About RISE
RISE Child Development Center, Inc. was founded in 2018 by Dr. Choquette Hamilton to directly address the trends she observed and experienced personally with early childhood education in Central Texas. Through the process of enrolling her two children in several child care centers across the area, Dr. Hamilton was outraged with several aspects of child care including but not limited to the high cost of tuition, the lack of access to high-quality care options, the dismal pay for teachers, who were predominately teachers of color, and the lack of diversity among the children and families. Most disheartening, she witnessed her two sons experience anti-Blackness, which led to one sharing with her after only two weeks in school that he wished he wasn’t Black.
This led Dr. Hamilton to put together a training program to support early childhood educators with unlearning racialized teaching practices. It has been shown that culturally responsive teaching can have large and lasting effects on all students’ social, emotional, academic, and behavioral outcomes. If children do not have access to high-quality anti-racist early education, they miss out on the most critical period of brain and social-emotional development of their lives, which can have negative life-long impact on life outcomes including being successful in k-12 education and beyond. This is even more critical for children of color because their likelihood of experiencing oppression at such a vulnerable age is significant. Research such as the Yale Study on racial bias among preschool teachers and the National Prevention Science Coalition’s report found that Black children are expelled at twice the rate of their peers. Not only that, research has shown that children of color are less likely to have their needs met by a caregiver and are more likely to be suspected of misbehavior even when the child was not misbehaving. This research illuminates the need for transformative change, which is why RISE exists today.
The lack of affordable and dependable child care disproportionately affects working families, particularly marginalized groups contributing to generational poverty. The lack of affordable and dependable child care can have devastating consequences for the children of working parents and it is one of the reasons in 2019 half of young children in the United States are impacted by poverty. Especially for parents who are marginalized, research has shown they are the most impacted by the child care crisis and that it is one of the main contributors to generational poverty. Lastly, research published in The Hill shows just over half of U.S. residents live in child care deserts, or areas where there are more than three children under the age of 5 for every licensed child care slot. These numbers have only been exacerbated since COVID-19 when 20 percent of childcare centers closed due to no enrollment. Without reliable child care, parents struggle to secure financial stability, perpetuating cycles of powerlessness and poverty for both parents and children.
