“Dad, you have a cool job,” my daughter told me one morning this week. “You make sure more kids go to preschool.”
Ellery is four. We were in the middle of the morning rush to get her and her younger brother off to preschool. I smiled as I bent over to pour dog food into a bowl.
“It is a cool job,” I answered.
Welcome to my new blog. Here, and in the posts to follow, I’ll keep you updated on my “cool job” as Director of The Community Foundation’s School Readiness Initiative. Thanks for reading.
I should start by describing my assignment, which began officially on July 1. Ellery summed it up pretty well. My job basically boils down to getting more kids into preschool. The more grown-up way of putting it would be to tell you our vision statement:
“The whole community will own the goal of closing the achievement gap through early learning, and the gap will close significantly by 2017.”
Few people know it — and many are shocked to discover — that the academic achievement gap between kids in poverty and their peers is wider in Boulder County than just about anywhere in Colorado.
The gap starts in the early years and only widens from there. By third grade, more than one in three kids in poverty in Boulder County can’t read at grade level. That was 466 third graders last spring, according to the 2012 TCAP results published yesterday by the Colorado Department of Education.
If you took those 466 third-graders out of the picture, we’d have 90% of our kids at grade-level by that crucial year, when they switch from “learning to read,” to “reading to learn.”
But we can’t take them out of the picture, and obviously we shouldn’t. The Community Foundation cares so much about this most vulnerable local population, that they’ve launched a School Readiness Initiative and charged me with helping the whole community help make sure that far fewer students in poverty are behind five years from now.
So how do you do that? I’m getting that question a lot. It’s a tough one. It’s one we’re exploring now more actively than ever. The good news is we’ve been taking some stabs at various answers, and giving them a shot, for the past four years.
Our experiments so far have revolved around building the capacity of the local institutions best focused on improving educational outcomes during the early years for kids in poverty. Here’s a sampling:
· We’ve helped a grassroots nonprofit program called Providers Advancing School Outcomes become more sustainable. This program trains mostly Latina mothers who provide in-home daycare to their own children and their neighbors’ kids.
· We launched a public awareness campaign called Ready.Set.Learn, which made the case for public investment in early learning as a matter of personal, economic and national security. Here’s our slick Web site that sums up those compelling arguments: www.readysetlearn-early.org. And here’s a Ted-style talk I gave at a recent Knight Foundation conference on this effort: http://vimeo.com/37279631
· We supported the successful ballot campaign in 2010 to increase early learning, reduce class sizes, and retain quality teachers in the Boulder Valley Schools. The measure won in a landslide and brought an extra $22 million into the district, with $5 million of that earmarked to expanding preschool and full-day Kindergarten spots in the lowest-income elementary schools.
· We’re supporting a similar ballot campaign right now in the St. Vrain Valley School District. This school district covering Longmont and northern Boulder County has made impressive progress increasing its preschool and full-day Kindergarten offerings over the past five years, and this ballot issue’s success will help keep the district focused on closing the achievement gap. You can click here if you’d like to get involved with the campaign: http://grassrootsstvrain.org/
· We’re supporting the capital campaign of Wilderness Early Learning Center, a new nonprofit early childhood center by the founders of Boulder’s Acorn School focused on serving families with children ages 0 – 6. This center represents a unique model in childhood services that brings together high quality education, medical, social-emotional, language and other community support all in one facility.
Building capacity is important. And we’ll keep working with various partners on that. But so is community organizing on a grass-roots level.
We estimate that in Boulder County, there are 2,000 kids in poverty, ages 0-5, who are off the educational road map, and won’t get their first early learning experience until Kindergarten or, more likely, 1st grade. First grade is more like it, because Kindergarten is not compulsory in Colorado, nor is it fully funded.
Statistically speaking, these 2,000 kids are going to drop out, unless we catch them earlier.
My job – our job – is to make sure more of them go to preschool. Or at least get the sorts of educational experiences kids in preschools get. Like being read to. Learning to play nicely with others. Learning about counting and colors. Being fed well, cared for, and loved.
It’s a tall order, to see this achievement gap close significantly in the next five years. But it’s also totally achievable, if we focus our collective impact on the kids and parents who need the most help.
I’m starting this blog because I’ve been given a window into what our research proves is one of Boulder County’s most critical social issues. In the past five weeks, I’ve had the privilege of working with both school district superintendents, our congressman, faith leaders, business leaders, neighborhood activists, nonprofit leaders, inspired educators, reporters and state legislators. Everyone’s inspired that these conversations might lead somewhere productive. So for starters, I’m going to jot notes and thoughts right here.
Thanks for joining me on this adventure. I can be reached at chris@commfound.org.
