Recent studies have shown that good preschool programs can help children in poverty, like those in the Black Belt, make a better start in their transition from home to community and thereby set more of them on the path to becoming economically self-sufficient, socially responsible adults.

Helping preschools with their efforts to reach these children is UA's Child Development Resources (CDR). CDR addresses parenting and child care issues in a six-county region of west-central Alabama that includes three Black Belt counties: Bibb, Lamar and Pickens. Beginning in December 2003, six additional counties, Hale, Greene, Sumter, Perry, Marengo and Choctaw, will become part of the region served by CDR.

"Our primary focus is to improve the availability, affordability and quality of child care and to assist parents in the nurturing of their very young children," said Sally Edwards, CDR director.

"Everything we do is designed to help improve the quality of child care for all children. We do that by helping parents become better consumers, and also through our training department, where we have child-development specialists who offer extensive training for child care providers," she added.

Edwards said CDR offers financial assistance for parents, child care resource and referral, child care provider training, and parenting and educational support.

CDR offers child care subsidies that pay a portion of the child care costs for qualified parents who are either in school or have a job.

"So many of our clients are single mothers who need help with child care costs in order to work or to complete their educations as a means of becoming self sufficient. The whole point is for them to become more capable of supporting themselves and able to manage on their own and no longer in need of financial assistance," she said.

During the past year CDR served over 2,700 children and 1,588 families, and had more than 2,300 participants in their child care training activities.

CDR battles the problem of parents' lack of information through their child care resource and referral services, which provides parents with information about child care rules and regulations, how to recognize and choose a child care program, as well as educating them about their own child's development.

"We've been able to blend resource and referral with our BabyTALK program so that parents are receiving good information not only about child care but also about their child's development along with parenting resources.

"We give them information about child care regulations, how to recognize a quality child care program and what to look for when [they] go to visit a day care facility.

"So a large part of what we do is try to develop more informed consumers who can, by their own demands, help raise the quality of child care in Alabama," Edwards explained.

Through CDR's BabyTALK program parents receive child development and parenting information, suggestions for age-appropriate activities for their children and suggestions for encouraging nurturing relationships with their children.

Among the services offered by Baby TALK are mom/newborn hospital visits, "Warmline" phone service for parents, a weekly parent support group that blends parent-child activities with child development information, parent-child visits at local health clinics, and monthly family fun events for early Head Start children and their families.

Ensuring that these programs have quality child care workers is the other task of CDR. "Quality training activities are offered throughout the region and through multiple venues to improve the quality of child care programs and staff," Edwards said.

Child development and administrative courses, as well as weekly workshops, are offered at the center on topics ranging from dealing with extreme behaviors in children using everyday resources as teaching materials, curriculum development, and classroom managements techniques to preventing health and safety problems.

The center houses a demonstration classroom and a resource lending library. The resource library is heavily used by the child care providers. They can check out teaching resources, children's books, activity kits and use equipment such as die-cut machines to create interactive bulletin boards.

But, Edwards said they are finding themselves taking their resources out of the center and doing their training on-site at the child care facilities.

"Family child care providers make up the bulk of child care in the Black Belt, so they are isolated from the resources we have at the center. To be able to take resources out to them and to illustrate how these materials work in the providers' own environment is really helpful to them," she said.

"Doing on-site training helps the child care workers see the theories and activities put into practice with the children in their center. They really do learn how to integrate the knowledge with their practice, which is what we in child development always hope will happen," Edwards said.