Thirty Million Words Newborn Initiative coming to Pensacola

Dr. Dana Suskind announced Tuesday that the University of Chicago is partnering with the Studer Community Institute to pilot its Thirty Million Words® Newborn Initiative in Pensacola.

Suskind is a surgeon and founder of TMW, a research program at the University of Chicago. Suskind and her staff develop and implement scientifically tested programs to help parents maximize language development from birth through three years of age. The goal is to use language to build children’s brains in an effort to ensure they show up for school ready to learn.

A third of our children in Escambia County aren’t kindergarten ready when they start school, according to Randy Hammer, president and CEO of the Studer Community Institute.

“It is perhaps the most significant problem we face that holds back our community,” said Hammer. “TMW addresses that and has the potential to improve the lives of thousands of children in our community. None of this would be happening if it weren’t for a $108,000 grant from the women of IMPACT100 and a $50,000 gift from Quint and Rishy Studer.”

TMW is based on a 1995 study by two Kansas researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley, who found some children hear 30 million more words by their fourth birthday than others. The children who heard 30 million more words were more likely to be ready to learn at the start of preschool, and by the third grade, they had bigger vocabularies, were stronger readers and scored higher on cognitive tests.

A key takeaway of the study, said Suskind, is that children who started school ahead tended to stay ahead, and children who started school behind tended to stay behind.

“That’s why early learning is so important,” she said. “TMW is designed to confront not only the language gap, but also the achievement gap. We’re so excited to have Pensacola as our first community outside of Chicago to pilot our program.”

“Pensacola will be our first test case,” said John List, who has been working with Suskind and TMW and is chairman of the University of Chicago’s economics department. “Once we learn what works in Pensacola, we will then take that to a nationwide experiment. We will choose communities in an experimental way and roll out in these communities what we did in Pensacola that worked and see if it can work nationwide. And I believe it will.”

Sacred Heart Hospital, Baptist Health Care and West Florida Hospital have all agreed to participate in the TMW-Newborn Initiative pilot program. TMW-Newborn delivers TMW’s core message in a short video shown to new parents in hospitals as part of routine postpartum care.

TMW-Newborn was developed through rigorous testing and interviews with health care providers, hospital staffs and parents, especially those from underserved, low-income communities. It’s the first piece in rolling out a broader community-wide outreach to establish Pensacola as America’s first early learning city.

“This is a good first step in an early learning initiative,” said Suskind. “Pensacola will become a model so other people and communities can learn from us.”