Greenville center seeks ways to help children succeed
By Ron Barnett
Originally published 12/06/2010 in The Greenville News (subscription required)
By the time children are 5 years old, 90 percent of their brain development is complete, a Harvard University study says.
But 90 percent of tax dollars spent on children benefits those ages 6-18, another study shows.
Susan Shi uses those figures to point out “a huge disconnect” in the way resources are used for child development compared to the way she said research shows is the most efficient use.
That disconnect is the target of a newly formed nonprofit organization called the South Carolina Institute for Child Success.
It’s a collaborative effort between the United Way of Greenville County, the Greenville Hospital System, the Greenville County school district and a variety of public and private organizations that focus on various children’s issues. Its goal is to help all children in South Carolina read and do math at grade level by the third grade.
“Greenville has had a great track record of leading collaborative efforts in this early childhood arena,” said Shi, the institute’s board chair and wife of former Furman University President David Shi.
“If we can become the nonpartisan, independent, private entity with the credibility to bring together those who do touch the lives of our youngest children … we can change the whole way we handle children in our state.
“Because what we’re doing now just isn’t getting us there,” she said.
It’s not just a matter of putting more money to the task, said Ted Hendry, president of the United Way of Greenville County.
“We can’t allocate our way to greatness when children are involved,” Hendry said. “Increasing funding for child-development programs or other children’s programs is really not going to move the needle the way we need to.”
What’s needed, he said, is a “system” approach that combines research on health, education and social components of early childhood.
The United Way has allocated $300,000 to set the institute in motion. The Greenville Hospital System has agreed to donate land at its Patewood campus for a child-development center to be used for research that also would provide care for about 140 local children of a cross-section demographic groups, he said.
It has hired an executive director, Colleen Bridger, former director of public health for Gaston County, N.C., who plans over the next year to lay the groundwork for the center to take shape in about 18 months.
The child-development facility, or Child Study Center, as it’s being called, is one of four “centers” to be part of the institute, Bridger said.
Others will be a Collaborative Leadership Center, a Children’s Advocacy Public Policy Center and a Translational Research and Training Center.
Only the Child Study Center will be a physical building. The school district’s kindergarten for 4-year-olds program will operate out of that facility, Bridger said.
The overarching vision is getting groups who work on children’s issues from a variety of different angles to work together, she said.
“What we have heard from the state community of organizations that work with children is we want to do that,” she said. “We just haven’t really had anybody to help us get through that process before.”
The public policy center aims to “unify the voices of groups that all have their own niche message now,” particularly in lobbying legislators on childhood issues, Bridger said.
Dr. Desmond Kelly, medical director of the division of developmental-behavioral pediatrics at GHS’s Children’s Hospital, said he expects researchers at the Child Study Center to gather data that would lead to improving child-development methods in a state that lags in that area in many ways.
“The children that will be fortunate enough to be there will certainly be receiving great services, but the impact will be way beyond those children,” Kelly said.
The hospital also will use the center for training pediatricians, nurses, social workers and others in applying the new techniques developed there, he said.
Some of the research will be on finding ways to help families living in poverty help their children’s development without spending a lot of money, Kelly said.
“Some of those large endemic societal problems you’re not going to change overnight,” he said.
“But if there are, say, single parents who are struggling economically, there would still be approaches that they could learn and better understand their child’s development and why their child is behaving or responding the way he or she is.”
Bridger will work on four goals in 2011:
• Develop a “single message” that policymakers can use to guide decisions that affect children.
• Conduct a “gap analysis” to learn what elements of child development are missing and where there’s duplication.
• Establish a “warm line” — an information system similar to a hot line that lawmakers could use to get information on children’s issues.
• Evaluate baseline data related to children in South Carolina from a “50,000-foot view” to help measure the institute’s progress over the next five to 10 years.
