In January, Kiara Johnson asked the 18 students seated on her classroom rug whether they knew what a volcano was. Little voices talked over one another as they rushed to tell the teacher everything they knew. Johnson cued up a video of the volcanic eruption happening in Hawaii and showed it to the class.
“This is happening now,” she told the students. “Do you know where this is?”
Heads shook as the children waited anxiously for her response.
Johnson turned the globe toward the group.
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“We are here in Mississippi and Hawaii is way over here,” she told the 4-year-olds while drawing a line with her finger.
Kiara Johnson taught pre-K at VanWinkle Elementary, the Jackson Public School District’s pre-kindergarten hub. Photo courtesy Kiara Johnson
Johnson taught at VanWinkle Elementary School last year. The school “serves as the Pre-Kindergarten hub” for the Jackson Public School District’s JPS/Hinds Pre-K Collaborative.
“The collaborative was very new to our district,” she told the Mississippi Free Press. “What I loved about it was the fact that we all had to learn together.”
The JPS/Hinds Pre-K Collaborative is made possible through Mississippi’s Early Learning Collaborative Act. The law, passed in 2013, established funding for state pre-kindergarten programs known as Early Learning Collaboratives, or ELCs. Each ELC designates a lead partner, either a public school or other nonprofit entity. This partner manages the curriculum and capacity. The partners then collaborate with area head starts and daycare providers to align instruction. Mississippi has 37 early learning collaboratives across the state.
This is the second year of the three-year award for Jackson Public Schools. The school district launched the program last year with $9 million in funding from the Mississippi Department of Education. The collaboration includes the Little Saints Academy, Jackson State University’s Lottie W. Thornton Early Childhood Center and the Hinds County Human Resource Agency’s Head Start. Dr. Felicia Thomas, the early childhood director for Jackson Public Schools, said the choice of partnerships was deliberate.
“It started with our strategic plan making sure we wanted to have a robust early literacy system for our children,” Thomas told
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