24,7

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week -- that's the goal Sutton residents have for parental involvement with their children.

A new Healthy Families 24-7 strategy is being developed by the preschool and kindergarten department at Sutton Elementary School, and being supported with a grant from the Valley Hospital Communities Scholarship program.

"This has been one of the most productive parental involvement strategies that I have seen," said Shirley Durham, a Sutton kindergarten teacher who is the director of the program.

The goal of the program is simple -- to create a network of support with the parents that can help inform the community about the resources available to them, and the steps necessary to take advantage of the resources. By informing the community and giving people a chance to utilize everything available to them, parents can be more informed and better able to give their children a chance to succeed, organizers said.

Durham said that across the nation, similar research-based programs like Healthy Families 24-7 have been very successful. When a community shares the responsibility of "caretaker" for everyone else, it is more successful at providing "protective factors such as playgrounds, after-school programs, neighborhood watch, child care, health fairs, community counselors, clinic, etc. to help ensure and maintain healthy families 24 hours each day, seven days each week."

Recently, committee members attended the Anchorage Association for the Education of Young Children (AAEYC) conference at the Hilton in Anchorage.

The Valley Hospital grant helped pay for the Sutton committee members to register with the AAEYC and attend a week-long conference in which people chose from more than 100 different training sessions. Each evening, the families attending the conference had a chance to network with parents from other areas of the state and share their knowledge, information and ideas.

The grant money from Valley Hospital also paid for parents on the committee to start receiving Young Children, a quarterly publication that helps educate parents how they can better educate their families.

"We were totally involved and we became really good friends," Durham said of the conference.

Durham said parents are the first teacher in a child's life, and that's why the program is so important. It gets parents involved, which in turn gives each child "a smart start, even start, head start or a jump start."