Investment focuses on preschool
By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Columnist
Al Castle and the Castle Colleagues Program have the right idea. To get the best college students, you invest in preschoolers. And to do that, you train and support their directors and principals.
To that end, the foundation has put $80,000 a year for the past six years into providing management training for preschool directors statewide. It's a crucial piece of the puzzle of how to create a better whole-cloth education system.
"By investing in the kindergarten directors and principals, we believe we can reach the kids and give them a more equitable start for being ready for school, which means being ready for life," said Al Castle, executive director of Castle Colleagues, which is financially supported by the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation.
The training program is housed at Chaminade University and pulls its teachers from a wide range of disciplines, including accountants, communicators, computer technology experts and fund-raisers.
"The directors come to us and say, 'What we really need is everything,' " said Castle. "Most of them have been preschool teachers and have risen to take over the institution, although they're not necessarily trained to be school administrators.
"So we've worked with them to identify what they need. Essentially it's the total scope of training for managing an institution.
"For instance, they might have a half-day of accounting, a working lunch with a guest speaker, then intensive sessions in things like risk management and outcomes assessment."
The training program picks up all the costs, flies Neighbor Island directors to O'ahu for three intensive sessions of three to four days apiece once a month for three months, puts everyone up in a hotel and gives each a $500 library of books that support the training curriculum.
Each year there's enough money to train 16 directors, said Castle. Chaminade puts out a call to preschools in early fall seeking applications, and then an admissions committee selects the attendees.
To date approximately 100 have received the training.
This year, special emphasis is placed on training the directors of the Hawaiian Immersion preschools, which have 11 sites statewide, Castle said.
"It's important because it networks them with their peers," he said. "We really want to create a network of professionals who support each other."
To that end there is a new Hawai'i preschool directors' association called the Good Beginnings Alliance. (The phone number is 531-5502.)
Formed in 1894, the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation is the nation's oldest family foundation, rivaling the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. It operates on principles established by Mary Castle more than a century ago when Hawai'i was the most racially, culturally and linguistically diverse nation in the world.
Mary Castle "believed the best chance for social equity would come from equality of educational opportunities," said the younger Castle.
"She hired John Dewey — he was a family friend — to help create the kindergarten system in Hawai'i and she insisted on a multiracial agenda for these kindergartens," Al Castle said. "That thrust — putting money into small children so that social outcomes will be better — is still a fundamental tenet of the foundation."
Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8013.
