Note: The html version of the newsletter has been condensed for easy reading. For the complete newsletter, please download the pdf.

Welcome to the Plan4Preschool December Newsletter!

In this Issue:

• Welcome
• RAND Preschool Studies 1 and 2 Released
• December County Showcase: Orange County
• Plan4Preschool News and Notes

Welcome

Welcome to the Plan4Preschool December Newsletter. We are excited that you have signed up as a member and want to share new resources and features that we have added to the site. Plan4Preschool not only hosts a lot of content, but invites you, the user, to make submissions of preschool planning and implementation resources. There is interesting work going on all over the state and it needs to be shared. Whether it’s lesson plans or community plans, please don’t be timid about contributions. You never know if someone else out there might benefit from the work you’ve done. We want this website to be helpful to our collective work, which includes advancing the greater goal of improving and expanding preschool in our communities.

RAND Preschool Studies 1 and 2 Released

The RAND Corporation has released the first two of four California Preschool Studies. The first one, “Who Is Ahead and Who Is Behind,” examines the root causes of the achievement gap in California, the readiness gap for children entering Kindergarten. The second," Early Care and Education in the Golden State,” provides a comprehensive examination of the publicly-funded “system” of early education and child development in California.

If you visit the document pages at Plan4Preschool.org, you can participate in a lively discussion about the challenges and key issues surrounding preschool in our state by leaving your comments and opinions.

December County Showcase: Orange County

Various community organizations have been working tirelessly over the past few years to improve and expand preschool in Orange County. At the Orange County Showcase page at Plan4Preschool.org, you will find local workforce surveys, information about a local child care rating system, and information about previous and on-going preschool planning efforts.

Many of the documents uploaded to the Orange County page come out of the OC Preschool Planning Collaborative, a coalition of local organizations that have been meeting monthly in 2007 to create a county-wide preschool system, focusing on targeted services and universal quality standards. Local members uploaded many of these resources, which were used during the planning meetings.

Plan4Preschool.org hosts a County Showcase page for all 58 California counties. Please visit your county’s homepage, and if you don’t see a document or local event that you think should be there, upload it yourself! This is a chance to showcase your local efforts to the public!

Plan4Preschool News and Notes

Please visit the Orientation Page, if you haven't already, to learn about all of things you can do at Plan4Preschool and please fill out the Feedback Form or send us an email to tell us about your experiences on the site. Let us know what’s easy to do, and what’s hard to find. Plan4Preschool will improve and become more useful through your participation and feedback.

Ultimately your utilization of this resource demonstrates that preschool is a policy domain of increasing public significance. Let’s place preschool “front and center” on the minds of people in your community!