Leadership
Buzz Ritchie
Team Chairs
Education: Ted Kirchharr
Environment: Dr. Enid Sisskin
Health: Dr. Debra Vinci
Poverty: Tim Evans
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About Our Team |
Remarks from Education Solutions Team Chair Ted Kirchharr:
As a volunteer leader for Unite Escambia, I am encouraged by work already underway to understand our community’s priorities and develop practical solutions.
Our team began by educating ourselves on the issues facing our community and learning about the innovative programs already underway. We heard from experts from pre-Kindergarten to adult literacy. We knew it was important to start by identifying successful, existing programs and discuss how to better engage the community behind these efforts, while also working to identify gaps in services or duplicated efforts addressing the same issues.
Based on our initial fact-finding, our team goals at this time are:
- Create and support an effective data system to transfer data collected by the voluntary pre-kindergarten programs to the School District of Escambia County.
- Assist in moving Escambia County from the 50th percentile to the 75th percentile of the Florida Kindergarten Readiness Screening (FLKRS) by 2020.
- Assist in moving Escambia County to the 75th percentile of the State District Composite Score by 2020.
Our short-term goal addresses a gap we identified during our fact-finding efforts. We learned that a wealth of data is gathered each year on students enrolled in voluntary pre-Kindergarten programs, yet a system is not in place to transfer that information to the School District. Not only are Kindergarten teachers deprived of the valuable knowledge gained by the pre-Kindergarten teachers, this lack of data flow prevents tracking the academic performance of voluntary pre-Kindergarten students over time. This inability to conduct longitudinal studies of student performance greatly reduces our ability to evaluate the effectiveness of our voluntary pre-Kindergarten program providers.
I am pleased to report that through the hard work of the Early Learning Coalition of Escambia County and the School District, Escambia County will soon become the first county in Florida and one of just a handful in the Southeast with the ability to track and transfer this data. This data gap, identified by the Education Solutions team and addressed by the stakeholders involved, is a significant step in moving us toward our long-term goals.
Our long-term goals address measurement of both pre-kindergarten children and school-aged children. Children must be ready to succeed in Kindergarten, but statistics show that half of Escambia County children are not ready to learn at the Kindergarten level. For school-aged children, the goal addresses the Florida Department of Education’s district composite score, the most comprehensive measure of public K-12 programs in Florida. This score combines the FCAT scores from a number of grade levels. While imperfect, this composite score gives us the best look at the performance of the entire district.
I invite you to join us. We can achieve our goals by working together and focusing on our future, rather than blaming others for our problems in the past. Please post your comments and suggested solutions on the Education Blog page or click here to contact us.