Several years ago, Tiffany Cannava was helping her church figure out ways they could help people living in struggling communities nearby. She was particularly interested in the Northeast Corridor of Miami—a working-class area that includes North Miami, North Miami Beach, and Little Haiti—and what kinds of early learning opportunities were available for families there.

Cannava has a bachelor’s degree in special education from the University of Miami, but even she struggled to find a central place online to find early learning resources. There were some government-sponsored programs in the area and some small, mom-and-pop daycares, but Cannava realized the Northeast Corridor of Miami was an educational desert for children under 6 years old.

“I didn’t see a lot happening and I asked, ‘Why?’” Cannava said.

 

That question sparked a years-long, community-wide effort to add more early learning opportunities to the Northeast Corridor. Some services have been added, and now, that team is launching an interactive website to help parents find those resources.

The Map to Learning 0-5 initiative allows parents to search for early learning programs and other educational resources through an easy-to-understand, interactive website. Visitors can input their location and their needs into the website, and it gives them maps showing nearby resources, detailed information on each program, and explanatory videos in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole. The website provides organized lists of early learning centers, Head Start programs, pre-K programs, book programs, government and private childcare subsidies, financial aid services, and resources for children with special needs.

Gepsie Metellus, executive director of the Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center in North Miami, said that information has been nearly impossible to find in a community that needs it the most. Some state and local websites provide information on early learning centers, but they’re scattered, incomplete, and confusing to navigate.

That becomes even more of a challenge for the immigrant families in the area, many who don’t speak English and generally view pre-K education as a babysitting service. Multiple studies have shown how early learning can lead to higher test scores from kindergarten to college, better grades in reading and math, improved mental health, and even a lower risk of heart disease in adulthood, according to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

“Folks want their children to do well, they want them to be in school, but they don’t necessarily understand that early learning is highly recommended to ensure that children really bloom academically,” Metellus said.

 

With so few options in the Northeast Corridor, parents would have to send their children to facilities miles away, a monumental challenge for working parents. And while more affluent parents in other parts of the county can pay tens of thousands of dollars for early learning, most of the families in the Northeast Corridor cannot, leaving their children behind before they even reach kindergarten.

Even if they are aware of the importance of early education, Mark Needle said, parents in the Northeast Corridor face other obstacles. “So long as early childhood services are in limited supply and the rules are complicated, the most literate and capable are going to get them because they know how to access them,” said Needle, a facilitator for the Miami-Dade IDEAS Consortium, a collaborative focused on improving effectiveness and better aligning early learning opportunities in the county. “This website is trying to be an equalizer.”

 

The website was built by a collaboration between county agencies, local universities, and nonprofit organizations. Sant La, the Together for Children’s Northeast Corridor Coalition, the IDEAS Consortium, and the UM Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC) Systems and Data Engineering Group (SDE) led the coordination and design of the website.  IDSC SDE provided software design and engineering services and developed the website and is hosting the website on its servers.

IDSC experts are investing their time and resources because the initiative is a perfect example of the kind of data-intensive, interdisciplinary research that is at the core of IDSC’s primary mission, said Christopher Mader, senior director of Systems and Data Engineering at IDSC. The initiative aligns with early learning research that’s been done by Rebecca Bulotsky Shearer, PhD, a child clinical and school psychologist and a professor in UM’s Department of Arts and Sciences, and has the potential to be used far beyond the Northwest Corridor.

“What’s nice about Map to Learning is that it has the potential to assist people in their daily lives,” Mader said. “IDSC is always looking for ways to leverage completed work for new projects, funding, and collaborators, and this project has great potential for both ongoing work and new projects.”

“The team at UM built the website infrastructure so that it can be easily replicated for other areas.”

The team behind the Map to Learning 0-5 initiative believes the website can help educate another critical population: policymakers. The website is the first time anybody has collected all of the early learning opportunities available in the often-overlooked Northeast Corridor, giving the team much-needed data on opportunities, resources, and interest from the community. Metellus plans to use that data to show how underfunded the area truly is and to lobby for more investments in educational programs from government agencies and private donors.

“We need to continue to sound the alarm such that policymakers understand exactly what our parents and community members are facing, to show them what the gaps are, show them what the barriers are based on parental voices,” she said.

Another goal of the website is to use it as a pilot project that can be replicated in other corners of South Florida, or even statewide. Needle said the team at UM built the website infrastructure so that it can be easily replicated for other areas. And Cannava said she’s already hearing from other communities about expanding the initiative.

“The need’s there,” said Cannava, a senior strategist at GKollaborative. “When people find out about it, they say, ‘We want that, too.’”

 

The Map to Learning 0-5 website was created by a collaboration of dozens of other organizations, including The Miami Foundation, The Children’s Trust, the Early Learning Coalition of Miami-Dade/Monroe, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the Miami-Dade County Head Start and Early Head Start programs, the University of Miami Family Navigator Program, the Parent Education Network, Metro Mommy Agency, the University of Miami Health System Mailman Center for Child Development, and The Education Effect, a collaboration between county schools and Florida International University.

 

Story by Alan Gomez | ARG Media