Western Maryland County Focuses on Education to Attract Jobs
For Tom Uphold, the Overlook Judy Center Partnership (OJC) in rural Garrett County, Maryland not only provided quality early childhood education for his daughter, now a thriving second-grader. It connected him to programs that helped him buy a new house for his family and build up his small business.
“It really taught her a lot of things for getting ready to go into school,” says Uphold, of his daughter’s Head Start program, an OJC partner. Through Head Start, Uphold also learned about a first-time homeowner program and the Individual Development Account (IDA) program – matched savings accounts that can be used for home ownership.
“I started saving when I took the class,” says Uphold, 33, a single father who also has a 14-year-old son. “And I was able to get money through the IDA program so that really helped out with the down payment.” Uphold, who is a mechanic, then used the program to buy equipment for his car repair business.
Based in this Western Maryland county seat of Oakland (pop. about 2,000), the Overlook Judy Center Partnership brings together the resources of local schools and community agencies to ensure that children are ready for school.
Quality early childhood education is a key building block for a broad effort in Garrett County to thoughtfully invest in programs that help two generations – parents and children – succeed economically and to promote intergenerational mobility. Faced with a changing local economy dominated by low-wage jobs, Garrett County leaders realized that to attract higher-paying employers, the county must develop a more skilled workforce.
“We decided the solution was workforce development – to increase skills to drive up wages,” says Duane Yoder, president of Garrett County Community Action Committee (GCCAC), a private, nonprofit that works to help people in need become more self-sufficient and provide them essential services in collaboration with partners.
That starts with the children—preparing them for school, encouraging their ongoing success and ensuring they have role models and mentors. “We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on strategies to get children ready for school with the hope that that translates into school performance and job readiness,” Yoder said. “We’re also trying to make our early childhood programs serve as child care facilities for working parents.”
At the other end of the educational spectrum, the county’s high school graduates qualify for a two-year, county-funded, full-tuition scholarship if they attend the local community college full-time. About 70 percent of the about 300 graduates or GED recipients in 2009 used this opportunity, which costs the county about $370,000 a year.
“We have children going to college who would have never [gone] before, that couldn’t afford it or were too scared to go,” says Denny Glotfelty, chairman of the Board of County Commissioners. “Anytime you help your children, you help yourself and it’s helping the county.
“We’re starting a business park about two miles from the college to bring in… better businesses so they pay better salaries. So we’ve got to educate our children. We don’t want them to move out anymore. We want them to stay in our community, and we want a better life for them.”
The Garrett County effort illustrates the “two generation” approach to strengthening vulnerable children and their families championed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The approach is designed to equip children with the knowledge, skills, experiences, values and opportunities that will prepare them to participate in the mainstream economy; and to stabilize and strengthen the economic condition of low-income working parents.
“County leaders recognized that their economic development challenge is tied to the fact that children were not entering school prepared to succeed or coming out of school with the skills and preparation they need to get more than low-wage jobs,” says Miriam Shark, associate director at Casey, which has supported some Garrett County efforts. “So they need to both help kids – from early childhood on – and help support their parents’ efforts to get ahead.”
With about 30,000 residents spread across 657 square miles in the Allegheny Mountains, Garrett County has become popular with recreational sports enthusiasts and second-home buyers drawn to its ski runs, golf course, parks, and 13-mile-long Deep Creek Lake. But the county’s shifting economy also has left many longtime residents grappling with low wages and rising costs.
“We’re turning the corner away from an agriculture and resource-based economy toward tourism, service, retail and light manufacturing,” says Yoder. “But we still have significant issues including underemployment, low incomes, and limited job opportunities.”
Between 1997 and 2008, Garrett County’s assessable tax base rose from less than $1 billion dollars to almost $4 billion. Income tax revenue and property tax revenue also increased markedly. And unemployment dropped from almost 14 percent in 1997 to about 5 percent in 2006. With the recession, unemployment now stands at about 7 percent.
But Garrett County’s estimated 2008 median household income is $41,500 – about 60 percent of the state median of $70,400. And the county’s average weekly wage is $553 compared to $953 for Maryland.
“The area around the lake – there’s all the mega homes and people coming in from different areas who make massive salaries. It’s made the property taxes and the land values higher,” says Tom Uphold. “When you just work local here, the overwhelming majority of the jobs are minimum wage to just a few dollars above. It’s very hard to make a living.”
With efforts like the Overlook Judy Center Partnership, Garrett County is working to change this. Operated by GCCAC and the Garrett County Board of Education, OJC is part of a statewide school readiness initiative that supports childhood professionals by offering staff development and training.
It also supports parents in their role as their child’s first teacher by providing workshops and parent-child activities. And it coordinates family support services and provides links to community resources such as the first-time homeowner program.
These supports go to OJC partners including several Early Head Start, Head Start and wrap-around child care programs. It also involves some private and home-based child care providers who receive training and assistance toward licensing and certification. Some Early Head Start, Head Start and wrap-around programs are offered at the Overlook Center in Oakland, as well as at two public elementary schools that are OJC partners.
The results of the OJC effort are striking:
94 percent of all children attending kindergarten classrooms in the two OJC partner elementary schools were “fully ready” for school in fall 2008, according to Maryland’s kindergarten readiness assessment, up from 48 percent in fall 2002, OJC’s first year. The majority of the children attended OJC early childhood programs.
- These children’s readiness is improving in seven domains of learning, particularly in scientific thinking, mathematical thinking, and social studies.
- These children exceeded both the county and state in the percentage of children “fully ready” in language and literacy, thanks to an increased emphasis in this area. OJC is also tracking children’s progress, with the goal of ensuring that children read at grade level by third grade.
- In the county, 93 percent of children with an OJC Head Start 4-year-old experience were fully school-ready in fall 2008, up from 29 percent in 2002. That compares to 62 percent of the county children with a non-OJC Head Start experience who were fully school-ready in fall 2008.
Barb Unger, OJC Quality Programs Manager, attributes this success to OJC’s enhanced services and its efforts to align early childhood programs with the skills needed for kindergarten. “We’ve connected the Head Start teachers with the Board of Education teachers. Through joint staff development, teacher mentoring and sharing resources, the teachers are working to align programs,” Unger says. “Plus, there’s our work in getting the families involved and giving them the resources they need to work with their children. We put more money and resources into those classrooms.”
The OJC effort, using the Overlook Center in Oakland as its hub, serves children in southern Garrett County. Funding is being sought to replicate this effort in northern Garrett County. A GCCAC-operated early education center opened in 2009 in the town of Grantsville would serve as the hub.
Another OJC partner, Healthy Families Garrett County/Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) provides home visiting services to expectant parents and families with newborns to ensure that children are healthy and school ready.
Garrett County is NFP’s only site in Maryland and an exceptional rural example in a program that has become a national model. It is one the few home visiting programs that can demonstrate evidence-based data of proven outcomes, including improved school readiness for children born to mothers with low-psychological resources. The Obama administration has committed money to the program in its budget and cites NFP as an example of a program it wants to bring to scale through its Social Innovation Fund.
“It’s the most rigorously-tested maternal child health home visiting program,” says Earleen Beckman, of the Garrett County Health Department, who directs the program. “They really focus on supporting the parent-child relationship and working with the parent to improve their life and that helps the child also.”
Targeted to low-income mothers pregnant with their first child, NFP is designed to improve pregnancy outcomes, child health and development, and economic self-sufficiency. Currently serving 86 Garrett County families, NFP partners a mother, early in her pregnancy, with a registered nurse and she receives ongoing nurse home visits through her child’s second birthday.
More than 3,000 households – out of 12,000 in the county – participate in one or more GCCAC programs. These programs dovetail with the Casey-developed rural Family Economic Success (RuFES) framework, which has three broad outcomes – Earn it, Keep it, Grow it – designed to help families increase their income, stabilize their finances, and build assets and wealth. More broadly, these efforts can create family-supporting environments. GCCAC programs help families in areas including:
- Transportation: Wheels to Work, which provides low-interest loans to help people purchase a vehicle as they move from welfare to work, has placed 158 cars since 1999. Of 64 car recipients followed over the years, 42 percent are employed with an average hourly wage of $9.18.
- Housing: GCCAC has built, financed or repaired 1,120 affordable housing units including the 88-unit Mountain Village complex in McHenry, Md., which offers workforce rental units. Under construction is the 220-unit River Hill complex in Oakland, offering owner-occupied units and mixed-price rentals.
- The First-Time Homeowner Program helps low-to-moderate income individuals by offering counseling, training, and down payment assistance through partnerships with local banks and USDA Rural Development. Since 1994, 1,075 people have completed the training and 270 homes have been purchased.
- Asset Building: With the IDA program, for every dollar deposited toward a home purchase, college, trade school, or business start-up expenses, GCCAC sets aside two dollars to pay toward these expenses. People must save monthly for a minimum of one year and GCCAC’s maximum contribution is $2,000. Since 1994, 63 IDAs have been issued – 51 to purchase a home, five for business development, three for higher education, and four for home repair.
- Job development: GCCAC helped start Adventure Sports Center International (ASCI) a mountaintop water park with a 1,700-foot-long man-made whitewater course that offers guided raft trips and self-guided kayaking. Located near the WISP ski and golf resort, ASCI is part of an effort to transform seasonal recreation and tourism jobs into full-time jobs with benefits. It’s also an example of the county’s willingness to think outside the box. GCCAC provided land, investment, leadership, and programming.
For some parents, their involvement in an OJC program serves as a portal to other GCCAC services, illustrating how a core group of families connects early on to the agency and uses different supports at different times.
Those supports helped Tom Uphold move from a cramped rental apartment in town into a three-bedroom house near the lake. “The kids really like the house – having a yard, their own bedroom,” says Uphold, whose son lives with him full-time and his daughter part-time.
Being able to tap into local resources that give his children a good start and improve their prospects--plus enable him to better provide for his family--has been invaluable. What’s more his business improvement has helped build the local economy: He contributes to the tax base and could one day add new jobs. “It’s not always easy to do everything on your own,” Uphold says. “Having a little help to get going, it makes a world of difference.”