Beyond the Pod: Closing the Opportunity Gap Starts Before Kindergarten

In our season four finale of “No One Is Coming to Save Us,” we hear from Brooke Legler, the owner of a child care center in Wisconsin, who is struggling to keep her center open despite the strong demand for it even in a state with nearly universal preschool. Brooke shares that when resources are lacking for early childhood education, students – especially those with special needs – often struggle when they get to K-12. To address that need, she founded WECAN, an organization fighting for early education funding across Wisconsin.

We also meet Angela Harris, a former early childhood educator turned elementary school teacher and chair of the Milwaukee Black Educators caucus, who discusses the importance of investing in children from zero through elementary education to set them up for success.

At Neighborhood Villages, we believe in building a system that starts at birth. Our goal is simple: give children the best possible start in life so they can thrive in K-12 education and beyond. That’s why we’ve focused on developing a model to bridge the gap between early childhood education and K-12.

One way that we’re doing that is through our play-based toddler curriculum, Learning Through Exploration, which we developed in partnership with Boston Public Schools and The LEGO Foundation. Learning Through Exploration supports toddlers and seamlessly, vertically aligns with Boston Public Schools’ high-quality, play-based FOCUS curriculum (serving children ages 3-8). Since its launch, the curriculum has been downloaded over 650 times across 38 states and 14 countries, reaching six continents (Antarctica, we’re coming for you!). These numbers speak to the widespread need for high-quality early childhood education resources, especially when you consider that 90% of brain development happens before the age of five.

Notably, many of our team members at Neighborhood Villages, including Co-Founder Sarah Muncey, Chief of Staff Kate Armstrong, and Chief of Policy Elizabeth Leiwant, have backgrounds in K-12 education. They saw firsthand the challenge of closing the opportunity gap once children entered the K-12 school system – and how much better it could be if we provided more accessible and high-quality education to children earlier.

We asked these former K-12 educators why they transitioned to the early education field. Here’s what they had to say. 

Sarah Muncey, co-founder

“As a public school teacher and administrator, I'd worked with students ages 10-18 for 12 years before co-founding Neighborhood Villages, and two things about my experience inspired me to move upstream to the 0-5 space. 

The first was about the children. Our 10 year olds were coming to us every year farther and farther from where they were supposed to be in terms of reading, math, and the soft skills of school, and honestly, they were more and more traumatized by the conditions of their families living paycheck to paycheck in America. 

We made great gains, especially in that fifth grade year when students first came to our school and were wrapped around in such a holistic way, but we could not close the opportunity gap. We could lessen it, we could make great gains for individual students, but it persisted. And I came to understand that if students had access to enriching, safe, and play-based experiences while their brain is forming, they are better able to access grade-level content in later years. They are less likely to repeat a grade, less likely to require one-on-one support services, and more likely to do everything from read on grade level to graduate from high school, if they have access to high-quality early education. So I decided to move upstream, hoping that I could add some support and structure to these first five years when families have so little of that.

The second was that as a mom to young children and as the school administrator in charge of making sure all of the kids had what they needed in terms of clothes, school supplies, and enrichment experiences, I could see that the wheels fall off the bus of a family when a child is born. Families were slipping farther and farther away from their own career goals, their own dreams of economic stability, each year. I would hear story after story of a caregiver who'd been working towards their own career goals, whether trying to make manager at a retail shop or partner at a law firm, and then they had a baby. And when they went to look for child care all they found were waitlists. And when they got off of those waitlists, the care cost as much as their rent and didn't cover the hours of their job. And that set off a course of events that caregivers, usually women, never really recover from in terms of their careers and economic stability.”

Kate Armstrong, chief of staff

“After nearly two decades working in middle and high schools, it had become very difficult to continue seeing, year after year, fifth graders arrive at their new middle schools already behind grade level. The amazing teachers and administrators worked tirelessly to close these pre-existing gaps, but I kept longing for the opportunity to start earlier and prevent these gaps from developing in the first place. As a parent of three young children, I had also experienced firsthand how difficult and expensive it is to access high-quality early learning opportunities. But when my oldest turned four and got a coveted K1 seat at a wonderful BPS elementary school in our neighborhood, suddenly the world opened up for our family. She was able to access a warm, supportive, enriching classroom environment as part of the pre-existing K-12 infrastructure - and all for free. I am so grateful the stars all aligned for me to begin leading internal operations at Neighborhood Villages, finally getting to work towards the high-quality system of early education and care that all the children in the middle and high schools I operated so deserved.”

Elizabeth Leiwant, chief of policy

“I spent a decade as a K-8 teacher and school leader. After years of seeing how policy decisions impacted that happened on the ground in schools,  I pivoted to focus on educational policy to try to impact the systemic challenges impacting students and teachers. This included differences in the early learning environments students had access to before they arrived in Kindergarten. 

At the same time I had my first child and experienced as a parent the complexities of finding and paying for high-quality child care. I had the opportunity to see up close that the challenges in equity, funding, and structural supports that I was working to address in K-12 are exponentially greater in early education and care. These differences were put into even starker relief during the COVID pandemic.

 Seeing the challenges in early education and knowing how critical these years are for children’s development and ultimately for their academic success, inspired me to switch my focus from K-12 to early childhood education. 

I believe that if we invest strategically in high-quality early childhood education, we can alleviate many of the challenges that later strain our K-12 system. The evidence is clear: children who benefit from robust early learning opportunities enter elementary school more prepared. This boosts their long-term success and reduces many of the structural and financial strains on the K-12 sector. Until we fully invest in children 0-5, our efforts to close the opportunity gap will always fall short. We’re committed to leading this change and ensuring that all children have the opportunity to thrive – starting from the very beginning.”