GradNation is goal of United Way collaborative

Adrian Hill, foreground, looks at a book donated by the United Way of Greater Chattanooga's Project Ready for School while his sister, Alexandra, and brother Anthony look on.
Adrian Hill, foreground, looks at a book donated by the United Way of Greater Chattanooga's Project Ready for School while his sister, Alexandra, and brother Anthony look on.

The United Way of Greater Chattanooga has been focused on school readiness and success in school for years. It's not abandoning those goals, but the organization also wants to see what can be done to help at the other end of a kindergarten through 12th-grade education.

Thus, the focus of its new partnership with the Hamilton County Department of Education is to increase the graduation rate in local schools.

By now, everyone should know that high school graduation is the minimum ticket to a maximum future. Of course, high schools dropouts here and there go on to successful careers, but it's not the norm.

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* GradNation Summit to be held to increase high-school graduation rate

High school dropouts, after all, are not eligible for 90 percent of jobs in America, will earn $200,000 less than a high school graduate over a lifetime and almost $1 million less than a college graduate, and will commit about 75 percent of crimes in the country, according to DoSomething.org.

Further, dropouts don't qualify for military service, and they don't live as long, according to America's Promise Alliance.

To combat that, the local United Way and the school system's new partnership will host a GradNation Summit next Monday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 554 McCallie Ave. Although attendees will hear about best practices from experts, what organizers sincerely want is input from the community on education issues from birth to college and beyond.

The long-range goal of the community summits - Chattanooga's is one of 100 organized by America's Promise Alliance - is to raise the national graduation rate to 90 percent by 2020, and that organization says it is on pace to achieve such a goal.

Locally, the rate is 82.6 percent, which has risen nearly 12 percent since 2009.

Nationally, the greatest strides since 2011 have been made by Hispanic/Latino students (4.2 percent increase) and black students (3.7 percent). Still, graduation for those groups, along with English language learners, low-income students and students with disabilities, lag behind the national average.

The GradNation Summit will examine those achievement gaps through workshops involving early childhood readiness, foundational literacy, middle school transition and high school graduation strategies.

Childhood readiness and foundational literacy have been United Way of Greater Chattanooga thrusts for more than a decade.

In 2004, the local organization ramped up what had been a limited program called Project Ready for School. The idea of the program was to give all area children the tools they needed to develop language and reading skills before entering school. As part of the initiative, children received a book a month, and parents were given developmental kits to share with their children. Parenting classes, health screenings and neighborhood reading centers also were part of the initiative.

"If a child gets to school without these [learning] skills," said then-United Way board President Mai Bell Hurley, "we know they'll have difficulty."

By 2009, two-thirds of children under age 5 in Hamilton County were receiving a free book monthly through a partnership with Dolly Parton's Imagination Library. By 2010, 24 neighborhood reading centers had opened, which were a collaboration among Project Ready for School, the Chattanooga Public Library and communities.

Today, the local United Way's website reports that 5,379 parents are using the organization's learning checkups to monitor their child's development skills, and 86.6 percent of children screened with learning checkups are maintaining age-appropriate development skills.

The organization also is working with local child care centers to help achieve school readiness. In doing so, it found 78 percent of classrooms demonstrate strong or exemplary language and literacy environments, 81 percent of children entering kindergarten have age-appropriate literacy skills and 94 percent of programs demonstrate strong or exemplary classroom environments.

Statistics across the country are clear that children without a strong preschool foundation will have a more difficult time in school and that students who have a hard time in school are less likely to graduate. If "a" equals "b" and "b" equals "c," then children without a strong preschool foundation are less likely to graduate.

It's not possible to measure whether the United Way of Greater Chattanooga and its partners with Project Ready for School are responsible for the local uptick in graduation rates, but it's a sure thing the organization was on to something more than a decade ago.

Next week's free GradNation Summit can help participants focus on local needs and see how some of those blocks stack on each other to build to graduation. Indeed, parents, teachers, business leaders, government officials, mentors, volunteers and students themselves, along with nonprofits, must be part of the equation in helping the country reclaim its status of turning out the best and the brightest.

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