An in-depth analysis of the social cost of carbon, conducted during the competition phase, led the project team to propose an entirely new construction while remaining within budget. The existing school building lacked the capacity for sustainable transformation; its demolition would free up land and allow for a reimagined urban future.
Harms was widely known as the lead co-author of the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS), an observational framework that transformed how educators, researchers and governments evaluate early learning settings. Developed during her tenure as Director of Curriculum Development at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the ECERS created with co-authors Richard Clifford and Debby Cryer became one of the most widely used measures of early childhood program quality worldwide.
The Feb. 19 announcement marked the official opening of the District 2 Pre-K and 3-K Center at 403 East 65th St., a former parking garage completed in July 2025 that had sat unused for months under the prior administration. The center will open this fall, according to the mayor, adding more than 130 seats and becoming the first standalone, city-run early childhood education facility in the 10065 ZIP code.
At the end of November of 2011, I saw my dad take his last breath. I came back to the United States after participating in all the death-related rituals that helped organize my pain in México. New York City was not a place to live my mourning, and right around December of the same year, I felt an intense longing to become small again. I needed to work with children.
When Maria Santana first started dropping off her son Anthony at FirstStepNYC, an early education center in Brownsville, Brooklyn, he would cry for hours, refusing to eat or nap until she picked him up. Santana, who was working as a home health aid, told the center's director that she thought she'd need to pull Anthony out. The director, Catharina Oerlemans, had a better solution: She asked Santana to come work for FirstStepNYC as a food handler.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Thursday the first step toward a new citywide child care program for two-year-olds opening a request for information to recruit providers for both the existing 3K system and a new 2K program. The announcement took place at City Hall's Blue Room, where the mayor and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels were flanked by a group of District 2 pre-K students who had been invited to participate.
The Trump administration's sweeping crackdown on immigrants has taken a particularly high toll on the child care industry - both for families and providers. In California, almost 40% of the workforce is foreign-born and more than a million parents - immigrant and otherwise - rely on child care providers so they can go to work.
Crowden School in Berkeley has brought together music and academics for over 40 years. Once a middle school only, Crowden now admits students as young as kindergarten, with no musical experience. The school, at Sacramento and Rose streets, also receives new students in all grades, including at the start of middle school years. Music instruction at Crowden about one hour per day for the youngest students and two hours per day for third grade and up includes strings and piano.
Jennings helped shape the museum into a nationally recognized leader in early education, family engagement and community partnership. She also helped develop programming that expanded the museum's reach to families across the Bay Area. Jennings also led the creation and growth of the museum's outdoor spaces, including Bill's Backyard: Bridge to Nature, Exploration Portal and most recently Bubbling Up, the new interactive bubble exhibit.
This was the first administration to have five women deputy mayors, the first woman police commissioner and the second woman police commissioner. We had the first Dominican deputy mayor, the first Filipino deputy mayor, the first East Indian deputy mayor, and the first Persian deputy mayor an administration that looks like the city it serves and that has delivered for our city every single day.
School leaders announced last week that Aurora School, a private north Oakland school serving 76 students in kindergarten to eighth grade, would be welcoming students and educators from the Children's School beginning next year. "The more and more that we were in discussions, the more we found in common and more potential we saw in taking the best of each of our communities," said Lynsey Kamine, the head of school at Aurora School. "We also want to offer a route for the legacy of Mills' early childhood program and lab program to carry on." Aurora is expecting around 20 students to enroll from the Children's School, Kamine said.
Rob Reiner was known to millions as a TV actor and film director. But the Brentwood resident, known for the classic films "Stand by Me" and "When Harry Met Sally," was also a political force, an outspoken supporter of progressive causes and a Democratic Party activist who went beyond the typical role of celebrities who host glitzy fundraisers. Reiner was deeply involved in issues that he cared about, such as early childhood education and the legalization of gay marriage.
Fuzhou ESUO Future Kindergarten by Dika Architectural Design Center in Fuzhou, China, reimagines early childhood education through a playful, irregularly shaped building crowned with a rooftop astronaut sculpture. The structure transforms traditional kindergarten layouts into a three-dimensional exploration system that spans from ground level to corridors and rooftops. Corridors function as all-weather adventure paths, while each floor becomes an interactive playground. The astronaut sculpture atop the building serves as a visual and conceptual anchor, inviting children to imagine themselves as cosmic explorers
Nargiz Mammadli and Emmanuel "Manny" Morando Neri both have a passion for teaching, and in particular, teaching young learners. Early Childhood Education Substitute Teacher Empowerment & Placement (ECE STEP) is looking to provide connections and training to help them pursue both. With an eye toward careers in education, both Mammadli and Morando Neri said they have gotten a boost from resources provided by the nonprofit commonly known as ECE STEP.
'You know your kids love you but you don't see them talk about you,' Katz, whose daughters are 10 and 12, tells TODAY.com. 'The space between you and your child when you send them to preschool for the first time just feels so wide, and you're just hoping that they're OK. Getting to be on the other side of it and seeing how much love these kids have for their parents ... I had no idea. You don't see.'
When Sesame Street first appeared on television in 1969, it rearranged the architecture of childhood. The show looked like pure joy, a neighborhood of color, rhythm, and creatures who seemed to belong to no one and everyone at once. But underneath the laughter and songs was something more radical. A handful of educators and psychologists came together with a quiet conviction that television could be a classroom for children who didn't have one. They weren't simply trying to teach the alphabet.
School board officials in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood recently voted 4-1 to convert Lincoln Elementary school into a centralized early learning center, and re-direct all pre-kindergarten children from their neighborhood schools to there - a small but seismic change that advocates say will effectively sacrifice district's identity as a "walking school district" where virtually every student can access the classroom on foot.
Look for the teachers getting down on their level, walking from child to child, asking each one questions about their activity/day, and seeming genuinely interested in each child as they speak to them! Early on, when working in childcare, I struggled with this way more than I do now, honestly, being worried that the kids just wouldn't like me. But kids like consistency and safety, which is what that trust-building is for.
A member of our research team handed a five-year-old a crayon and asked her to draw what makes her feel like she belongs at school. She drew herself surrounded by Lego blocks. "I feel like I belong to school when I am playing Lego," she wrote. This wasn't what we expected in our latest study. After analyzing drawings and conversations with 108 children in their first year of school across Melbourne, our research team discovered something important.
The preschoolers were fascinated, looking at their classroom through the lens of an iPad camera, watching animated images pop up as a cheerful voice told them: Feed apples to a pig behind a haystack. Select the carnival ride located between two sets of balloons. While the game delighted these 3- and 4-year-olds, they were actually participating in a serious research project that is developing an important foundation for their future in math - spatial thinking and its integrated vocabulary, a skill typically overlooked in early education.
From swim lessons to tutoring, today's most successful children's franchises are finding innovative ways to support kids' growth, learning and confidence - while also providing strong opportunities for entrepreneurs. Based on the 2025 Franchise 500, these brands represent the best in their categories, combining proven systems, trusted reputations and scalable business models. Whether it's early education, enrichment programs or adventure-filled activities, these companies are shaping the future for the next generation.
The preschool and community center-a $3 million renovation project which just held an opening celebration in early August and will begin operations in early September-fills a void in most homeless housing and service centers. Services for children and families remain very hard to come by, preventing many single parents and families that are unhoused from transitioning to a more stable and secure housing situation. The Betty Bazaar Center is the first state-licensed childcare center to open adjacent to homeless housing.
The city's Department of Education is opening an Early Childhood Learning center this fall at 1972 Broadway, catering to students with special needs such as autism, cognitive delays, and emotional disabilities.
Labour pledges to create an integrated network of family hubs that would be so popular and entrenched that no future government could dismantle it. This initiative will build on the legacy of Sure Start and aims to close the attainment gap between poorer and richer children.
