by Linda Lanier, Published in The Florida Times Union February 3, 2012
Lately, we are seeing some positive signs that our economy is starting to rebound, and we believe that Florida¹s state policies are moving in the right direction to support working families, the key to a strengthening economy.
However, there are several bills currently moving through the Florida Legislature that threaten low-income working families by denying access to quality early learning programs for their children.
Working Florida families depend on programs that help them achieve self-sufficiency and arm their children with high quality, early learning education to succeed in life.
While developing policies that create jobs and strengthen the economy, state leaders must also make Florida¹s children a part of the equation in the race toward prosperity.
The Florida Children¹s Council promotes policies that build effective primary prevention and early intervention systems of support for Florida¹s children and families by engaging and enhancing the collective strengths of the individual children¹s services councils of Florida and their communities.
Representing eight counties in Florida ‹ Duval, Martin, St. Lucie, Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, Hillsborough and Pinellas ‹ we serve more than 50 percent of our state¹s low-income children and families.
To do so effectively, we partner with the state¹s early learning leaders and stakeholders. By prioritizing the education of young children and supporting low-income working families, legislators can make strategic investments that pay dividends in the form of children who are healthy, ready to learn and prepared to succeed.
These investments also minimize the downstream costs of health care, juvenile detention and remedial education.
The proposed early learning bills would alter the very nature of our early learning system by eliminating the foundational, early learning education criteria that are essential to ensuring program accountability and meeting federal intent.
Lawmakers fund critical screenings for children that identify red flags such as vision or hearing deficiencies and developmental delays that may compromise a child¹s ability to learn.
Catching these problems will avoid the cost of intervention services, school failure and even human suffering later.
Policies must include measures to protect research-driven child assessment tools that measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning. Child assessment scores are a means by which we know where a child enters a program and where they exit ‹ a pre/post-test model.
State policies should ensure that educators utilize research-based curricula that have been proven to produce learning outcomes in young children. These curricula are powerful tools that teachers can use to ensure all children learn, grow and prepare to enter kindergarten ready to learn.
These basic educational requirements must be outlined as foundational requirements for child care centers and family care homes that participate and accept early learning funds, commonly known as child care vouchers.
Additionally, we must have an accountability system that prioritizes health, safety and education for children and ensures appropriate use of these federal and state tax dollars.
Developing a well-prepared workforce for tomorrow requires a good education today. Quality early learning experiences are seeds sown for the promise of a strong, academic future. Don¹t count working families or their children out of that future.
Linda M. Lanier is the CEO/executive director of the Jacksonville Children¹s Commission and is currently serving as the chair of the Florida Children¹s Council.
Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
By Dan Scanlan
Jacksonville’s citizen think tank has a new leader, and he didn’t have to go far to accept the job.
Ben Warner is the new president and chief executive officer at the Jacksonville Community Council Inc., at 2434 Atlantic Blvd., replacing Skip Cramer.
Warner was deputy and vice president after joining JCCI in 1998 as a senior community planner. When Cramer decided to retire after holding the post for seven years and previous careers with the Navy and the American Red Cross, Warner became one of 70 candidates. Now, he’ll officially take over Sept. 1.
“This is a tremendous place to work and to make a difference here in Jacksonville and making a difference in communities around the world with the conversations and consulting we do,” Warner said.
“... JCCI has been a strong organization serving this community for nearly four decades, and I am honored to be able to carry that mantle forward.”
JCCI was created in 1975 to examine community issues by working with a broad cross section of the area’s population. Since its formation, the nonpartisan civic organization has handled community research, consensus building, advocacy and leadership development in Northeast Florida. It has also consulted on similar studies for other communities across the world.
Warner will be officially introduced at the organization’s 36th annual meeting at noon Friday, Sept. 9, at the Schultz Center for Teaching and Leadership at 4019 Boulevard Center Drive. The guest speaker is San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro.
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), (904) 359-4549
Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2011-08-22/story/ben-warner-named-jccis-new-president-and-ceo#ixzz1VxlR2v2j
Aurora Foster struggled when she first got to high school - skipping classes, getting into trouble - and she watched her share of friends drop out. Now the 18-year-old is taking part in a program that she hopes will galvanize the community to help teens stay in school.
Foster, a senior at Robert E. Lee High School, will be one of about 20 students in Duval County featured in Jacksonville Public Education Fund’s One in Three campaign.
The campaign, which will kick off this fall, will be a yearlong effort to bring together the community around the issue of improving public education and lowering the dropout rate. The name, One in Three, refers to the school system’s 67 percent graduation rate.
The initiative will use the stories of students like Foster to grab the community’s attention and mobilize it to develop a citywide agenda for education.
Foster, whose parents were largely absent from her childhood, was raised by her grandmother and watched two older brothers spend the better part of her life in prison.
Despite her initial struggles in high school, today Foster is a member of the National Honor Society and president of her graduating class.
“I hope that my story will inspire the people around me and the people after me and kids in elementary school to graduate, to go to college and graduate from college,” she said. “To me it just gets the community involved, just like it got me involved.”
One in Three’s organizers want everyday people to host small conversations about education in their homes, businesses and community centers. The organization hopes those conversations and the ideas that flow from them will motivate the community to take responsibility for improving public schools.
“Our goal is to develop a collective action plan that is created by the community,” said Rachael Tutwiler, the fund’s manager of community engagement.
Organizers anticipate having an action plan by summer 2012.
The first step will be a public relations blitz that will include the use of social media, text messaging and yard signs similar to those used in political campaigns. The effort will cost the nonprofit $200,000 to $250,000.
The students profiled for the campaign represent different ethnicities and ages and come from all over the city, she said.
The exhibits will feature large 5-by-4-foot portraits of the students along with video segments, literature and invitations to get involved.
The campaign will start at The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in September and run until about December.
“We felt that art could be a really important vehicle to taking this conversation and this message to another level,” said Hope McMath, director of the Cummer.
The education fund will bus about 10,000 students to the Cummer to see the exhibit.
It will also travel to other locations in Jacksonville, spending about a month in each area of town. There will be an anchor location in each area and pop-up locations, such as grocery stores or movie theaters, that will feature exhibits for a day or two.
“The goal is that if we’re at the Beaches, you can’t go the month that the exhibit is there without tripping over it,” said Trey Csar, the fund’s president.
WJCT will produce a documentary focused on the campaign and audio segments on the students. Organizers hope to gather 35,000 email addresses from adults and 10,000 email addresses from students to keep them informed and engaged.
Csar said the reason One in Three’s action plan will succeed is the emphasis on getting community buy-in and the education fund’s willingness to push the agenda.
“Very rarely is there an organization who is ready to put its strength and resources behind what the community says,” Csar said. The Jacksonville Public Education Fund “is ready to listen to the community, compile what those views are and work with the community to make those things happen.”
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), (904) 359-4169
Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2011-04-15/story/one-three-program-address-duvals-dropout-rate#ixzz1Vxkj6NVT
By Jeff Brumley, Topher Sanders
More Duval County residents today feel education is the most important factor to Jacksonville’s future than five years ago, but more of them have lost confidence in public schools, according to a new education poll.
The poll was commissioned by The Community Foundation as part of its 10-year Quality Education for All initiative. It compares responses with a similar poll conducted in 2006. Of the 1,100 respondents, only 34 percent had a child in their home under age 18.
Nina Waters, president of The Community Foundation, said the data would help her organization set priorities at the midway point of its initiative.
Waters said the foundation was still analyzing the poll but there were some surprises. One of them was that education continues to be the top local issue - trumping jobs, crime, roads and growth.
Some of the poll’s key results:
- While 37 percent of parents said parental involvement was the most important factor to a quality education, 40 percent said teachers were the most important factor.
- The percentage of parents rating the school system as good or excellent dropped from 41 percent to 29 percent in five years, while the percentage rating it poor more than doubled from 12 percent to 25 percent. Overall, 22 percent of the respondents rated the local schools as poor.
- There was a wide gap between blacks and whites in judging the quality of education in majority black schools, with more blacks saying those schools were not as good as predominantly white schools.
- 50 percent of respondents feel their taxes are too high given the quality of the schools; only 31 percent would support a tax hike to address shortfalls.
- White parents expected their children to complete higher levels of education than black parents.
Addressing the issues raised by the poll is not something the Duval County Public Schools district can do alone, Waters said.
“The problem isn’t a district problem, it’s a community problem and it’s going to take a lot of community organizations to address it,” she said.
Waters said the foundation will be scheduling face-to-face meetings with civic, business and elected officials to discuss the poll findings, with an eye to determining if briefing papers need to be written to respond to the community’s attitudes about its schools.
Superintendent Ed Pratt-Dannals said one of his problems with polls is that parents often have favorable opinions of their children’s schools but less so of the district.
“It’s still very important that we look at this and we pay attention to it and we address it, because that perception is critical for us moving forward,” Pratt-Dannals said.
The poll was conducted the same week that the school district dominated the headlines with the School Board deciding not to identify a legally required choice for its most struggling schools and its chairman, W.C. Gentry, criticizing state Education Commissioner Eric Smith.
On Tuesday, Gentry told his fellow board members that they shouldn’t be defensive about or dismissive of the poll.
“Obviously the perceptions of the schools are not positive,” he said during a break in Tuesday’s meeting. “It’s been that way for a long time, and we have to not only make the schools better but convince folks and start making them believe they are better.”
But Gentry did point to one of the poll’s findings that may show some flaws: 96 percent of white parents and 100 percent of black parents said they had met with a teacher in the past six months, while 62 percent of parents said they had volunteered at their child’s school and 56 percent said they had attended a PTA meeting in the past six months.
Despite the district touting gargantuan drops in discipline referrals last year, the poll showed the public still views classroom discipline as a problem.
Waters noted that disconnect between the public’s views and the district’s data raises questions about how well the district is communicating its progress.
The poll also revealed staggering differences between white and black parents’ expectations for their children’s education. About 46 percent of black parents expected their children to complete a four-year college or graduate school degree compared with 80 percent of white parents. Nearly 40 percent of black parents expected their children either wouldn’t graduate from high school or would just earn a high school diploma, compared with only 6 percent of whites.
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), (904) 359-4169
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), (904) 359-4310
Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2011-03-10/story/education-no-1-issue-jacksonville-residents-will-not-be-taxed-improve-it#ixzz1GhGcIbhW
Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2011-03-10/story/education-no-1-issue-jacksonville-residents-will-not-be-taxed-improve-it#ixzz1GhGXLf92
District Partner 2010-present
In July 2010 ERS launched a partnership with Duval County Public Schools to complete a resource map of the district, examining how they currently use their resources to support their student learning goals. Located in the Jacksonville, Florida area, Duval County serves 123,000 students in over 160 schools. This engagement will run into September 2011.
Work Focus
* To assess current resource strategies and consider how to reallocate to maximize impact on student learning.
* To dive deeper into the district’s school turnaround strategy.
* To investigate how to incorporate Duvall County Public Schools’ teacher value-add scores into the ERS resource analysis.
http://erstrategies.org/partners/district-partner/duval_county_public_schools/
Quality early learning experiences are seeds sown for the promise of a strong, academic future.
Read more...Warner chosen from 70 candidates to replace retiring leader Cramer.
Read more...
The Chartrand Foundation has been a champion and key partner for Teach For America in Jacksonville since we opened our region in 2008. Their support of our work goes beyond the financial investment in our program. The Chartrand family and Foundation staff have each been personally involved in helping us realize our mission for educational equality - from making our teachers feel welcomed during our summer induction to visiting classrooms and participating in local events to sitting on our regional advisory board. This community is lucky to have the Chartrand Foundation - their passion and investment in making Jacksonville a better place for all local citizens is truly remarkable. We are grateful for their support and look forward to continuing to partner with them in the future.
- Crystal Jones, Executive Director
The Chartrand Foundation has played a central role in making The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens accessible to thousands of students, teachers and families throughout our community. They have become one of our most important partners in making our mission of engaging and inspiring through the arts, gardens and education a reality.
- Hope McMath, Director, The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens
