This map shows which DPS schools, color-coded by school type, have AmeriCorps programs in 2012-2013. The larger a school’s dot, the more programs it has. If you mouse over a school, you’ll be able to see the names of its programs. Click on a point to find more information. You can pan and zoom the map to see more detail, or view a full-screen version.

Burmese refugee Ma Htay in her northwest Aurora apartment. A Buddhist shrine dominates the living room, which also doubles as a bedroom. Immigration and refugee resettlement have transformed this part of Aurora over the last 20 years.

The Glory apartment building sits near the southwest corner of Yosemite Street and 14^th Avenue in Aurora. The building resembles a wide, fat U, apartment doors opening to walkways, walkways looking down upon the concrete slab that is the courtyard. Residents drift in and out to smoke a cigarette, to see who’s up to what. On warmer days, they hang their laundry over the railing and the doors stay open.

Many of this building’s residents are refugees from Burma, also known as Myanmar. They are ethnic Karen, Karenni, Chin, Shan, Mon. They crowd into apartments, shoes piled near the door, air fragrant with curry and ginger and coriander. The elders offer shy smiles to strangers and then turn expectantly toward their children, their translators. The teenagers oblige, barefoot in skinny jeans, caught somewhere between Americanization and tradition.

Here, in this second floor, one-bedroom unit lives a Burmese family of six. Mom and dad, Ma Htay and Tinza Oo, sleep on the linoleum living room floor. Every day, they pile their bedding against the back wall and the room becomes whatever it needs to become. On this day, Ma Htay making pillow shams on the sewing machine she has set on the floor. She sells them for $5 each. Her husband works in the meatpacking plant in Greeley. The room is dominated by a Buddhist shrine laden with vases of roses and lilies, a bowl of apples, glasses of water, a man’s photo. The image of Buddha is framed with green tinsel and Christmas lights giving the room a kind of holy festivity.

Downstairs, the Burmese Muslims in the next building are marking Eid al-Adha and two men carry inside what looks be the haunch of a freshly-slaughtered goat in a plastic bin. A man walks by in a suit and red flip-flops. Two Bhutanese refugees wait for their ride to the meatpacking plant. A Burmese teenage girl appears, her face covered in a greenish paste. To block the sun, she says. She giggles, covering her mouth with her hand.

Everywhere, there are children.

***

So much has changed in this neighborhood in 20 years. In 1990, half the babies born in northwest Aurora were born to white women. Ten percent were born to immigrant parents (who could be of any race.)

In 2009, 945 babies were born here – 319 more than 1990. Only 15 percent were born to white women. Sixty percent of the babies had immigrant mothers. By far, the largest ethnic group – native or foreign-born — bearing children in the neighborhood was Hispanic. Of the 945 babies, 618 had Hispanic mothers.

This is the backdrop against which the Children’s Corridor must be seen.

A dramatic, widespread demographic transformation has taken place throughout the Corridor’s 41-square miles. Only a handful of neighborhoods outside its boundaries have seen anything like it.

Historic black neighborhoods have become Latino. African Americans have migrated north and east before heading south into Aurora. Middle-class whites lay claim to downtown neighborhoods once home to working-class Latinos and blacks. A brand new white, middle-class neighborhood has risen from the site of the old airport. Thousands of refugees, from Burma and Nepal and Somalia, have been resettled here.

The transformation can be seen in the small Mexican-, African- and east Asian-owned businesses, in the proliferation of Spanish-speaking churches, in the Spanish classes for English speakers and English classes for Spanish speakers, in public school classrooms filled with English Language Learners who speak Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Somali, Karen.

But it is the birth data that is most telling.

***

In roughly the last 20 years, the number of babies born in the Corridor has climbed from an average of about six babies born per day to an average of about 10 per day. In 1990, most babies in the Corridor were born to black and native-born women.  Fewer than 14 percent of babies were born to immigrant mothers, who, again, could be of any race or ethnicity. There has been a steady rise in births to white women, though the share of total births has dropped slightly to about one-quarter.

Nineteen years later, half of the births in the Corridor were to Latinas. More to the point, almost 43 percent of the 3,867 babies were born to immigrant mothers.

Herein lies both challenge and opportunity in the fight against childhood poverty in the Children’s Corridor. This demographic change was fueled, in part, by one of the largest waves of immigration – legal and illegal – in our nation’s history. With that immigration came many people with little formal education. The less education one has, the higher the risk of living in poverty.

According to the Urban Institute, newborns born into poverty and who spend at least half their childhoods in poverty are more likely to be poor as adults. They are more likely to enter their 20s without finishing high school. They are more likely become single, teen mothers.

About 20 percent of immigrants have less than a ninth-grade education compared to less than three percent of nonimmigrants, according to George Borjas, Harvard professor of social policy and economics. Focus on Mexican-born immigrants, who make up the largest group of immigrants in this country, and the challenge grows considerably. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, among Mexican-born immigrants ages 25 and older, 60 percent have less than a high school education, compared with 21 percent of other immigrants. Overall, Mexican-born immigrants are younger, less educated and less likely to speak English very well.

A little closer to home, you’ll find this: In 2010 in Colorado, there were 52,109 births to U.S.-born mothers, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Almost 12 percent of those moms did not graduate from high school or have a general education diploma. That same year, another 14,126 babies were born to immigrant mothers. Of those mothers, 43 percent did not graduate from high school or a GED.

More than half of these immigrant mothers were from Mexico. Of them, roughly seven in 10 did not graduate from high school or have a GED.

***

The work of combatting childhood poverty in the Corridor is, then, not only about providing more preschools or more parent education or prenatal care. It is also about immigrant integration. It is about bringing into the fold people who may be isolated by language or legal status, who may have different cultural understandings of how schools function or how parents teach their children or the need for education. It is about accepting that poverty is not always measured in the lack of dollars, but the lack of experience, imagination and opportunity. There is a difference between a mother being unable to take a parent education class because none exist around her and a mother unable to take a parenting class because she can’t speak English and a mother who asks, “what is parent education?”

“Some people don’t know what they don’t know,” says Cynthia Gallegos, executive director of the Focus Points Family Resource Center. “They have the desire. They just don’t have the tools.” The Center trains and sends Spanish-speaking parent educators into the homes of fellow Spanish speakers in the Corridor to teach mothers about the brain development of their children and what it takes to ready them for school.

If that is the challenge here, its flipside presents the opportunity. All that immigration has meant a Children’s Corridor that is younger than the rest of Denver. In that youth rests vast talent and energy. It has brought people who value hard work, family, community and who have demonstrated resourcefulness, resilience and ingenuity. They are laborers and business owners. “Immigrant parents are often pioneers in their own right,” Gallegos says. “Coming to an unfamiliar country is a courageous first step into the unknown.”

And there is this, says Yoal Ghebremeskel, an Eritrean immigrant who is engaged in community outreach for The Piton Foundation. “These immigrants and refugees they choose to come here, first of all, for their children. They want better for their children. They want them to be educated.”

Belen Aranda, center, prepares her daughter Alexandra, 2 months, to make a red hand stamp with Elvira Rivera, right, of Focus Points while Aranda’s other daughters, Susan, 3, left, and Corina, 4, watch and play. Aranda learns about child development and educational games as she teaches her kids.
Photo courtesy of the Denver Post

Great power exists in that yearning for better, in their willingness to sacrifice and in their   faith in this country to uplift their children. In that yearning, on that strength, the Corridor must be built.

A few weeks ago, in a home near the Glory apartment building, a refugee named Mulania Bathin, 24, admonished a group of teenage boys and girls she was helping ready for a fashion show. It would be the first time many in the audience would be exposed to different Burmese ethnicities, Mulania told them. Yes, they would wear traditional garb, but “show them,” she said. “You can be traditional and American.”

Four teenage Burmese refugees now living in Aurora, learning to negotiate their old world and their new home.

“(The science) says that the character strengths that matter so much to young people’s success are not innate; they don’t appear in us magically, as a result of good luck or good genes. And they are not simply a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry, and they are molded, in measurable and predictable ways, by the environment in which kids grow up. That means the rest of us — society as a whole — can do an enormous amount to influence their development.”

What’s the word I’m looking for here? Oh, yeah. Mentor. Mentor. Mentor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/opinion/sunday/kristof-cuddle-your-kid.html?_r=0

Herrera has a child in her after-school program who has lived with his grandma and mom in a hotel for nine years. Such a thing seems inconceivable from the vantage point of the secure, but no one stays in a hotel that long unless some serious issues are at play. The hotels, Herrera reminds me, don’t ask for a deposit, don’t do a background check, don’t run your credit history. Come up with money for a night or $185 for a week and the key is yours.

At any rate, most discussion around these families begins and ends with scathing criticism of the parents, which, in some cases, may be warranted, but doesn’t do anything to help the kids. As Herrera says, “children don’t get to choose who they are born to.”

You want to talk about chronic stress. This is one place in the Children’s Corridor where it’s obvious. Herrera sees it all the time. She calls it trauma. It manifests itself in the kids who act out, who won’t keep their hands to themselves, who rage or weep or withdraw, silent, into some corner of themselves. The bear comes home, indeed.

Not long ago, Herrera moved a family from one hotel to another. The rate was cheaper, the room better. The family’s youngest refused to cross the threshold of their old room to move. It was what she had been taught. Stay inside. Stay safe. After they brought her out and moved to the other hotel, she refused to go back inside. “She screamed and grabbed at the door. She wanted the sun,” Herrera said.

I asked Herrera how she fights despair. She looked at me. “I don’t get sad. I get angry. I just get angry. It’s so frustrating to watch kids suffer when it’s not necessary. You feel powerless. You feel helpless. You don’t feel sad. We as a society can do better.”

CCN offers, among other things, an after-school program for 25 kids, six to 11 years old. If they had room and funding for more, they’d take them. Fifteen of the kids live in hotels. They come to this room at the top of a brick building, and the room has no air conditioning, no heat, no running water, but the rent is cheap and there are toilets in the basement. The kids have little tables to do school work and eat baked potatoes and a library with books they can take home. They have adults who will listen to them and who will say, “There is more to this world than what you see now.” Maybe, after time, the kids start to believe them and this is what keeps Herrera going, the thought that if they can help one child, it will have a ripple effect.

Without question, these children face obstacles atypical of most kids within the Corridor. They live in the extremes. It does not matter. For a long time after I left that hot room with the kids happily eating their snacks, I kept thinking of something Herrera said.

“These kids probably are the most at-risk. Their chances of escaping are the smallest, but someone has to try. If we’re not going to try, we’re saying to all of them: ‘We don’t think any of you will make it. We don’t think any of you matter.’ But this is a human life. And it matters.’”

And that line of thought is what drives the Corridor and what applies to every child within it.

If you have not yet seen the video introducing the Children’s Corridor, you might want to take five minutes to do so. It debuted earlier this month at the Colorado Children’s Campaign annual luncheon, where the keynote speaker was Dr. Jack P. Shonkoff. Shonkoff, a pediatrician, is also director of Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child.

I wish I could have been there. So much fascinating, ground-shifting research in now coalescing around the brain development of children and, in particular, on the impacts of chronic — or toxic — stress on the very structure of the brain. As the Center defines it, toxic stress is “strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity – such as physical or emotional abuse, chronic neglect, caregiver substance abuse or mental illness, exposure to violence and/or the accumulated burden of family economic hardship – without adequate adult support.”

This research is relevant to the Children’s Corridor precisely because many of its 54,000 children live in poverty or are otherwise vulnerable to this kind of stress.

Chronic stress changes the brain’s circuitry, atrophying crucial connections and disrupting the development of lifelong learning skills. Many of these brain connections form before a child starts his or her formal education. The ramifications of this in terms of how low-income kids fare, not just in school, but in life, are huge.

As my former Rocky Mountain News colleague Katie Kerwin McCrimmon reported for Health Policy Solutions, Shonkoff said: “This is a shift in the field. It’s just starting. It’s coming from this scientific understanding that excessive stress disrupts the brain circuitry. How do we stop that?”

This research, which has been causing quite a buzz, is the subject of Paul Tough’s latest book, “How Children Succeed,” and was featured in this column last month by the New York Times’ David Brooks. I first heard the science explained in a recent This American Life episode called  “Back to School.” It’s a must-listen. In it, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris says: “ . .You are walking through the forest and you see a bear, right? So you can either fight the bear or run from the bear, that’s your fight or flight system. And your body releases a ton of adrenaline, which is your short-term stress hormone and something call cortisol, which tends to be more a long-term stress hormone. And this dilates your pupils, gets your heart beating fast. Your skin gets cold and clammy. That’s because you’re shunting blood from anywhere that isn’t absolutely necessary to the muscles that you need to be able to run from that bear.

“The other thing that it does  — now, you can imagine that if you’re about to fight a bear, you need some gumption to fight that bear, right? So, it kind of shuts off the thinking portion of your brain, that executive function, the cognitive part and it turns on the real primal aggression and the things you need to be able to go into a fight with a bear and come out the winning side. And that’s really good. If you’re in a forest. And there’s a bear.

“The problem is when, you know, that bear comes home from the bar every night, right? And for a lot of these kids what happens is that this system, this fight or flight response, which is an emergency response in your body, it’s activated over and over and over again.”

And that changes the brain. Not just in the short-term, in deficits of self-control or the ability to delay gratification or motivation. Not just in how well a child remembers or reasons. But over the long term, with lifelong repercussions for that child’s future mental and physical health.

“The more adverse experiences in childhood,” according to the Center on the Developing Child, “the greater the likelihood of developmental delays and later health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, substance abuse and depression.”

This raises a whole host of questions, the kind of questions driving the evolution of the Corridor. What will it take to improve the lives of the children within the Corridor, to improve their odds of academic, social and economic success?

Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, also interviewed for the TAL “Back to School” episode, elaborates on that question:  “What are the determinants of human success? How fixed are these determinants? How much can you change them? How much can you bolster them? How much social policy can actually influence those?

A young student in the Children’s Corridor video says: “ I think everyone has a choice,” she says, “but some people, they don’t get the opportunities to make that choice.”

That’s what this is about. Opportunity. Science, Shonkoff argues, is pointing us in the right direction. It is leading us toward more early enrichment, pooled public-private efforts targeting young families, parent education, mentoring. “Adequate adult support,” is the phrase the Center uses. Within those three words lie the futures of thousands of kids.

I first came to know the neighborhoods of the Children’s Corridor through my columns for the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post.

In Globeville, I watched a classroom of immigrants practicing their English. “I eat. You eat. We eat.”  I visited a young man who planted a sapling outside the tiny home of the grandparents who raised him. It was, he told me, his declaration against the fate assigned to him, a poor, Latino kid. The tree would grow and reach its arms toward the sun, and so would he. I will become mayor of Denver one day, he said. He’ll graduate from college this year. In Aurora, I sat on a donated couch in the nearly-empty apartment of a homesick Bhutanese refugee. Someone once told him U.S.A. stands for U Start Again. He repeated it like a prayer.

The Children’s Corridor is 14 miles long,encompassing North and East Denver and the older, densely-populated northwest corner of Aurora.The Corridor is home to about 54,000 children, a good 40 percent of whom are not yet of school age. This vast territory has its pockets of prosperity and middle-class stability — Stapleton and Park Hill come to mind — but at least four in 10 of its children are born to mothers living in or at high risk of falling into poverty. And roughly 80 percent of its children who attend public schools in the Corridor live in poverty and teeter on its edge. Eighty percent. It strikes me as an astonishing number in a city as wealthy as ours.

They’re the youth who come from homes where mom works a $7.75 an hour job and school lunch is provided free or at a discount by the government. Many are black or Latino. Many are refugees and immigrants who straddle a bi-cultural, bi-racial, bilingual world. These children are typically defined by what is missing in their lives rather than what is present. It is worth keeping in mind that they are, first, young people. As with all youth, they brim with potential and talent and yearning. And, like it or not, we are bound to them. Our future economic prosperity, the health and wellbeing of our communities, depends largely upon theirs.

*******

I wrote about the Children’s Corridor about a year ago for the Denver Post. The Corridor is, for lack of a better term, a Piton Foundation project, though calling it such is like calling the Rocky Mountains a few hills west of the city. “Experiment” is not apt, either. That suggests a lopsided relationship: the actor and the acted upon. Agency and client. Donor and recipient.

That will not be the case here. The Piton Foundation drew the boundaries of the Corridor and gave it its name and purpose, but Piton will not bring it into being. The people of the Corridor will. They will decide whether its goal to improve the lives of a generation of children, to provide them better health care, better schools, more tools to enter those schools ready to learn and to graduate prepared for college or career, will, in fact, be.

It is accurate to say, for now, that the Children’s Corridor is an idea in the making. It is a dream, if you want to call that, of a man named Sam Gary. He is the Piton Foundation’s founder. Gary, the grandson of Russian immigrants, made his money in the oil business and, over 35 years, he has invested tens of millions in community programs. It is not by accident he named his foundation after a piton. With the right tool, it’s easier to scale a mountain.

Gary is in his 80s now and has grown impatient with the slow progress in the fight against childhood poverty. What will it take, he wondered, to achieve widespread, sustainable, measurable improvement? What if we focused all our energy, money and expertise not on this or that program, but on a place? It would resemble the Harlem Children’s Zone, a pioneering effort to change the odds for poor kids living within 100 blocks of that New York City neighborhood. Like the HCZ, the Children’s Corridor would focus on boosting kids from cradle to college or career. The pipeline is already clear: prenatal care, parent education, strong schools, pre-school, after-school programs, mentoring, and access to quality health care, both physical and mental.

Unlike the HCZ, Piton would not build the pipeline. Much of it already exists in the Corridor, though it is fractured or redundant in some places. Gary’s thought was that Piton could marshal, align and buttress the good work underway. And it would start by shining the biggest, brightest spotlight it could on the need.

For that, the foundation turned to the data.

 *******

Piton staff came up with the Corridor boundaries based on what multiple sources of data reveal. At least two-thirds of children in the Corridor are what Piton defines as “vulnerable.” They are vulnerable to health problems. They are vulnerable to academic failure. These, in turn, make them vulnerable to a life of economic struggle. These are children born to teen mothers or mothers without a high school education or they are kids who live in households poor enough to qualify for free and reduced school lunch. In addition, single parents head 41 percent of the households with children in the Corridor.

No single indicator seals a child’s fate. Each crumbles before the power of individual initiative, before a resourceful, resilient parent, an inspiring, committed mentor, teacher, coach, pastor. Someone is always defying the odds. You can ask our mayor about that. What is indisputable is that these young people have much to offer: Creativity, ingenuity, determination. Vast reservoirs of potential exist within them. What is also indisputable is they may never offer what is fully within their capacity to give. Poverty restricts access to opportunity. It narrows horizons. In isolation, it creates its own norms and they can be destructive, self- perpetuating, self-defeating. Research tells us the most vulnerable children of the Corridor enter school behind their cohorts and stay behind. Too many will succumb to inertia. They will drop out of school. They will have babies they cannot support. They may emerge from the chaos of poverty – with its lurching from one crisis to another – only to slip again.

This is where our futures intertwine, where we are bound. Every day, 10 babies are born in the Corridor. Our current path will see four of 10 of them born to young, undereducated moms, and eight of 10 in or near poverty during their school years. They will live in neighborhoods lacking in libraries, after-school programs, grocery stores, clinics. They will attend overwhelmed, underperforming schools. Our current path sees roughly half of those students drop out. It sees them consigned to low-paying jobs with no disposable income. It sees them paying little or no income taxes and, at times, dependent upon charity and government programs.

Our path sees us fail to fully tap that which our society demands in order to remain stable, to thrive, to be productive, to compete: human capital.

“Look around you,” says Terry Minger, The Piton Foundation’s president and chief executive officer. “We are all in the same boat here and if this boat goes down, we all go down.”

This is not simply a moral question, though such squandering of human potential and the continued lack of equitable access to quality education and healthcare – two pillars of a better life – strike me as such. It is a social and economic imperative.

What is lost in the neighborhoods of the Corridor is lost to all of us, just as its opposite is true.

*******

You may be wondering how this is going to work, what exactly “improving the lives of a generation of children” entails. Over the last two years, Piton has been laying a foundation. It includes much data and many partnerships and a few programs of its own. I will be telling you more about all these and the Corridor over time. But if you are looking for a master plan outlining every step, every program, you’ve come to the wrong place.

“You won’t find a bound master plan on a shelf,” says Meredith Miller, Piton’s chief of staff and strategy. “Master plans take you down a prescribed path and by the time you get there, the conditions have changed. Our master plan is adaptive, open-ended, flexible. We want to create the conditions for success.”

This will be a coming together of many. Consider this your invitation. Success in the Corridor will take individual initiative and a strong safety net. It will take more jobs with higher wages. It will take stronger schools and students who understand that staying in school is their first, but not only, obligation to society. It will take more affordable, quality childcare and early childhood education. It will take the mom who turns off the TV and reads to her kid and the small business owner who offers an internship to a young entrepreneur. It will take fewer single-parent households and more middle-class families in public schools.

It will require those who live and work within the Corridor – nonprofits, churches, neighborhood leaders and residents, business owners, teachers, students, parents – to claim some piece of this idea, this literal and metaphoric territory, and declare it theirs to change.

And, finally, it will take time. About 20 years to build out, Gary estimates. As he put it in this introductory video: “These issues are not short-term issues; they are generational issues and we need to think of them that way.”

A thousand reasons exist to despair, to say, “This is not a pipeline; it is a pipe dream.” Perhaps we will again fall victim to our own shortsightedness. Perhaps the Corridor’s fate lies in the archives of good intentions. Minger would respond: “People kill too many damn dreams in this country…

“What I’m optimistic about – and somewhat depressed about – is that a lot of smart people, people smarter than I, have been working on this for years and they haven’t figured it out. But I haven’t met a person yet who is not intrigued by the Corridor.”

I can tell you that for every reason to doubt, there is another to hope. Most of those reasons are embodied in the people who live and work in these neighborhoods.

For 14 years as a journalist in this town, I had the privilege of traveling in their company. I witnessed the incredible, yet-unharnessed innovation, energy and faith in self. If there is anything worth trying, this is it. What is learned in the Corridor, after all, will not remain there.

The Children’s Corridor is a metaphor, as surely as are that tree in Globeville and the piton in this foundation’s name. It takes many hands to build so that it is safe and strong and lasting. It serves as a series of passages from birth to the cusp of adulthood, from poverty to economic wellbeing, from what is to what should  be. And, as Gary says, “what should be, could be.”

For example, looking the five neighborhoods in Near Northeast, you can see Five Points, Cole and Whittier are more densely populated than Clayton and Skyland. And while Cole has a predominantly Hispanic population, Whittier is more heavily African-American and white.

This map was made using 2010 Decennial Census data from the U.S. Census Bureau. For more visualization and analysis of Census data, visit piton.org/census2010.

Download a PDF version of this map.

We already know, from many different metrics, that the level of need in the Corridor is immense. This map simply puts that need into stark relief.

Using this map, we can identify areas that have the most vulnerable children in terms of sheer numbers (East Colfax/Original Aurora and Montbello) and in terms of the percent at-risk (Globeville/Elyria-Swansea and Montbello). One of the most striking things about this map is that Montbello and East Colfax/Original Aurora are among the top within the Corridor, no matter which way you look at it.

Taken as a whole, the Children’s Corridor stands out above the rest of Denver in that it has a higher concentration of children, and a higher percent of children who are vulnerable. That is, even if so many children were not at risk because of their family’s income of their mother’s education level, these neighborhoods would still be an areas of focus because they are so child-dense.

Here is the breakdown of vulnerable children by Corridor hub (using the 2010 Census population counts as a baseline):

• In East Colfax and Original Aurora, 11,409 children, or roughly 73%, are at risk.
• In Montbello, 8,946 children, or roughly 80%, are at risk.
• In Green Valley Ranch, 4,940 children, or roughly 49%, are at risk.
• In Stapleton, 473 children, or roughly 13%, are at risk.
• In North and Northeast Park Hill, 2,469 children, or roughly 56%, are at risk.
• In Globeville and Elyria-Swansea, 2,650 children, or roughly 80%, are at risk.
• In Near Northeast, 4,061 children, or roughly 69%, are at risk.

When we expand the picture to include all of Denver and Aurora, here is what we see:

Download a printable PDF version of this map.

This map was made using October count data from Denver Public Schools and Aurora Public Schools for October 2010, as well as birth data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment for 2006 through 2010.

The Rasulo Family - Waverly Creek Community Garden

Workshop Topics that will be discussed

• Education Must Begin at Birth
• Parents as the First Teachers
• Early Brain Development
• Social and Emotional Development
• Parents Must Stay Involved
• Ending the Achievement Gap

Contact Info: For more information about Babies Ready for College or If you would like to participate in our program, please contact Jami Horwitz, Executive Director at: jamih2@msn.com or Zulema Inai, Program Coordinator at inai.zulema@gmail.com or call: 303-981-7311