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Evaluators followed staff and watched their interaction with children and how children interacted with each other. They noted activities for developing fine motor skills, meals and toiletries and whether there is adequate space for activities. Building Blocks, which currently serves 37 children, and Farrar, which is serving 25, provide a testament to the well-known quote from James Heckman, the 2000 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics: “Early learning begets later learning and early success breeds later success. The later in life we attempt to repair early deficits, the costlier the remediation becomes.”

At NOAH, they don't wait. The Farrar program starts helping babies succeed even before they are born. They know there is a direct correlation between low-birth weight babies and low performance in schools, so the prenatal parenting outreach program works with young teens.

"We tell them, 'don't smoke and don't drink. Take your vitamins.' Givens-Barber said. "Once the babies are delivered, we want the young ladies to stay in school, so the childhood program was birthed. The girls go to school and children come here." Producing four-star programs feels a lot like running a successful family. "Just seeing these children matriculate through the various stages and being ready to go into school is the most rewarding thing," Givens-Barber said.

If you have ever sent a child off to kindergarten, you know how she feels. It is a culmination of prenatal office visits, conscious dieting, healthy choices, self-sacrifice, diaper changes, sleeplessness, late-night hospital visits, breast-feeding, bottle-feeding and the search for good day care. You read the latest parenting books and bought gadgets to help develop motor skills. Maybe you even took your barely-walking, not-yet-talking toddler to a museum or library to expose them to the intricacies of a Jacob Lawrence painting, a Claude McKay poem or a Zora Neale Hurston novel. You did everything you could to make your child ready for school — just like they do at NOAH — and every success that follows brings you a proud parental moment. A mother recently brought in the report card of one of the program's students to show the staff.

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