Siskin early learning center east brainerd: Siskin Children’s Institute

Siskin Early Learning Centers | Siskin Children’s Institute

The Siskin Early Learning Center has been serving the Chattanooga community for over 50 years. We serve children with special needs and developmental disabilities as well as typically developing children.

Quality early childcare is low child-teacher ratios, using developmentally appropriate practices, sparking their curiosity through intentional learning as well as being play-based. The Early Learning Centers use assessments all year long, so we are measuring their progress all year long. We offer many resources for our families and offer our staff specialized training in strategies, implementation, etc.

Inclusion benefits all children both typically developing and children with special needs. The benefits of inclusion for children with special needs is peer modeling, so the children will learn from others. The training is specialized, so that will benefit all children. The typically developing children will learn about respect, empathy, and differences. At Siskin Early Learning Center, we develop meaningful relationships between all of the children.

The Engagement Classroom Model that we implement is three things:
1. Increasing a child’s engagement
2. Increasing a child’s independence
3. Increasing the child’s social interactions
These three things allows a child to be successful now and later in life. We use the terms incidental or intentional teaching, so even though we are play-based, learning is very intentional and we are taking those teachable moments and the teachers are expanding on it. The teachers utilize zone-defense that allows the classroom to stay organized and learning is taking place. The Engagement Classroom Model also decreases those transition/wait times. So, for example when you line up to go to the playground, there can be a lot of wait time, but with this engagement model, our staff has strategies to decrease that wait time making transitions easier for the children.
We also implement integrated therapy, which allows the therapists to go inside the classroom and work with the staff members, so the staff members are imbedding interventions all day within all the routines. So, they are getting interventions 8x greater than if they were receiving specialized services only 2x a week.

We also provide a Reggio Emilia Model which is an approach founded in Italy that allows the environment to play a large part in learning for children. The environment is the third teacher, so our teachers have brought in a lot of natural components and open-ended materials that encourage the children to use their imaginations and helps with problem-solving skills. We also implement the Project Approach that focuses on the interests of the children. For example, a child might find a spider out of the playground, so the teacher could bring that spider inside and allow the class to research about spiders, study the spider, what is a spider’s habitat, etc. The teacher can use this approach and expand on it, so it’s more meaningful and more interactive that works on critical thinking skills and problem-solving skills.

Siskin Children’s Institute to close East Brainerd learning center

Johnathan Castro, 2, uses a touch screen to help him understand emotions in the ESCALATE Class at Siskin Children’s Institute. His teacher, Molly Sloan, watches his actions as the screen changes faces.

ABOUT SISKIN CHILDREN’S INSTITUTE• Founded: 1950• Mission: To support quality of life for children of all abilities through education, research, health care and advocacy• Website: www.siskin.org• Contact: 423-648-1700Source: Siskin Children’s Institute

Site of Siskin’s East Brainerd Early Learning Center in Chattanooga.

Chattanooga’s Siskin Children’s Institute is shuttering one of its two early learning centers, citing dwindling numbers of special-needs children at the center and a shifting tide in early education for children with disabilities.

The East Brainerd Early Learning Center on Gunbarrel Road will close on May 30, Siskin Children’s Institute president and CEO John Farrimond said. Almost 120 children between the ages of six weeks and five years attend the center, which employs 39 people.

Siskin will make room for as many of the East Brainerd children as possible at its downtown Carter Street location, which is already close to capacity, said Linda McReynolds, director of development and communications. First priority will be given to the handful of children with special needs, she added.

“It is very difficult for them to find placement, so we are going to be able to accommodate them,” she said. “And we’re working to see what other spaces we have for typically developing children, as well.”

Of the 116 children who attend the East Brainerd center, just 12 have been diagnosed with special needs — that’s strikingly different from Siskin Children’s Institute’s downtown location, where about 40 percent of the center’s 140 children have special needs.

At East Brainerd, the 12 special-needs children would have dropped to 9 next year — nowhere near the desirable 40-60 ratio, which helps create the inclusive environment that Siskin strives for, McReynolds said.

“As we looked at our service population, we only had nine,” she said. “And not that those nine aren’t important, they are. And the other children’s experiences are equally important. But we just don’t have the demand for the services for the special-needs children out here. “

That decreasing demand is driven in part by a shift in the Tennessee Early Intervention System. The state-sponsored program helps pay for care for special-needs children before age two. In past years, the program often paid for as much as five-day-a-week placements at providers such as Siskin Children’s Institute, but that has been cut to just five hours a week, McReynolds said.

At the same time, the Hamilton County Schools system, which contracts with Siskin to provide care for special needs kids ages three and above, started to provide services in-house instead of sending kids to community-based providers like Siskin, Farrimond said.

“Programatically, the environment has changed,” he said. “With [the early intervention program] making a move to home-based instead of center-based, and the public schools referring less kids with special needs to organizations like ours, that’s a programmatic change that has to be looked at.”

Closing the center is the best way to ensure Siskin Children’s Institute can continue to serve East Brainerd, Farrimond said. The money previously spent on the center will be reallocated to new community-based programs, he said.

Siskin Children’s Institute spent about $4.8 million on both of its early learning centers in 2011 while only earning $1.8 million in revenue from the centers, according to the latest nonprofit disclosures filed with the IRS. Farrimond declined to say how much money the organization will free up by closing the East Brainerd center, but said the amount is well into six figures.

The end numbers will depend on several factors, he added, including whether Siskin sells the East Brainerd building, what new programs it launches and how many of the center’s 39 staffers stay with Siskin. All of that is still in flux, Farrimond said, although he hopes to keep as many employees on the payroll as possible by transitioning them to roles downtown.

The closing was recommended by a task force of board members who worked for more than two months on the decision, Farrimond said. It was announced three months early to give parents ample time to find new arrangements for their kids, McReynolds said.