AMERICAN FALLS, Idaho — After reading a book about the five senses to a semicircle of rapt 4-year-olds, Abi Hawker tells the children in her afternoon preschool class that she has a surprise for them.
She drags a small popcorn maker across the carpet and asks them to consider: which of their senses might be activated when she pours the kernels into the machine? When are the beans heated? When the popcorn starts to pop pop?
Moments later, the children scream with joy as the corn kernels burst.
As Hawker explains what the children see, he asks them questions that relate to the day’s lesson. From the activity, the class moves on to snack time, stimulating two more senses: touch and taste.
A few years ago, this experience would have been inaccessible to almost half of the children in Hawker’s classroom. Their families do not earn enough money to pay for children’s education. Other children come from families that may have the means but, until recently, did not make early learning a priority.
Today, however, American Falls is a transformed city.
This one-stop-light farming community on the banks of the Snake River has seen dramatic improvements in family engagement, preschool access, and kindergarten readiness in just the last few years—the results of a grassroots effort to support children and families in this southeastern Idaho enclave. .
It couldn’t have come at a more critical time. Like President Joe Biden efforts to expand child care support have failed, states have been the next best hope for addressing a national crisis in early childhood education. Some as New Mexico, Minnesota and VermontThey have invested a lot. But others have made clear that they see early care and education as an individual responsibility, not a government one.
In reliably conservative Idaho, lawmakers have gone a step further. They have withheld state support for early education students: Idaho is one of the few states that does not provide funding for preschool, and federal grants rejected to improve early childhood education. Some have expressed open hostility toward early learning, including a Republican lawmaker who said he opposed any bill that would facilitate learning. “so that mothers leave the home.”
American Falls also goes conservative. However, the city has proudly embraced a goal its supporters describe as “progressive”: universal preschool education. Residents have united around a simple mantra – “read, talk, play” – and turned it into a movement.
That local success has been driven by a broader vision experiment spreading across the state, where communities build their own systems for early childhood education. These ad hoc projects are known as “collaborations” and bring together educators, school district leaders, and business and nonprofit executives to identify and dismantle barriers to early childhood development. It’s known here as early learning done “Idaho style.”
“The bottom-up approach is critical to their success,” says Beth Oppenheimer, executive director of the Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children, a nonprofit that advocates for the collaborative model.
These local associations offer hope to families in the 25 Idaho communities and counting those who have launched them. The goal: for these self-determined efforts to succeed in showing state lawmakers that early learning programs are good for all Idahoans and worthy of state money.
“We’re building something they can see, feel, touch and experience in their backyards. “We’re showing them that it can work in their community,” Oppenheimer says. “So if you invest in early childhood, you will see better (readiness) rates for kindergarten in the fall. You will see families who know where to look for resources. You’re going to see kids thrive.”
That’s what’s on display at American Falls, Idaho’s early learning company favorite.
It all started with Randy Jensen, who became superintendent of the American Falls school district in 2017. At the time, he says, kindergarten readiness rates “were like, ugh, rock bottom.” To change things up, he encouraged families to read to their children, talk to their children, and play with their children every day.
Six years later, after a grassroots campaign, the concept is ubiquitous in the city of 4,500, where half of the residents identify as Hispanic. At the bank, in the supermarket, in the mayor’s office, the townspeople proudly wear their “read, talk, play” t-shirts. The message, sometimes translated into Spanish “read, talk, play,” can also be found on stickers in storefronts, pinned to office bulletin boards and on banners hanging from light poles.
“It’s just part of the culture here now,” says Tennille Call, interim education director for United Way of Southeastern Idaho. The nonprofit organization financially supports early learning in American Falls and hosts regular events where parents and children participate in learning activities together.
In 2019, a preschool push began.
A small number of families in the city could afford to pay out of pocket. Others qualified for free Head Start or child care subsidies.
But most fell into an overlooked middle category.
“They don’t have money for preschool,” Jensen says, noting that his rural district has one of the higher poverty rates in the state. “They live paycheck to paycheck.”
United Way stepped forward with scholarships that today support nearly 40 percent of children attending preschool in American Falls, which now has five programs, a mix of private and public.
“But of course, we didn’t want the kids to just be in preschool,” adds Jensen. “We wanted them in a high-quality preschool.”
As the 3-year-olds in Honi Allen’s class take their seats and begin the art activity, she notices that some of them clutch their crayons as if stirring a cauldron, their fists clenched tightly. She reminds them to “pinch, pinch, pinch” the utensil. They adjust their grips.
