The Children Involved:

The Bradford-Tioga Head Start Program serves children from low-income families.   The Pennsylvania Head Start website notes, “Nearly three-quarters of non-poor three and four year olds attend some type of preschool program.  In contrast, only 34% of poor three and four year olds attend.”  From a study quoted on the website, “Low-income children starting first grade have been exposed to an average of 25 hours of one-on-one picture book reading, compared with middle-class children who have been exposed to 1,000 to 1,700 hours of reading.”   Clearly low income children are underserved.

As established earlier, the extreme rural nature of Bradford and Tioga Counties, and the fact that very young children as a class are underserved, makes the children in the Bradford-Tioga Head Start Program deserving of special programs such as Learning Communication Skills Through the Arts.

Of particular note is that of the 289 children served in this program, 36 (12.5%) have been diagnosed with disabilities and 20 more (6.9%) are suspected to have disabilities and are currently being evaluated.  The disabilities include autism, speech/language, visual (blind), hearing impaired, emotional, orthopedic, severe diabetes (requires fulltime nurse), cerebral palsy, brain injury, and other physical disabilities including one child who is wheelchair bound.  In part because the artists were trained by Paula Bing, author of Activities for Students with Disabilities, the project is fully accessible to all students. 

Educational research offers a strong connection between communication skills and educational success; and between the arts and communication.    “A strong relationship exists between communication and academic achievement,” is noted in Children with Communicaton Disorders: Update 2001 by Aljandro Brice (ref #1).  Also, a University of North Carolina study of the effects of music and movement in Head Start classrooms found that “children in the intervention group showed more growth in communication skills….and were rated higher on language and listening skills, both important components of school readiness”  (ref. #2).    Learning Communication Skills Through the Arts is fostering youth development in many forms.