Saturday, May 4, 2024
A unique preschool
Hall of Fame jockey Jerry Bailey, a two-time winner of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes, and Michael Dubb, the principal owner and founder of the Beechwood Organization, Long Island’s largest real-estate developer, hit upon the idea for a backstretch preschool at Belmont Park during a dinner-party conversation with Bailey’s wife, Suzee, in 1990.
The nonprofit Belmont Childcare Association was founded in 1998 to raise funds for the proposed preschool. Dubb constructed the 10,000-square-foot center on land provided at no cost by the New York Racing Association, which runs Belmont Park. Dubb then donated the school to the Belmont Childcare Association. Eugene Melynyk, a Canadian billionaire and a renowned thoroughbred racehorse owner, and his wife, Laura, pledged $1 million toward the preschool, which was named for their daughter.
Anna House, which is run by Bright Horizons, an international early-childhood education provider, is the only preschool at a U.S. horse track, according to Joanne Adams, the Belmont Childcare Association’s executive director. “There’s nothing like this,” she said. “This is virtually the only one of its kind.”
Dubb is now chairman of the Childcare Association’s Board of Directors.
Part two of an occasional series about the challenges that people face making ends meet in Nassau County.
By 8 a.m. on July 3, many, if not most, of the 3- to 5-year-olds in Jazmin Torres and Tina Weterrauter’s brightly lit classroom at Anna House had already been awake for three and a half hours. You would have thought they would be bleary-eyed. Not these 18 children. They were bursting with kinetic energy during free play.
Two galloped like horses around the classroom, neighing as they went. Three were building towering skyscrapers at the Lego table. A half-dozen had dressed up as princesses and were pretending to snap one another’s photos with make-believe cameras in the drama corner. Others were drawing with an electronic stylus on the Smart Board or with crayons and construction paper at tables spread around the room.
“The kids are just so fun. They’re loving. It’s amazing watching them grow,” Torres, 26, said later that day. Her job, she said, is “to mold them into world citizens so they are never made to feel ashamed because of where they came from.”
Without Anna House, a one-story, yellow-clapboard structure squeezed onto one acre at Belmont Park in Elmont, the 63 children who attend the preschool might otherwise spend their earliest days locked in cars or offices, as many children of backstretch workers once did.
Anna House serves the sons and daughters of Belmont’s grooms, walkers, exercise riders and assistant trainers. They are the lifeblood of the racetrack’s backstretch, the nonpublic section of the 430-acre park where million-dollar racehorses are housed in distinctive, green-and-white stables. Backstretch workers muck out the animals’ stalls, keep them fed and run them through their paces every day –– no exceptions.
Before Anna House opened in 2003, many backstretch employees left their children to their own devices at the track or at home while they worked. Most had no choice. They didn’t have enough money for babysitters or daycare –– and they needed to work to survive.
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