MORE: $4.25 million to assist with student improvement
The goal of the comprehensive community-wide collaboration is to improve student performance and educational attainment in the Edgewood, Franklin, Madison, Monroe, and Middletown school districts, said Matus, development officer at the Middletown Community Foundation.
The campaign is the culmination of a community-wide visioning and strategic planning process led by the MCF over a three-year period involving experts in the field and representation from local early childhood education practitioners, the region’s major employers, area school districts, and community leaders, said T. Duane Gordon, executive director of the foundation.
He said nearly 100 people volunteered their time, donating more than 7,000 hours of service to research the problems facing the local education system, identify research-based national best practices that have worked elsewhere, and determining which are best tailored for local families.
Matus is quick to point out that “Ready Teddy” is more than a masked, stuffed animal.
“This isn’t just about a bear,” said Matus, snuggling a bear in her office. “It’s about making sure our children have successful futures so they have the great start to be successful in school, so that they’re confident, so they’re happy, so they can make a great life for themselves.”
She hopes parents use the bears as a cuddly tool when they’re reading aloud 15 minutes daily to their children.
“That way,” she said, “we start talking about the bigger issues.”
For Matus, area school officials and city leaders, those issues surround early childhood education. For the region to prosper — maybe not now but 15 years down the road — the foundation has to be laid and that starts before children enter kindergarten, Matus said.
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She called preschool the “really critical years” in the educational development of a child. She said 50 percent of the parents who didn’t send their children to preschool made that choice not based on lack of funding or transportation. It was because they believed early education wasn’t important, she noted.
To those parents, Matus warned: “When kids start behind, they stay behind.”
Then she added: “It starts with education, and that education starts at home when children are infants.”
Too many students, she said, start school behind, sometimes as many as two years, and that puts pressure on the students and their teachers. She said 50 percent of the students in the Middletown City School District start kindergarten with the academic and social skills of someone two years younger.
Matus said it’s “nearly impossible” for kindergarten teachers to get those students caught up with their classmates in just nine months.
As a volunteer with the district’s Mentor Read program, she saw the discrepancy in the academic levels of some students. As she listened to first graders read, she said some struggled with three-letter words, while others were fluent with lengthy text.
“We want everybody prepared so when the best prepared child is sitting in the classroom, the child next to him is equally as prepared,” she said.
So the foundation is using “Ready Teddy” to spread that awareness at the grassroots level, she said. She said the $20 bears are for sale in 17 local stores and through the foundation’s website and its office. She said everyone who purchases a bear will be eligible to win a $2,000 vacation package from Pierson Automobile that will be given away on July 22 during the Ohio Balloon Challenge at Smith Park.
She said 100 percent of the proceeds will help fund the Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, an early childhood literacy program that provides one free, age-appropriate, expert-selected book every month to any child birth to age 5 living within the borders of the Edgewood, Franklin, Madison, Monroe, Trenton, and Middletown school districts.
Since the foundation started the program locally, more than 125,000 free books have been distributed to more than 6,500 local kids, and those who received books are more prepared for kindergarten, according to test results.
Matus said the foundation has raised $3.1 million of its $5 million goal to fund the Dolly Parton library and other educational programs.
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