Jumpstart

Mission

Jumpstart advances learning outcomes for young children by recruiting and supporting caring adults to deliver high-quality programming to children.

Needs Statement

There has never been a greater need for our work. Jumpstart is driven by the knowledge that high-quality ECE that supports academic and emotional growth can set all children on a path to build healthy, productive, and satisfying lives. High-quality early education is directly correlated with higher graduation and college enrollment rates, higher rates of employment, and higher salaries. However, due to long-term, systemic inequities, children from low-income families and children of color experience the greatest disparities in access to high-quality early education, and this inequitable access to high-quality childcare perpetuates many of the opportunity gaps that K-12 schools spend years attempting to counteract. Several factors contribute to these disparities, including a lack of investment in public early education programs and low recruitment and retention of qualified educators in underserved communities. The ECE sector is facing an ongoing staffing crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the workforce changes in its wake. Between February 2020 and October 2022, nearly 10% of workers in the childcare industry left the field, and the sector has still not recovered. Using US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, The Center for American Progress reports a gap of more than 150,000 ECE employees between long-term, pre-COVID trends in ECE employment and actual employees in place in September 2023, leading to education centers nationwide enduring ongoing staffing shortages and forcing many sites to operate at reduced capacity. In addition, children’s learning environments have drastically changed due to the pandemic, with many infants and children experiencing reduced language input from fewer adults, a lower frequency of interactions, especially with other children in play, and in some cases, emotional stress directly resulting from the effects of the pandemic. These trends culminate in an ECE sector with fewer classrooms, fewer teachers, and more work for teachers who remain—ultimately making it more difficult for families to find and afford high-quality ECE for their children. With expertise partnering with higher education institutions, experience delivering a high-quality teacher training curriculum, and the national reach necessary to implement culturally responsive programming that meets the needs of the diverse communities we serve, Jumpstart offers a comprehensive solution for the early education sector.

Impact Statement

Our core curriculum has demonstrated a strong track record of success with nearly three decades of producing positive outcomes for young children and cultivating future education leaders. Each year, Jumpstart evaluates program effectiveness by assessing children’s language and literacy skill gains from pre- to post-intervention using the Test of Preschool Early Literacy (TOPEL), a direct assessment tool for 3-5-year-old children widely used in intervention research. Results are consistently positive year after year, with the most recent assessment showing an average of 66% of Jumpstart children making gains in oral language across our sites. In addition to evaluating children’s progress through the TOPEL, we will continue growing our partnership with LENA to implement “language pedometers” that produce real-time, quantitative data about children’s language growth. The LENA devices allow tracking of “conversational turns” as children interact with Corps Members and other adults, more nimbly demonstrating the crucial language growth tracked by the TOPEL, and guiding near-real-time refinements to our curriculum, programming, and training. Beyond these ongoing evaluations, Jumpstart also participates in large-scale external evaluations. The two most recent, evaluating our work in California and Massachusetts, demonstrated that the children we serve make one-and-a-half to two times greater language and literacy gains than their peers who do not receive Jumpstart programming. We also track our impact on Corps Members’ growth as teachers through pre- and post-service Corps Member Surveys, which collect information about Members’ demographic backgrounds, future career and education plans, workforce skills obtained, and satisfaction with the Jumpstart program. We expect that 80% of Corps Members will express improvement in their skills as educators as measured by the survey. Corps Members across all sites consistently show strong growth in classroom skills that will benefit their future career success, with 99% of last year’s Corps Members reporting that they gained or reinforced critical classroom skills.

CEO statement

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Board Chair Statement

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Areas Served Narrative

Jumpstart serves in partner preschools where at least 75% of the students qualify for free/reduced lunches as determined by federal guidelines.

CEO statement (optional)