Over the past five years the Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI) has seen an increase in enrollment in the Early Childhood Education associate program, which was recently accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).

NAEYC is an organization with more than 70,000 individual members that promotes early childhood education through research and policy reform.

The goal of the Commission on Early Childhood Associate Degree Accreditation is to improve those programs servicing young children, by improving the education of their current and future educators.

Only 180 institutions throughout the country have received national accreditation for their Early Childhood Associate degrees, and as of July CCRI is one of them and the first in the state to do so.

Assistant Professor Courtney Read, who served as the accreditation coordinator, said the process took nearly two years to complete, starting in November 2013 with a self-study of the program itself.

“As we saw enrollment increasing, we felt we owed it to our students to have the best quality higher education,” she said.

Since the fall of 2010, enrollment into the Early Childhood Development degree program has increased 39.4 percent. In 2010, the program had 254 students and as of fall 2014 it had 354. As of last fall it was one of the top five majors with greatest enrollment, along with General Studies, Law Enforcement, General Business and Nursing Level 1.

The study consisted of looking at the experiences of not only the students, but also staff and those stakeholders who benefit from the graduates of the program.

Read said the groups involved in the study were diverse, allowing CCRI to remain “honest and objective” in their assessment, which took a year.

The study was submitted to the Commission in October 2014, with peer reviewers, early childhood educators from across the country, coming to the college for four days in March of this year.

“It was really a labor of love,” Read said. “There are so many benefits to the students, our faculty and the community. We were able to make positive and impactful changes to ensure a strong and high quality program.”

“This accreditation will assure that our students who go through this high-quality program will fully benefit from courses that will prepare them for jobs in their fields or to transfer to four-year institutions,” said CCRI President Ray Di Pasquale.

The college received a lot of support stateside as well, for the accreditation was an “integral part to Rhode Island’s plan as outlined” in the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grant award.

Rhode Island was one of nine states awarded $50 million over five years from the Early Learning Challenge fund in December 2011.

There was a point in time where people could work in early childhood education facilities right out of high school, but in part due to the grant, and the realization that teacher education directly correlates to early education success, Rhode Island’s teaching requirements have shifted and educators are expected to have higher and higher levels of education.

“There was a lot of momentum and support from the stateside for this accreditation,” Read said.

CCRI offers a “unique” early childhood education program for students with small class sizes, a successful field placement requirement where students must take the skills they learn in the classroom and apply them in real world situations.

Read, who has been at CCRI for five years, said the courses offered are “meaningful, but challenging.”

Because of the smaller classes, professors and educators are able to create strong and individualized relationships with students.

“Our teachers have a great desire to see student success,” Read said. “We have a more cohesive and collaborative faculty from this process and that makes the experience more rich for the student.”