Shannon NickinsonThere were lots of great questions at the Studer Community Institute’s education town hall on May 5 in Pensacola.
Questions about what skills our students lack when they go to Pensacola State College and the University of West Florida to further their education.
Questions about how we can address the educational, emotional and physiological impacts of the stressors that our inner-city children live with every day.
Questions about how to match the needs of our employers with the skills we impart to our students in the classroom.
But all of those questions ultimately lead to just one.
What is the future of this community worth to you?
You, our business leaders. You, our educators. You, our parents. You, the citizen.
Is it worth $8,400?
That’s the value of the college scholarship the Take Stock in Children program offers students from poor families who show promise — and agree to keep at least a 2.5 GPA, meet citizenship and attendance requirements, and stay away from crime and drugs.
The Florida Prepaid Foundation matches the donations dollar for dollar.
That’s at least what was spent on Joe Sims, a son of Brownsville, who is now a social worker for United Methodist Children’s Home. Every day he helps kids he could have been if we hadn’t spent that $8,400 giving him the chance to be the first person in his immediate family to graduate from college.
Is it worth $2,289?
That’s what the state of Florida spends per child in voluntary prekindergarten to help prepare our 4-year-olds for school.
Data from the Florida Office of Early Learning shows that 80 percent of 4-year-olds in Escambia County who complete a VPK program are “kindergarten ready” based on their state standardized test scores.
Only 50 percent of Escambia children who don’t finish a VPK program are kindergarten ready.
Bruce Watson, executive director of the Early Learning Coalition, which oversees both the VPK and School Readiness programs in our area, says there are 3,000 to 5,000 children in the county who benefit from the services his group provides.
Last year, he was able to reach 2,039 of them. And his waiting list is just under 1,000 names deep.
So how do you want to pay for it?
How do you want to pay for children who grow up unprepared for school, unable to learn as well as their peers, who find their job prospects limited when — or if — they graduate from high school?
Because you will pay. Even if those children aren’t your blood relations.
You can pay for things like subsidizing child care and early education for the children of poor parents or through the time a mentor can give a young man like Joe Sims when he is a middle schooler.
Or you can pay for the absence of those things at the other end of the pipeline.
With about a core part of our community locked in generational poverty. With a core of students who start kindergarten two years behind their peers. With a core of our workforce not ready to fill the jobs that await them.
With the label “one of the worst places to grow up poor” attached to our community, as the work of two Harvard researchers recently found we were.
That’s the choice this community faces. The responsibility we have if we want to walk the talk.
Do or do not. There is no try.
Shannon Nickinson is the editor of PensacolaToday.com, a news and commentary website in Pensacola. Follow her on Twitter @snickinson.com. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
