The Garden City Telegram
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Getting children a good start
Published 9/30/2008 in News
By DIANE ELLIOTT
Smart Start and St. Catherine Hospital are working together to allow children born at the hospital to get their hands on books early.
As in, immediately.
Getting the bags of books, with four bilingual board books and supplemental information for parents about the importance of reading to their children, in the hands of families is one partnership that helps Smart Start of Southwest Kansas fulfill its mission.
It is a simple mission: To ensure that all children birth to 5 are healthy and enter school ready to succeed.
How the agency that serves 13 southwest Kansas counties goes about accomplishing that mission is all about collaboration.
Director Rebecca Clancy said the organization, one of 21 United Way-funded agencies for 2009, relies on community representatives to help them determine which programs need help and what needs aren’t met.
The advisory council has representatives from each county that includes people from organizations, schools and health departments, among others. Counties include Finney, Grant, Greeley, Hamilton, Haskell, Kearny, Lane, Morton, Scott, Seward, Stanton, Stevens and Wichita.
“They let us know what they have in place, what they’d like to add,” Clancy said. “They help connect us with other sources” geared toward providing early learning opportunities.
Clancy said the overriding concern is to be flexible to the individual needs each community Smart Start serves.
“We provide funding and support for children birth to 5. We partner with existing agencies,” she said. “We help support programs or create programs that will enhance the early learning opportunities for young children. As a community identifies a need, we try to bridge that gap, fill that need. We believe that supporting community-based programs enhance opportunities for the community’s youngest citizens.”
Funding for Smart Start comes mainly through the Kansas Children’s Cabinet from tobacco settlement proceeds. Clancy said the 2009 budget request is $579,228, with 20 percent of that required to be matched by cash or by in-kind donations.
That’s where the United Way funding helps. The $2,000 Smart Start is hoping to receive if the United Way meets its $500,000 campaign goal, will help leverage the state monies. And the money from the Finney County United Way stays in Finney County, just as money from Seward County’s United Way stays in that county, Clancy said.
The 2009 allocation will help support the bag of books program at St. Catherine Hospital.
One of the past beneficiaries of Smart Start’s United Way allocation was the Lifetime Smiles dental clinic program at United Methodist Mexican-American Ministries.
Clancy said a couple of days a week, MAM was able to focus on dental care for birth to 5.
“They already have a great program,” she said. “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. Also, we’ve partnered with the MAM immunization program.”
The immunization program provides required shots to children.
In addition to partnering with organizations, Clancy said another part of the organization’s funding goes toward helping child care providers, from in-home providers to preschools and day care centers. Help includes professional development, grants so providers can purchase items and help to deal with challenging behaviors in a child care setting.
“Many children are in child care before entering school so we’ve identified that as important,” Clancy said. “Child care providers play an important role in the children’s lives they’re caring for.”
The United Way campaign is set to wrap up in the next month or so.
The other agencies receiving United Way funding for 2009 are: The Emmaus House, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Finney and Kearny Counties, Girl Scouts of Kansas Heartland, The Salvation Army, Santa Fe Trail Council Boy Scouts, Russell Child Development Center, Community Daycare, Kansas Children’s Service League Head Start, Miles of Smiles, United Cerebral Palsy of Kansas, American Red Cross, Catholic Social Service, Family Crisis Services Inc., Meals on Wheels, United Methodist Mexican-American Ministries Clinic, Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Association, Garden City Family YMCA, Finney County RSVP, Garden City Recreation Commission and Spirit of the Plains CASA.
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