$2.5 Million Grant Awarded To Tulsa Educare To Help Early Childhood Education

A $2.5 million federal grant has been given to Tulsa Educare and will go straight to helping early childhood education.

The organization says this will help child care centers hire more people and give kids more access to quality education.

It will also help them take their child care partners from 13 to 21.

“You see the smiles, all the little loves, and all the little hugs, and just watching them grow,” said Lamara Craven. 

For more than 20 years, Craven's passion has been taking care of children.

“We incorporate social and emotional skills, fine motor skills, we also do cognitive skills, and we actually meet the children where they are,” she said.

She owns Mara's Loving Angels and has been running it out of her house for almost a year and a half.

Lamara has 12 kids enrolled and her son, daughter and sister help her teach.

Thanks to a federal grant from the Office of Head Start, Mara's Loving Angels is now a partner of Tulsa Educare.

“It professionalizes their field, they then are just striving to learn more and be better and make more differences for kids,” said executive director Cindy Decker. 

Decker says this grant will completely change lives.

The new partners have access to a new early childhood curriculum, will be able to pay staff more, and improve the learning environment.

Cindy says it will not only help the students but encourage staff to stay in the field.

“As we know child care has a lot of turnover and it's really important so that people can go to work and children can learn,” she said.

Cindy and Lamara both agree because of this partnership, kids are getting the knowledge they need to be successful in kindergarten and later in life.

“They know everything, they pretty much are ready to go and it gives them kind of an advantage, so they are either able to be a grade up or either top of their class,” she said.