Building bridges: Preschool Partners helps children prepare for the future

The first few years of a child’s life are a critical foundation for the cognitive, emotional and social skills they’ll carry with them when they grow up.

At PreSchool Partners, those social and emotional skills are just as important as school-readiness skills. Founded by St. Luke’s Episcopal Church parishioners Jeanette Hancock and Bill Black, PSP was focused at its inception on helping children from under-resourced communities prepare for kindergarten and supporting parents’ engagement in their children’s education. After nearly 30 years, its mission and reach have grown to include more areas of developmental success. 

In addition to the school’s academic reputation, many Mountain Brook families are eager to send their children to PSP because their classrooms include a mix of children from a variety of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds and many neighborhoods, from Mountain Brook to Woodlawn and from Norwood to Center Point. 

PSP gets its name from the partnership between the school and the children’s families. The program insists on family involvement in each child’s education and requires at least one caregiver to come to school with their child every Monday for two hours. While the children learn and play in their own classrooms, their parents, grandparents or other family members gather for lessons about temper tantrums, financial literacy, picky eaters, how to communicate effectively with school officials and other topics relevant to families with young children. 

“Parenting is a perfect way for people to connect in spite of their differences. Parenting is hard for all of us,” said Amy Stevens, a PSP teacher whose three children have also attended the program.

Executive Director Lella Carl Hamiter said “magic” can happen in those parent classrooms. 

“Men and women from all walks of life see that they’re all in the same boat, and they realize they’re not alone — and they’re not that different,” Hamiter said. “We’ve seen parents helping others with job searches and networking and learning from each other. For example, after one session about cultural traditions, one parent said, ‘I realized our family doesn’t really have any traditions, so we’re going to adopt one I learned about here.’” 

Hamiter credits Turner Burton as an early supporter of a preschool program that includes children from a cross-section of Birmingham. 

About 10 years ago, at the request of some of the program’s parents, PSP decided to hold a free “kindergarten boot camp” in August to combat summer learning loss. Finding they had space for more participants, PSP offered the boot camp to St. Luke’s parishioners, who eagerly filled the available spots. 

Burton remembers the day clearly. His company, Hoar Construction, was building a new facility for PSP, and he went to pick up the contract. When he saw two little girls of different races walking down the hall holding hands, he told Hamiter, “That’s the kind of preschool I want for my children.” 

After sharing classrooms with St. Luke’s preschool program and renting space from Trinity Presbyterian Church for 20 years, in 2015 PSP moved into a brand new facility on Montevallo Road, with room for more classrooms and more students. 

Around this time, the PSP faculty were seeing low language skills in many 3- and 4-year-olds in the program. They learned through research that children from under-resourced backgrounds improve language and vocabulary skills dramatically when they are in classes with children from stable-income families, who can share their skills organically. It was time for Turner’s idea to come to fruition, Hamiter said. 

The first combined classes were the 2-year-old classrooms. PSP tested the children’s skills at the beginning of the school year and at the end, and Hamiter said the results showed that it worked. All PSP classes now include full-tuition spots (up to 35% of the class), and there are waiting lists for those spots every year. 

Former Board Chair Charlie Clark, whose son Charles began PSP in 2019 and daughter Kitty started in 2021, said, “Our decision was centered on program excellence and the building of community around children. I’m proud that PSP has continued to exceed national benchmarks in early education metrics. During the 2022-23 school year, we distributed over 2,240 books to PSP families, and 97% of our graduating students tested ready for kindergarten.” 

Clark has seen those improvements in academics and emotional and social development firsthand through his own children’s education. 

Kirk Forrester, whose younger son recently graduated from PSP, said, “I cried and cried at his graduation because I knew it was the end of our time there. We loved the community and getting to make friends with parents and children from all over Birmingham.” 

Her sons played with their PSP friends on tee ball teams in the Southside League at Avondale Park, even after they graduated from the program. Forrester said she cherishes the connections she made — and continues to keep — with other PSP parents, and she expects her sons will also continue to benefit from their PSP friendships throughout their lives. 

PSP teacher Amy Stevens previously taught in Washington, D.C., and said seeing the children relate to each other as individuals is one of the best parts of her job. Her two sons are graduates of the program, and her daughter is in the 2-year-old class. Her sons’ experiences on the tee ball team, learning from and trusting parent coaches, were a big part of their positive experience, she said. 

“We’ve become a family, watching each others’ children grow up, and we look forward to reconnecting in the spring,” Stevens said. “It’s so good for your soul when you connect.”