University/Public School Partnership Provides a Jump Start for Three-Year-Olds.

This chapter is part of a book that recounts the year's work at the Early Childhood Development Center (ECDC) at Texas A & M University-Corpus Christi. Rather than an "elitist" laboratory school for the children of university faculty, the ECDC is a collaboration between the Corpus Christi Independent School District and the university, with an enrollment representative of Corpus Christi's population. This chapter focuses on the process of collaboration between faculty at the ECDC and the Zavala Special Emphasis School (SES). The collaboration was an effort to replicate the regular education 3-year-old program at the ECDC and expand early start opportunities to an additional 44 low-income children in the school district. More specifically, the chapter addresses how collaboration served to develop and implement an early childhood program, the Zavala Early Childhood Development Center, to: (1) advance early childhood education through comprehensive high-quality teaching and research efforts specifically designed to meet the needs of 3-year-old children in the Zavala SES attendance zone; (2) provide professional development opportunities for inservice and preservice teachers; (3) promote literacy and community health initiatives; and (4) promote dual-language literacy development. (Contains 26 references.) (EV)