United Way in the News

Kids aren't born to fail, we fail them from birth

Article published June 3, 2006
By DAN BOYD
The Gainesville Sun - Special to the Sun

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of speaking to hundreds of local citizens about the significance of the United Way's Success by 6 initiative, which is quickly building momentum throughout North Central Florida. Through this initiative, the United Way is working to bring together community resources to ensure that all children are ready to learn when they enter our schools.

As Superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools, I can vouch for the great need for Success by 6. Every year more than 2,000 children enter kindergarten in Alachua County, and it's our job as educators to teach them the things they'll need to be successful and productive adults.

I've been an educator for more than 40 years now, and each year it seems that the differences between those incoming kindergarten students become more significant.

We have students entering our schools who are already able to read. We have others who can't identify shapes and colors, let alone the letters of the alphabet. We have students who can write their names. We have others who can't even tell you their last names.

We have students who've been exposed to cultural experiences like concerts, plays and museums. We have others who have experienced the world primarily through television, which we all know is not a very good teacher.

We also see a lot of differences in the way incoming students relate to others. Many of our kindergarteners learned about sharing, about showing respect for others and about following directions before they ever walked into a classroom. But there are many students who have to learn these concepts from scratch in school because they never learned them at home.

That can be a hard lesson for a 5-year-old.

It's sad, but the fact is that we have some kindergarten students who build up very thick disciplinary files during that first year of school because they never learned appropriate behavior. Not surprisingly, those are the students who usually have significant academic problems as well. And so we have an achievement gap that begins long before kindergarten and continues right on through high school and beyond.

The future for children who don't succeed in school is usually bleak, filled with drugs, violence, poverty, prison and other consequences. And of course, these students often go on to have children who continue that sad cycle, which is bad for schools and bad for our community.

Schools have taken on much of the responsibility for things that used to rest with parents - character education, nutrition, health and dental care, mental health services, day care - the list goes on and on. But there's only so much schools can do with the limited resources we have. And after all, we only have the kids for about six or seven hours a day for 180 days out of the year.

So many of those services that we now provide in schools would be unnecessary if students and families had more help before entering school.

The National School Readiness Indicators Initiative issued a report last year that outlined those things that indicate a child is ready to learn.

Some of them are academic - things like fine motor skills, recognizing the relationships between letters and sounds, knowing basic shapes. But most of the indicators have nothing to do with academics - things like the mother's age and pre-natal care, birth weight, family income, immunizations, and access to health insurance.

The report also says more students would be ready to learn if there were more early education programs, more accredited child care centers, less child abuse and neglect and fewer children in foster care.

As Superintendent of Alachua County Public Schools, I'm committed to doing all I can to ensure that all our children succeed in school, no matter where they come from. But I also know that we can't do it alone - too many of those indicators are out of our hands.

Our community, our entire society, must recognize that we have to invest in our children from the moment they're born, and invest in their families even earlier than that, if we're going to make a difference in the future.

That's why I'm such a strong supporter of the United Way's Success by 6 initiative and its mission of ensuring that all children are safe, healthy and ready to learn when they enter school. That would certainly make our schools' job much easier.

But more importantly, our students will have a better chance of being successful adults and successful parents for their own children. And that's good for all of us.

Dan Boyd is Superintendent of Public Schools in Alachua County.