Roundtable Advocates Early Readers It's All Part of Effort to Improve High School Graduation Rates
Posted on: Thursday, 23 March 2006, 09:01 CST
By JOHN MARTIN, Courier & Press staff writer 464-7594 or jmartin@evansville.net
The Evansville Education Roundtable hopes to push the city's high school graduation rate closer to 100 percent by getting more books in the hands of preschool children.
A communitywide early childhood reading program was discussed in principle Monday by the roundtable, which has said improved graduation rates is one of its major objectives.
The goal, said roundtable member Carol Braden-Clarke, is to bring under one umbrella community programs which deal with early childhood intervention and to develop a unified strategy.
"You want to increase the number of children that start school ready to learn," increasing their chances of eventually getting a high school diploma, Braden-Clarke said.
The Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corp. graduation rate for 2004 was 88.9 percent. The state's rate was 90 percent.
Braden-Clarke is also executive director of United Way of Southwestern Indiana, which along with the Welborn Foundation, city government, EVSC and other organizations, is working on obtaining funding for a major early childhood literacy effort.
The Lilly Foundation awarded a grant to the state United Way organization to fund community programs. Evansville can receive $500,000 from the Lilly Foundation if it comes up with a local match by the end of this year.
"We're working on that," Braden-Clarke said.
A roundtable subcommittee had lengthy discussions on the issue of improved high school graduation rates, and the discussion kept coming back to issues of education and intervention for children up to age 5, said Cathy Gray, an EVSC assistant superintendent and co- chairman of the subcommittee.
"A lot of children walk through the door (at school) and haven't had the experience that they need," Gray said.
The Evansville Education Roundtable, chaired and formed by Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel, has another subcommittee working on the goal of increased "post-secondary education attainment." That effort is being led by businessman Bob Koch and Ivy Tech Community College Chancellor Dan Schenk.
Source: Evansville Courier & Press
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