Whatever It Takes has one overarching goal:
At 1 p.m. on Wednesday July 1st, 2020 every child in Athens will be on track to graduate from a post-secondary education.
Introduction by Michael Stipe of R.E.M
Executive Summary
Fifty years ago graduating from high school allowed the graduate to have a good job, earn a steady income, and provide for his or her family. That is no longer true. A post-secondary education is now necessary to be a productive member of society. The economic costs of under-educating our children are staggering and have become a massive burden on our community. Whatever It Takes seeks to ensure that every child in Athens-Clarke County will graduate from a post-secondary education. We, along with our partners, will accomplish this through emphasizing early intervention, focusing existing services in a limited geographic area, creating a culture of success, and using data to direct to policy.
Unabridged Version
Today, graduating from high school is simply not enough. The marketplace has changed such that using high school graduation as the final educational benchmark is clearly inadequate. High school graduation must be followed by another quality educational experience to ensure each child’s ability to successfully compete in a global economy.
Education is the silver bullet. An educated citizenry creates a community with better jobs, safer neighborhoods, and happier families. Producing well-educated children decreases the need for less effective and more costly government interventions. Conversely, having a large segment of our children attempt to go into the workforce with minimal skills creates social and economic instability along with a massive financial burden on our community.
Children respond to the environment and expectations created for them. We must create a culture of high expectations coupled with making sure each child has everything he or she needs to achieve those expectations. In addition to more basic needs such eyeglasses or transportation, every child needs a loving, caring adult to encourage him or her to explore the world, learn everyday, treat others with respect, and to give back.
By emphasizing early intervention, focusing existing services in a limited geographic area, creating a culture of success, and using data to direct policy we can ensure that every child is equipped to graduate from a post-secondary education, be it vocational training, military service, technical school, junior college, or a 4-year university.
Why will this approach be effective?
When Ben Franklin said, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” he could not have coined a better phrase for conveying the value of quality early care and learning. The quality of the learning environment and the care the child is given early in life weigh heavily in the child’s eventual academic and life success.
Children who are exposed to a culture of learning at an early age have a far greater chance of success in life and less need for expensive and less effective intervention(s) later in life. Almost every child has a parent that wants him or her to succeed, but not every parent knows how to teach their child the skills they need to be successful. We must make sure that every child is taught the skill set needed to be a productive member of society.
Athens has one of the best early learning programs in the country, but it serves only a fraction of those who need it. The long term costs to our community of not meeting these children’s needs is staggering.
While there are many social service organizations that perform exceptional work by helping a number of children to beat the odds, our efforts have failed to change the overall trajectory of at-risk children. This occurs because our services have been spread too thin over a large geographic area.
By concentrating our efforts in a single neighborhood and subsequently expanding outward Whatever It Takes will achieve a domino effect eventually covering the whole county. We will start with a manageable area that will allow us to reach the tipping point of 65% neighborhood involvement that is necessary to create a genuine culture of success within a neighborhood. This concentration of resources will create a compounding effect, changing the odds for all children rather than helping a few beat the odds.
We believe evidence should guide policy. Rather than making decisions based on emotion, intuition, or politics we will use state of the art longitudinal data systems to monitor the progress of our programs – allocating funds and resources to those that are proven to be working and recalibrating our efforts in the areas that are not. Simply put, Whatever It Takes will not support any program or policy that cannot prove its capacity to help children succeed.
How will this be accomplished?
Family Connection, the parent organization of Whatever It Takes, has quietly been leading many successful initiatives in Athens for over fifteen years. The dramatic decrease in teen pregnancy, the successful attack on abuse and neglect, the formation of the Classic City High School, and many other projects have all come out of Family Connection. Family Connection, by its very nature, is a partnership of non-profits, businesses, the public sector, and most importantly – families. When the public and private sectors come together great things can be accomplished.
The initial focus of Whatever It Takes will be to create community-wide consensus around our new expectations for children. We will create a system which better connects children and families to existing proven-to-be effective services. Children in the Whatever It Takes’ neighborhoods will be expected to succeed in school and to give back to their community.
We will encourage new independent projects, such as expanded Internet access, mentoring programs, or new quality early learning programs to focus in our initial neighborhood and make sure that existing services become available to every child in that neighborhood. In time, through classic fundraising and grant writing we will be able to scale up existing programs that work but don’t reach everyone in ACC who needs that service.
We will, at every opportunity, advance the basic principles of Whatever It Takes: early intervention, focusing existing resources in a limited geographic area to create a compounding effect, creating a culture of success, data driven policy, and establishing high expectations for children and then giving them the needed support to fulfill those expectations.
We will reach out into the community, we will knock on doors, we will take the time to listen, we will take the time to learn, we will do whatever it takes.
Children in quality early learning programs earn $20,000 more per year as adults and save the state $19,000 per year in remediation and criminal justice costs.(Reynolds 2004)
By 3rd grade middle class children know 12,000 words, children from low income families know 4,000.(Klein & Knitzer, 2007)
The odds of completing high school rise from 39 percent to 53 percent for children exposed to preschool. (Heckman 2004)
By 21, those in one preschool program studied were more than four times more likely than non-participants to be enrolled in a 4-year college; were less likely to be unemployed and more likely to have higher earnings; had lower juvenile and adult crime rates; were less likely to depend on public assistance; and were less likely to be a teenage parent.(National Center for Children in Poverty)
