Newview provides childhood development kits for Smart Start Central Oklahoma

Smart Start Central Oklahoma is a family engagement and support organization that works to ensure our community’s youngest children get the smart start they deserve. Smart Start’s focus is on children up to age eight. Smart Start achieves their mission by working with the most essential supporters in a child’s life, parents, caregivers, grandparents, older siblings, teachers, and childcare providers.  

Early Birds parenting support classes are a corner stone of Smart Start’s programming. The classes are free to parents and caregivers and focuses on teaching them to support their child’s emotional and cognitive development from prenatal to age five. Smart Start’s work doesn’t end there. They also dedicate time and talent to connecting families with community resources to help build a stable home where each child can thrive. By removing the pressing barriers to meeting educational goals, Smart Start and the families they serve have a higher success rate. 

Smart Start’s hub of community engagement and support is the Harbison Early Education & Kiwanis Community Center in Oklahoma City, along with the Parent Resource Room next door at Mark Twain Elementary. Smart Start has also adopted Bright by Text, a national texting program for caregivers of children prenatal to eight. “Weekly texts are tailored to your child’s stage of development and include tips and activities to build school readiness skills along with information about local resources.” 

NewView Oklahoma builds 38 different kits for Smart Start. The kits range across 6 different age groups and 3 seasons. For each age group, there are English and Spanish bags with age-appropriate toys, learning sheets, playdough, coloring items, and sidewalk chalk. NewView and Smart Start are also working to implement bilingual kits for all age groups to encourage and enforce language diversity. Each kit has between 4 and 15 items in it. The Smart Start kitting operation maintains about four full-time employees who work on a production kitting line to assemble the bags. NewView’s shipping department then ships completed kits to customers.  

”One of the ways Smart Start Central Oklahoma builds school-readiness skills in children is by distributing kits filled with developmentally appropriate learning materials for families to enjoy together. Smart Start utilizes NewView Oklahoma’s efficient manufacturing process to build our kits so that we can get more learning materials into more homes. This partnership allows Smart Start to impact more children than ever before helping them enter kindergarten prepared to learn and ready to succeed. We are grateful to NewView Oklahoma for supporting our mission to build a community that equips parents and caregivers to serve as their child’s first and most influential teacher.”  

– Sandi Cotton, Smart Start

NewView is proud to partner with Smart Start and help make a difference in the lives and education of children around Oklahoma, as well as provide stable employment opportunities to Oklahoma adults who are blind or have low vision. In winter and fall of 2021, we produced 2365 kits containing developmentally appropriate learning materials for families to enjoy together.  

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