For Adamary Sosa, the building blocks for a good life start early.
“Early childhood education is the groundwork for a child’s future success,” said Sosa, the vice president of education for Xiente, a local nonprofit organization that provides services to empower families and disrupt cycles of poverty.
Xiente offers several programs, including Head Start, in the communities it serves. One of its more unique resources is a mobile pre-K program called “Busesito,” or little bus.
Children attending the Busesito get six months of twice-weekly preschool sessions, on a bus. The program offers resources for parents, too.
“The kids are on the bus 2½ hours a day, twice a week,” she said. “So five hours total a week with a certified preschool teacher, and they’re getting kindergarten readiness. Basically, everything that they need to be ready — like letters, shapes, colors, names, numbers, all of that good stuff — and then adapting them into a school setting so that they can see it.”
While children spend time working on everything from reading to art projects, Sosa said, families have access to a variety of financial and economic resources.
“Then, while the kids were on the bus, the families we would partner with were in local churches or centers with an economic mobility counselor who was giving them workshops on economic mobility,” she said. “So we essentially removed the barrier of childcare for them so that they can attend these workshops. And they were getting financial literacy. They were getting parenting classes through a parenting curriculum. They were getting workforce development in there as well.
“So the idea was that, within the six months they were with us, we would have somehow enhanced their social mobility.”
Community needs addressed
The Busesito program began two years ago, arising from needs of the pandemic. For many, family, friends and neighbors (FFNs) have become the primary caretakers for children aged 3 to 5, and Busesito began by providing resources to caretakers for children’s success.
“The problem was that most FFNs don’t see themselves as educators,” she said. “And so we wanted to increase the quality of education within their program and just enhance the good work that they were already doing.”
Sosa said the program started as a “threefold model.”
- The first goal was to provide technical assistance, or provider care, to children through the bus.
- The second was a business model – providing FFNs with more resources and information if they wanted to be caregivers and/or develop childcare into a business.
- The final piece is education for parents.
Children and parents participate in these programs for six months. The program at the end is especially meaningful, Sosa said.
“At the end of the six-month cohort, we would graduate the kids, and then we graduate the family,” she said. “We’ve already had two graduations, which are so cute.”
“The parents got to watch their kids walk across the stage, but then the kids got to watch their parents walk across the stage, too, because they finalize their program. So, it was really touching, really sweet.”
Some children head to kindergarten after the program is over, while other, younger students may join other Xiente programs, like preschool centers.
There is currently one bus, with more in the works. The bus has been parked in the Frankford area. Sosa said the Busesito location priorities were assessed by community need.
“We were just going grassroots, trying to find FFNs, and we were knocking on places that they would normally go to, like churches, shopping centers, grocery shops, libraries, all of that,” she said. “And it so happens that the church, when we approach them, they did have a group of families that were in need.”
These programs partner with local organizations, like churches, Sosa said, to meet families and combine services.
“They helped us recruit and build that relationship with the families,” she said. “And they were just as invested in the program and in their community as we were in delivering the program to them as well.”
Services can include healthcare, housing assistance, workforce development and financial counselors.
Sosa also highlighted resources, such as food pantries or free washer-dryers in churches. She said with these partnerships, families can access both the basic needs and the educational/economic mobility offerings of Busesito, which can put students on track for success.
“Being able to have these programs in communities that need it can enhance their academic performance,” she said. “You can enhance their social skills, and now they know how to work with other children. You can increase chances of high school graduation and college completion, because you’ve already set them up towards a pathway towards success. And so they’re hitting those benchmarks when they should be.”
Setting children up for success
Proper education in the first five years of life is crucial, Sosa said.
“At this age group, they’re like sponges,” she said. “Between zero to 5 is when they’re learning the most and they’re able to retain more, which is why we push the dual language, because science shows children or people in general that learn more than one language tend to have more cognitive skills.”
Children in Pennsylvania are not required to attend preschool. But according to recent research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, it can have many benefits for children – including higher earning potential later in life.
Sosa said children’s progress in academic areas often increases after completing the Busesito program.
“So, the research we did, it showed that the kids on the bus, within just the five hours and two days a week, had better results or almost close to the results that we see at the center base,” she said. “And we think that that is attributed a lot to the smaller classroom sizes, the more individualized attention.”
In addition, Sosa said, the Busesito encourages socioeconomic growth and development for children.
“If you start early on, you should see improvements in school readiness,” she said. “So they have more of an advantage when they get to kindergarten. If you start early on, because you’re getting that routine in, they’re getting some of the material in already, so they’re not falling behind their peers when they get into kindergarten.
“And they’re able to advance, and it increases better academic performance. And that’s a good way also to begin closing the achievement gap, especially in underserved communities.”
Undocumented needs
Recently, the bus has helped undocumented families receive childcare.
“We were really supposed to work with FFNs, but because we couldn’t find them naturally, it just took us with undocumented families, and that has opened doors to a need that we didn’t know existed in early childhood,” Sosa said.
Sosa said community partnerships can help to identify families in need and get services to the proper locations.
The bus often has two programs per day, with two separate “cohorts,” Sosa said, which helps provide services for more children and families in the area.
“How it works is we’re 2½ hours, but we’re running two programs a day, so there’ll be like a cohort in the morning that would be considered cohort A, and that would be like Mondays and Wednesday mornings, and then cohort B might be Mondays and Wednesdays afternoon,” she said. “But Tuesdays and Thursdays, we may be elsewhere with two more groups of kids.”
In the future, Sosa said, there are talks of a bus in South Philly. Additionally, she hopes to expand the bus to more areas.
“We hope that we can have a fleet of buses in the future deployed in different areas,” she said, “whether it’s the middle of the city, or rural PA, providing early childhood education services in different, innovative ways.”
The program is free. Click here to learn more about or enroll in the Busesito program.
