Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country
Founded 05-05-05

Children’s Council: Numbers and Narratives

Touching Families One by One

Story by Kathleen McFadden

Annual reports are good tools for getting the big picture of an organization, but they rarely tell the whole story, mainly because annual reports focus on numbers, not narratives. And while numbers certainly tell a story, narratives are the real stories.

The Children’s Council of Watauga County recently released its annual report, and the numbers look good.

In fiscal year 2005-06, the Children’s Council leveraged state dollars to increase its funding by more than 50 percent, diversified its funding by 41 percent and saw a 300 percent growth in serving families through the Parents as Teachers program.

That last number is important. Parents As Teachers is a free year-round program that provides parents—through monthly home visits—information about how children grow and develop; activities and toys that will foster learning and nurture development; methods of positive discipline, new techniques for problem solving and realistic expectations of child behavior; and attitudes that will raise children's self esteem.

The Children’s Council was able to establish the Parents as Teachers program because of a three-year Early Learning Opportunities Grant. Those grant funds will be exhausted this year.

Here are a few more numbers:

• 298 parents/guardians received a Parents as Teachers home visit to help them with their parenting skills.

• 319 parents received one-on-one consultation, counseling or crisis intervention through Parents as Teachers, the Family Resource Center and Post-Partum home visits.

• 1,097 parents participated in some function of the Family Resource Center.

Every one of those numbers has a narrative behind it. Parenting is a tough and extremely demanding job under ideal social, personal and economic circumstances, but the difficulty of taking care of, teaching, guiding and nurturing youngsters increases exponentially as parents’ personal pressures increase.

The staff at the Children’s Council knows a lot about those pressures. Here are some more numbers about the parents served through the Parents as Teachers program:

• 30 percent are teenagers.

• 49 percent are incarcerated or on probation for drug-related crimes.

• 42 percent have less than a high school education.

• 50 percent of the women have experienced domestic violence or rape.

While the Children’s Council is reaching some of its target population, funding doesn’t allow the agency to even come close to meeting everyone’s needs.

“If we were fully funded,” said Executive Director Jennifer Wilson-Kearse, “that would mean meeting the needs of 20 percent of the population.”

And the Children’s Council is not fully funded. According to Wilson-Kearse, the agency receives only 45 percent of what could be considered full funding.

And while the funding lags, the challenges increase.

“With the closing of High Country Amigos, we feel we have become a leader in serving the Hispanic community,” Wilson-Kearse said. In addition, she said, the Children’s Council currently knows of 24 teenagers aged 14 to 18 in Watauga County who have recently had a baby or are pregnant. “Eighty percent of them are dropping out of school,” Wilson-Kearse said, many of them because they cannot find childcare. “I feel like teen pregnancy is something we should be talking about and will definitely be talking about in the next few years,” she said.

Watauga County needs more childcare, she continued. The Children’s Council receives 450 calls per year requesting childcare info. “We don’t have the capacity,” Wilson-Kearse said. “Childcare centers are full.”

Because quality early childcare for at-risk children is a important determinant of school success later on, its lack puts children even more at risk for future problems.

Wilson-Kearse pointed out, “I think we need to be thinking outside the box about children and education. One of America’s strengths is producing creative thinkers and innovation. How can we set up our kids for success in being innovators and creative thinkers?”

And that’s a narrative that needs to be written.