About Early Childhood Education
CentroNía’s commitment is to serve low-income, working families and their children by providing a continuum of early childhood education and care starting during a mother’s pregnancy until the child is five years old. Our model includes comprehensive education services for children, their families, and the community. With locations in the Columbia Heights neighborhood in DC and Takoma Park, Maryland, CentroNía Provide affordable and high-quality bilingual education to children ages birth to 5. About 75 percent of our students are Latino, 85 percent are English Language Learners, and 90 percent qualify for free or reduced priced lunch. Services are provided from 7:00am to 6:00pm Monday through Friday. These hours give our families the opportunity to work towards financial advancement through full-time employment or higher education while providing a stable environment for children. CentroNía’s Early Childhood Education program offers services for expecting families, infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.
Why is Early Childhood Education Important?
Studies show that development during the first years of a child’s life determines the foundation for growth, concept learning, memory, problem solving, and relationships with adults and other children. During these years, even more significant advances occur in language development. Nonetheless, access to quality education continues to be a challenge facing the District of Columbia and the Greater Metropolitan region. Many families have been adversely affected by the limited number of affordable and high-quality early care and education programs.
In addition, data shows that Latino children are less likely to be fully prepared for school compared to other ethnicities; in part because their parents do not have the financial capacity to pay for high-quality early childhood education or they are not aware of programs available to make it more affordable. Thus, CentroNía is an advocate for providing high-quality care and education accessible not only to Latino families, but to the diverse multicultural families in our community and beyond. CentroNía prepare children and their families to successfully transition to the elementary school environment, as reflected in the child’s emotional, physical, cognitive, and language development and consistent with national school readiness benchmarks.
