Greater Kansas City chamber sets its sights on boosting kindergarten readiness

The second time around, there’s no more denying early childhood education a place on the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce’s “Big 5” goals.

By joining the crusade to make all children kindergarten-ready, the chamber knows it is taking a perilous dive.

So many people and agencies are already vested in a struggle against economics and poverty.

The split between two states’ educational data systems will make any gains difficult to understand or measure.

Success will be hard to define and years away.

The puzzles embedded in state and federal funding will be maddening.

“Simply because it’s hard … simply because it’s complicated, we can’t fail to take it on,” Roshann Parris, the chamber’s chairwoman, told The Star.

The chamber’s announcement coming today, adding kindergarten readiness as a Big 5 goal, answers a challenge urged by hosts of community leaders.

Education was high on the list when the chamber put together its first group of five projects in 2011 — but it left education off for all those complicated reasons, said past chamber chairman and current executive committee member Greg Graves.

A year ago, the chamber determined that it had completed work on one of its projects — building on the success of Kansas City’s animal health corridor — and it was time to bring on another goal.

This time around, when the chamber convened a forum for ideas in February, the civic and business leaders of the community came full force, Graves said.

“I was shocked by who all came,” he said. “This time, they came advocating, locked and loaded. Mayor (Sly) James and team came. People realize business can make a difference in this city.”

The chamber met with area school superintendents as well and with many of the long line of agencies already invested in early childhood education.

The experience has been “humbling,” Parris said.

The chamber is not coming with answers, but with questions, she said. The chamber intends to play the role of convener and collaborator, helping to blend and energize the efforts under way on each side of the state line.

It wants to help resolve the complications around data collection and analysis.

It wants to zero in on where community investment of resources will have the greatest impact.

“How do you boil the ocean?” Parris said. “How do we get our arms around something this big?”

Educators are welcoming the help.

The future social and economic health of the region depends on strong education, and schools are increasingly strained in playing their part, superintendents said.

“Early intervention is absolutely critical,” Shawnee Mission Superintendent Jim Hinson said.

That means boosting not only pre-kindergarten classroom programming, but reaching out to parents and the communities raising children from birth to 3.

A survey by The Star of area school districts in 2013 found that one out of three area children entering kindergarten arrived with skills below the expected levels for beginners.

The percentage rose to 50 percent among districts with poorer populations where 70 percent or more of their students qualified for free or reduced-price lunches.

Those gaps, superintendents said, make it harder to get children reading at grade level by the third grade — an essential benchmark.

One out of every six children who fall short on reading level drops out or does not graduate on time, according to research through the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Those odds are four times worse than for students who reach reading proficiency. The odds worsen by double and even triple for children in poverty who struggle with reading.

And far more children are arriving at fourth grade below grade-level reading than at or above it.

Statewide, only 35 percent of Missouri fourth-graders and 38 percent of Kansas fourth-graders scored proficient or better on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

All of this is why myriad advocacy groups are pushing for more state and federal resources for early childhood.

It’s driving the Family Conservancy’s “Talk, Read, Play” campaign to get everyone talking to our youngest children.

It fuels Kansas City’s Turn the Page KC literacy crusade, which lobbied hard for the chamber to join the fight, James said.

The chamber “brings a huge community partner — the business community — to the table,” the mayor said. “They’re showing that the education of our young people should be everyone’s concern.”

Other Big 5 ideas are the Urban Neighborhood Initiative to revitalize a central core of the city, the quest to make Kansas City “America’s Most Entrepreneurial City,” the creation of the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Downtown Campus for the Arts and the expansion of Kansas City’s medical research.

The chamber’s decision to add kindergarten readiness as a Big 5 goal “is a wise choice,” James said. “A courageous choice.”

As much as anything, the chamber’s members can voice the needs of preschool children and their families, said Dean Olson, the vice president of programs at the Family Conservancy.

Struggles over limited budgets and statutory barriers will play out again in the halls of Congress and the state legislatures, he said.

Too often, he said, “no one is speaking for the very young.”

Kansas City Public Schools Superintendent Steve Green said he is optimistic the chamber will collaborate well with so many advocates in early education and “galvanize” a greater movement.

It is clear, chamber president Jim Heeter said, that legions of individuals and businesses are looking for more ways to take up the cause of education.

“There is a pent-up desire in this community,” he said.

And now they’re letting it loose.

This story was originally published September 23, 2014 at 7:01 PM with the headline "Greater Kansas City chamber sets its sights on boosting kindergarten readiness."