Residents will have plenty of opportunity to discuss early childhood development in the coming weeks at several forums scheduled throughout Westlock County.
As it turns out, the Westlock area is doing better with early childhood development than other Canadian communities, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.
The results of the Early Childhood Development Mapping Project (ECMap), specific to the Westlock and Thorhild area, were released late last month. They show that kindergarten students from these communities achieved, on average, better results in five major developmental categories.
“When we look at those results, it’s good to see we’re not doing badly in comparison,” said Sharon Lyons, the local ECMap coordinator.
“On the flipside, we need to ask, are those results OK with me? And the answer is no.”
ECMap defines results according to five broad categories: physical, social, emotional, language and thinking, and communication and general knowledge. The local mapping area includes Westlock and Thorhild counties, as well as a large part of the MD of Lesser Slave River in the north.
About one fifth of the 136 kindergarten students sampled in 2010-2011 struggled in one or more of those areas, compared to about one quarter as a national average.
For Lyons, having one fifth of students struggling when they enter school means there’s lots of work to do.
“We know a lot of this is preventable, because it’s things like holding a pencil and climbing the stairs … and following simple instructions,” she said. “So how can we, as a community, ensure that every child has a positive early childhood development?”
In particular, children in the Westlock area seem to be struggling most with language and thinking skills. Nearly one third of students in this area have trouble reading and writing, recognizing shapes, colours and counting.
That will be the focus of the coming meetings — looking at the opportunities to connect with children in all of Westlock’s subcommunities like Clyde and Jarvie.
Forums where the study’s results can be discussed have been scheduled for Feb. 20 in Westlock at the Westlock Rotary Spirit Centre at 7 p.m., and Feb. 28 at Thorhild Central School at 6:30 p.m. Lyons said she hopes it’s not just parents who take in these forums, but community leaders and policy makers as well. It’s a perfect opportunity for the community to work together to come up with the next steps to ensure children have a positive early childhood.
The results for the Westlock area were further broken down into two sub-communities. One subcommunity in the south includes Westlock and the rural area to the south and southeast, while the other includes the predominantly rural area to the north and east.
While the results were mostly similar in the two subcommunities, Lyons said it was interesting to note that students from the northern rural areas seemed to do much better with emotional maturity and showing empathy for others than their counterparts in the south — 11 per cent struggling compared to 22 per cent.
For more information about the ECMap project or the upcoming forums, contact Lyons at 780-349-5900.
