There is no doubt that in the past decade, Durham has made substantial progress in helping ready children for school and in helping ensure mental development at key times in early childhood.

Durham's Partnership for Children, the local agency to administer the Jim Hunt-legacy Smart Start program as well as Mike Easley's More at Four initiative, has labored tirelessly to raise standards for early-childhood centers, provide training for their staff and enlist business leadership in what is, many have come to realize, a crusade that can only benefit them in the long run.

Now, the partnership and its allies have landed a major coup. On Tuesday, the partnership unveiled a $3.3 million federal grant to establish an Early Head Start program. It will target 120 of the more than 3,500 children in our county who live with so little income that federal government acknowledges they are in poverty.

The Early Head Start program has been around nationally since the mid-1990s. But only with this grant will Durham families be able to take advantage of a targeted program to provide child and family development services for low-income pregnant women and families with toddlers under 3.

"All the services we and our partners provide really make a difference and there's a definite need in Durham for this kind of high-quality care," Angie Walsh, president of the partnership's board of directors, told a news conference announcing the grant on Tuesday.

That difference can be profound. An enormous amount of brain development occurs in the first three years of life, a development that has become increasingly well understood in the past two decades.

Youngsters who don't get exposure to brain-stimulating encouragement, coaching and activities from adults in those early years almost certainly will fall behind once they start school. And the pressure of poverty is more likely to deprive low-income kids of those sorts of stimulations, helping to ensure a cycle of poverty. And that, in turn, helps perpetuate a long-term threat to our regional prosperity.

So the early-childhood grant is a welcome shot in the arm. Admittedly, it will provide the opportunity to meet only a percentage of the need. But that's the sort of start that can be vitally important. If the grant truly does its job, the community will, we hope, be convinced to continue it with local money once the federal stimulus funds run out.

The partnership's Welsh, in announcing the grant, said it was a remarkable achievement for Durham ... exciting and remarkable."

We concur.