Last Saturday, more than 100 people gathered in a North Spokane parking lot to celebrate the grand opening of the Raze Early Learning and Development Center. Unique for its focus on the Black American experience, Raze offers 170 early education slots and an additional 35 slots for evening child care, in one of the city’s child care deserts.
The building on North Lidgerwood Street, which used to operate as an office for the Department of Licensing, is founder Kerra Bower’s love letter to the youngest members of the community and an act of strong defiance against a system that has historically allowed Black kids to fall behind their peers.
“Raze means to tear down, demolish and destroy. The reason that I chose that name is because my purpose in life is to dismantle and destroy the preschool to prison pipeline,” Bower says. “When we’re looking at prison rates that reflect graduation rates, that reflect third and fourth grade reading rates, that reflect Pre-K kindergarten readiness rates, that reflect the speech and the words known by an 18-month-old — that’s problematic for me.
“And if you really want to get technical about it, it’s what happens to the mother when she’s pregnant,” she continues. “You know, we’re looking at social determinants of health, so for me this is not just a social justice issue. This is a humanity issue of ‘How do we save babies from going to prison?’”…