For immediate release

A $794,459 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will enable Northampton Community College and sixteen partner organizations to bring an innovative arts-in-education program to the Southside of Bethlehem to promote school readiness. The grant will cover 85% of project costs. Participating organizations are contributing an additional $140,199 (the remaining 15%) towards the goal of ensuring that children enrolled in child care centers on the Southside of Bethlehem enter kindergarten with the skills they need to succeed.

The funds will give the children and staff of early education programs on the Southside of Bethlehem access to resources at the College and local arts organizations to enhance children’s cognitive skills. According to NCC’s director of early childhood education programs, Rebecca Gorton, many studies have shown that the arts “provide a central thread that unifies children’s learning. The arts give them a language they can use, as active learners, to construct and express their imaginations and knowledge.”

Earlier this month (January) Northampton Community College began offering training in Art as A Way of Learning ® for teachers from the Andrea Dority Family Child Care Center, the Georgina Jiminez Family Child Care Center, Head Start classrooms at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, Holy Infancy School, Lehigh Valley Child Care’s Campus Center, and artists from the Banana Factory, Touchstone Theatre, Pennsylvania Youth Theatre, Godfrey Daniels and Community Music School.

Art as A Way of Learning ® is a professional development program that was developed by early childhood educators at NCC more than ten years ago in conjunction with Binney & Smith,Inc. to help early childhood educators increase their understanding of the role of the arts in education and to prepare them to work with artists to develop aesthetically-stimulating classrooms and arts-based curricula that promote child development. Art as A Way of Learning ® classrooms have been featured in articles published in Early Childhood Today and have previously received funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Education, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Heinz Foundation.

The grant from the Department of Health and Human Services will enable experts in Art as A Way of Learning ® to serve as guides for teachers on the Southside as they implement what they learn in the training sessions offered at NCC’s Fowler Family Southside Center. Head Start Grow Up Great classrooms at the Donley Center and the Reibman Hall Children’s Center at Northampton Community College’s Main Campus will serve as demonstration sites for the program.

The grant will also provide money for educational and art supplies, for an artist-in-residence program, for parent education sessions, for reduced-rate tickets to Southside

arts events for children and their parents, for art exhibits, for home visits to provide parents of infants and toddlers with information and materials they can be use at home, for group activities geared to family literacy, and for inclusion of children with special needs. Effectiveness will be gauged by the children’s progress in meeting early learning standards established by the state. Two hundred children ranging in age from 1 to 5 are expected to take part.

In addition to the educational and arts organizations listed above, other partners who are actively involved in the project are ArtsLehigh, Cops-n-Kids, Northeast Key/CSC, Inc., St. Luke’s Visiting Nurses Association, United Way/One Voice for Children, and Via of the Lehigh Valley.

Called PASELA (“Promoting and Supporting Early Literacy through the Arts”), the grant is being administered by the Literacy through the Arts Consortium appointed by Bethlehem’s mayor, John Callahan. The council includes parents, PASELA partner organizations, representatives from the city, the Bethlehem Area School District, the Bethlehem Public Library, the Fowler Family Foundation, Lehigh University, Southside businesses, Binney & Smith, the Council of Spanish Speaking Organizations of the Lehigh Valley, and the South Bethlehem Neighborhood Center.

“One of the strengths of the project is its collaborative nature,” Gorton says. “That’s important not only for maximizing resources,” she says, “but it also has the potential to sparks idea and relationships that will extend beyond the project. Children are the primary focus, but parents, teachers, arts organizations, and the community-at-large all will benefit.”

###

For additional information, call Heidi Butler at 610-861-5453.

Northampton Community College – PASELA Grant – Page 2 of 2