Monday, January 20, 2025
For students eager to explore child development, Wantagh High School offers a hands-on program teaching them how to work directly with kids.
The school’s nursery program provides students with a course that allows them to care for around 40 kids ranging in age from 4 months to 5 years old. While caring for these children, the high school students learn how to teach young kids skills that will prepare them for elementary school.
Students in the class meet with the kids in playgroups on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while the remaining school days are reserved for lectures, where they learn about child development and review their experiences working with the children. They then discuss areas in which they struggle and come up with ideas about how to better engage with them, according to Valerie Gompers, the high school’s family and consumer sciences teacher who runs the program.
“It’s a whole class discussion where everyone’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve tried this,’ or ‘I’ve done this,’ and we kind of all talk about it together, and they all help each other out with that,” Gompers said.
Classes also function as a free nursery, where parents throughout the Wantagh and Seaford communities can enroll their preschoolers in the playgroups. The program has been around “for years,” according to Gompers, who added that some students who sign up for the class once attended preschool in the program.
The nursery program is made up of three courses: child development, adolescent development and college child development. In child development, students learn about conception to birth, while adolescent development focuses on fifth grade to high school and into early adulthood. The college development course, available to seniors, encompasses all of the material, with a focus on the psychological aspect of growing up. According to Gompers, there are around 60 students participating in the nursery program.
During playgroups, students deal one-to-one with preschoolers, tailoring the curriculum based on the abilities of the child they’re assigned.
“[Children are] going over letters of the alphabet, or they're going over numbers and counting things,” Gompers said. “We sing and celebrate birthdays with them. We'll go over colors, and they learn how to play with others.”
Students enrolled in the college development course, who’ve already taken adolescent and child development, are able to see kids grow from when they were babies, according to Gompers, and help develop their speech and learning as they mature. Being part of that development, she said, is a proud moment for the students.
“They see the progression of what some kids are able to do compared to others and how they grow throughout those years,” Gompers said.
Parizoba Kobiroba, a senior at the high school, said she loves to teach kids in the playgroup about colors, shapes, speaking, and the sounds certain animals make. High school students, she said, also teach kids important socialization skills, such as making friends and sharing.
“Some kids here are very shy and feel like they don’t want to talk,” Kobiroba said, “but if they’re paired with someone that talks a lot and brings them out, then it’s going to prepare them for elementary school.”
Separation anxiety, Gompers said, is one of the phases that the high school students help preschoolers overcome when they first arrive at the nursery. The first weeks are tough for the younger kids, she said, because most of them are leaving their parents for the first time. To help the kids feel comfortable, students write letters to the parents, introducing themselves while sharing their likes and dislikes. Gompers said the letters help the kids become familiar with who is caring for them, while students learn interpersonal and communication skills.
According to Gabriella Benisvy, a senior, kids sometimes scream for their mom when they first arrive. She said she would try to engage the kids by talking to them about their favorite color, adding that she’s patient and gentle with kids, allowing them to open up. Being able to see the kids smile, she said, is a wonderful experience.
“For me, I know the kids can trust me, and they know how gentle I can be,” Benisvy said. “I don’t rush into anything. It’s how they get comfortable.”
For Gompers, the class teaches students that it’s not as easy as they think it is to care for a child. There’s a responsibility that comes with it, she noted, which includes identifying safety concerns and knowing how to calm a child when they are crying.
“I want them to really see what it's like to be responsible for another person,” Gompers said. “It kind of has them turn around and be less selfish about things, and they understand that they're solely responsible for another human being and how much work that is and how hard it is.”
