support, and children need to be more and more ready for kindergarten than ever before,” said Director of Early Childhood Services Kris Kasperski, who oversees Oakland Family Services’ Children’s Learning Centers. “Unfortunately, the stakes have increased so much. Kindergarten is now [the academic equivalent of what used to be] first grade, so when children come into kindergarten, they have to be doubly ready.”

The agency’s Pontiac Children’s Learning Center opened its doors in 1990 to offer both tuition-based early childhood programs and free, state-funded preschool through the Michigan School Readiness Program. In 2008-09, this program was renamed the Great Start Readiness Program (GSRP).

State-funded preschool openings are determined by need in each community — areas with higher poverty rates, like Pontiac, are given funding for more openings than programs in wealthier areas. Oakland Schools allocates state funding for the GSRP partners in Oakland County, designating how many openings each program can offer.

By 2014, Oakland Schools had identified a need for more GSRP openings in Walled Lake and asked Oakland Family Services to open a second Children’s Learning Center location. The agency leased half of the building at 1885 N. Pontiac Trail and went on to lease the other half of the building when it became available in 2020 to centralize its services in Walled Lake.

“The expansion of our GSRP programming in 2014-15 was a significant undertaking,” Kasperski said. “That building was gutted and redone. It was created into a beautiful space for children and families and staff.”

Along with renovating the building, Oakland Family Services built a natural playground at the site. The playground is dedicated in memory of Kirk V. Oehrlein, son of Walter and Francie Oehrlein. Francie is a former board member of Oakland Family Services, and the couple continues to fund the playground’s upkeep each year.

A natural playground at the Pontiac Children’s Learning Center followed during the 2015-16 school year with funds from Eagles for Children. The Pontiac playground is named in honor of Brigitte P. Harris, a former board member and longtime supporter of the agency.

Instead of metal play structures, natural playgrounds feature elements found in nature, such as tree stumps, logs, and open grassy areas that encourage unstructured play time, imaginative play and motor skill development. The playgrounds’ upkeep has been supported by many donors, grants and volunteers.

Between the two Children’s Learning Centers, Oakland Family Services is currently allocated openings for 160 children per year in addition to its tuition-based programming. The centers served a combined 471 children in 2019 through GSRP and tuition-based toddler, 3-year-old, 4-year-old and summer camp programs.

Families’ eligibility for free preschool is determined based on household size and income level as compared to the federal poverty level. A four-person family with a total income of up to $66,250 would be eligible for GSRP in the 2021-22 school year.

HighScope

Since they opened, Oakland Family Services’ Children’s Learning Centers have followed HighScope, an internationally recognized early childhood curriculum that takes a play-based approach to help children develop socially, emotionally and intellectually in preparation for kindergarten.

“There is a tremendous amount of research about the long-term impact on children who go through a high-quality HighScope project,” Kasperski said. This research includes the Perry Preschool Project, which began in 1962 and examined long-term outcomes for children who attended HighScope programming. The study has identified benefits including higher rates of high school graduation, higher income, greater likelihood to own a home and vehicle, and lower arrest rates.

One of the key elements of HighScope is the Plan-Do-Review process through which students create plans for their day, engage in free choice time, then look back and review how their plans were carried out or changed throughout the day. Throughout the school year, Oakland Family Services’ preschoolers learn to create strategies, analyze their day and self-reflect, Kasperski said.

“[Plan-Do-Review] is really the hallmark of HighScope, and I think it’s so critical for children’s development of planning skills, self-control, all of those things when you think about what it means to plan your work and review it,” she said.

Preschool at Oakland Family Services helps children learn the social-emotional skills they need to thrive in kindergarten.

“Really, to be ready for kindergarten, it isn’t the academics they need, although those are important,” Kasperski said. “It is the social-emotional learning. … If they don’t have some internal control and self-regulation, know how follow a schedule, how to engage in play, how to ask questions and how to get their needs met, they are not going to be successful in learning how to write their name [in kindergarten]. You have to have the social-emotional first, and this is what preschool, especially our preschool, does.”

Early Learning Communities

Oakland Family Services’ Early Learning Communities launched in 2009, making it one of the agency’s newer programs. Funded by United Way for Southeastern Michigan, the program is dedicated to increasing the quality of child care in the area by providing training and support to child care providers, whether they be licensed, unlicensed, child care centers or home providers.

The Early Learning Communities provide free and extremely low cost training and workshops with flexibility so providers can learn in the evenings or on weekends. Kasperski said this is important because some home providers work from, for example, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and need that flexibility.

“It’s so critical philosophically thinking about how the world has changed and how much we need child care providers,” she said. “Here is a program that is really there to support and professionalize a profession that people too often discount as a babysitter. If anything has been told to us from the last year, it’s that that’s not what it looks like, and it’s critical that we maintain this support because people are burning out.”

The Early Learning Communities also run playgroups for parents and maintain three Lending Libraries, which provide educational toys, books, games and more that child care providers and parents can borrow free of charge. Teachers and child care providers are welcome to bring toys from the Lending Libraries into their classrooms, and they can also check out professional development tools like HighScope resource books and DVDs. The libraries also offer items that can help providers support children with special needs.

In the 2019-20 fiscal year, Oakland Family Services’ Early Learning Communities served 1,349 child care providers and parents.

Click here to read about the history of Oakland Family Services’ Prevention programs, or click here to read about the history of our Treatment programs.