Fewer kids ready for kindergarten as early childhood education impacted by outbreak
Alia Wong – USA TODAY – Cheryse Singleton-Nobles knows her 2-year-old son is regressing. – in the D&C on 12/5/2020 on page A2
While the toddler is getting the hang of colors, numbers and shapes, she says, “he’s back to the stage of ‘me, me, me.’ ” He doesn’t want to share anymore. He struggles to follow a routine and gets distracted by all his toys.
Singleton-Nobles, 47, attributes this backtracking to the COVID-19 pandem-ic, which recently forced her son’s free Chicago preschool to close its campus.
That preschool, an early learning center that belongs to a national network of Head Start-funded programs called Educare, shut its doors in the spring but managed to reopen at limited capacity in the fall. The center had to revert to distance learning again in mid-November amid a surge in coronavirus infection rates.