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The latest on the Key Bridge collapse, New York puts forth legislation to get clean energy projects on the grid and Wisconsin and other states join a federal summer food program to help feed kids across the country.

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Republicans float conspiracy theories on the collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, South Carolina's congressional elections will use a map ruled unconstitutional, and the Senate schedules an impeachment trial for Homeland Secretary Mayorkas.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Advocates of Pre-K Pushing Obama: “Go To The Library”

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Monday, March 11, 2013   

PORTLAND, Maine - President Obama highlighted support for early learning in his State of the Union address. He should go to the library, according to advocates for using public libraries as key parts of the learning process for toddlers to four-year-olds. Many libraries these days are more than musty book stacks and card catalogs and maybe an occasional story-time session. They're becoming fun and inexpensive places for children and parents to write the opening chapters in a lifetime of learning.

Sandy Feinberg runs a national program called Family Place Libraries that teaches librarians how to adapt to the needs of pre-kindergarten kids.

"A public space, well stocked with materials, from nine to nine every day, and the weekends, where parents can go - or caregivers - with their young kids," Feinberg called the local library. "It's a wonderful idea waiting to happen, isn't it?"

A recent nationwide survey by the Pew Research Center found that 82 percent of those polled "strongly support libraries offering free early literacy programs to help young children prepare for school."

Sandy Feinberg's group has overseen the creation of Family Place Libraries at 400 sites in 24 states. She's pleased at the attention paid to pre-K issues by President Obama, but wouldn't mind some public support - and funding - for libraries.

"The government can only think, 'Well, we'll put money into schools, therefore we can do universal pre-K.' But it's really at the young level that the parent can be so much more empowered," she declared. "So, libraries, I think, we're just a silent kind of institution so many times."

Not THAT silent, she says. It would be a lost cause for toddlers using library learning areas to be "shushed" by librarians.



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