In Flint, a future built on schools as well as safe water
When her two-year-old son DeQuincey was diagnosed with elevated lead levels and developmental delays, Crystal Garcia-Pitts worried he might face a lifetime of health and behavioral challenges.
The infamous Flint crisis over lead-tainted water, while not definitively to blame, was a possible cause of her son’s lead exposure, as for many others in this economically depressed Michigan city.
Yet after a year at an innovative school opened in the wake of the water crisis, DeQuincey has caught up so much he’s no longer considered delayed at all.
“He’s talking more, he knows how to count to 10 already,” Ms. Garcia-Pitts said recently after a support group for mothers wrapped up at the school, which serves 220 children from months-old babies to 5-year-olds. “He’s outgrown a lot of the stuff.... If he hadn’t been here, that wouldn’t have been the case.”
Late last year, Garcia-Pitts also enrolled her 4-month-old son Leo at the state-of-the-art school, the first in Michigan to follow an innovative model called Educare, for early childhood education. The former waitress even landed a job at the school as a liaison with
‘All of these pieces came together’‘Full-service’ schoolsMental-health effortsA focus on food