2024 Snapshot: Education

Mission

Develop solutions to ensure every child in Oberlin enters school ready to learn.

Why Kindergarten Readiness?

Kindergarten Readiness is a is a strong indicator of future success:

• National research shows, every dollar invested in early education yields a 13x return on investment;

• When students are behind in kindergarten, statistics show that they rarely catch up;

• In Oberlin, when the collaborative was founded (2014), there was a higher level of poverty and lower level of kindergarten readiness than the county average.

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Wins

• $20,000 in leveraged funds to help bring additional partners and programming to Oberlin

• Connecting For Kids brought adaptive storytelling for students and children with special needs

• Provided additional family engagement opportunities and skill building activities after partner events

Core Activities

• 880 total sign-ins to the community classroom

• 375 literacy kits distributed each quarter (for a total of over 1,500 books)

• 148 students participating in Leap Into Literacy, created for OberlinKids by a speech pathologist

Lessons Learned

• Making the community classroom “members only” did not encourage additional participation or engagement

• Responded to surveys by reducing literacy kit pick-up to quarterly instead of monthly, and included more books and resources in each kit

• Presence at community events builds trust and awareness to encourage ASQ screening and participation in programs

Plans for Next Year

• Partner “sponsored” Playgroup will begin for partners to share information and resources to families and build trust in the referral process

• Lorain City School teachers who are off for the summer will be planning and hosting 13 sessions of summer programming for OberlinKids

• KidSpeak, the agency who hosted Leap Into Literacy, will unfortunately be closing. Planning for additional literacy-based programming

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