by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
Politics, it’s well known, is a contact sport, rougher than a Bernard Hopkins left hook to the ribcage.
But it’s all in a good cause.
“I got into it, as most people do, because I cared about policy,” said Bert Ralston, former senior vice president for Wilson Research Strategies. “I wanted to make the world a little bit better place.”
As a former field representative for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Ralston has won tough political battles in the Southeast, Northeast and Midwest. He has been involved in races at all levels of government, from municipal to federal. And he’s won better than 70 percent of those races in which he had an active role.
But something’s been missing of late.
“The more deeply I got involved in campaigns, the more I realized I was affecting policy less,” said Ralston. “I was affecting people who could affect policy, but it wasn’t tangible any longer.”
The answer, for him, was to shift gears, to get back to the basics.
“This is a wonderful thing,” said Ralston, the new director of fund development for Episcopal Children’s Services at Exchange South Business Park. “I’m someone who has believed from the beginning that with education, the crime rate goes down, employment goes up, drug use goes down.
“It leads to better parents, better families.”
ECS has been on Philips Highway since 1998. The brightly colored rooms — with oversized letters on the wall, undersize chairs and tables designed for short legs, soft music and computers that seem to have been made by Fisher-Price — are more than adequate for an enrollment of 112. There’s an average of two teachers for each class of 10.
The overriding difference between the school and other preschool centers is the “Links to Literacy” curriculum that ECS designed for the 3- to 5-year-olds.
“We wrote it to improve the outcomes for children in language and literacy primarily, but also in math,” said Jeanne Duffy, vice president of program operations. “The curriculum has activities that carry literacy throughout the entire day.”
The program has four levels: infant (6 weeks to 11 months), toddler (12-23 months), early preschool (24-36 months) and preschool (3-5 years).
It is a literature-based curriculum with 20 units that use popular children’s literature to build vocabulary, increase background knowledge, “stimulate concept-building and instill a life-long love of reading,” according to a school brochure.
A literacy coach also comes with the program.
“That’s a person with a master’s degree who comes in weekly and models lessons and teaching strategies for the teachers,” said Duffy. “Then they come in the next week and watch the teacher implement those strategies and lessons, giving feedback.
“The goal is to help the teachers improve their teaching strategies and skills.”
“Our mission is to close the literacy gap,” said Connie Stophel, chief executive officer. “We decided many years ago that, if at any time our program could not be considered a quality program, we wouldn’t operate. That was part of the reason why we have closed down many subsidized programs that we directly operated. We had many subsidized child care centers over the city of Jacksonville, but the subsidized dollars remained frozen. We couldn’t operate the programs and maintain the quality we felt we needed to maintain and still serve that population. So we closed a lot of them.”
The dollars may not be there, but the need still is, which is why the ECS Foundation board hired Ralston, she said.
“We have broadened our vision” in the effort to close a yawning literacy gap, Stophel said. “We felt that that, if we established a foundation board that would be a separate 401(c)(3) not-for-profit, we could begin to meet some of those needs.
“In the next couple of years, we may be building another school or establishing another site.”
ECS also began its early Head Start program about five years ago in Macclenny. It is still the only early Head Start program in Northeast Florida.
ECS does operate additional Head Start sites in five surrounding counties — Nassau, Clay, Baker, Bradford and Union.
Other children also benefit from the Links to Literacy curriculum as ECS joined Mayor John Peyton’s Literacy Initiative and opened the program to private child care providers a couple of years ago, said Stophel:
“We are so fortunate in Duval County that we have a mayor who recognizes if we catch them early and really cement those early literacy skills in those young brains, it will make a difference.”
A room has been set aside at the school for about 27 staff members who work with the Literacy Initiative, helping other child care centers improve the quality of their programs. About 45 child care centers and an additional 45 4-year-old classrooms are affected.
“We were one of the agencies that partnered with the Jacksonville Children’s Commission to have a comprehensive team go into all the area preschool sites in Duval County,” said Stophel. “It’s quite a challenge. We figured out the other day we would touch about 3,000 children this first year.
“I think it involves all of us at some level to be part of that and make it happen.”