LAUNCH Flagstaff update for October — Election Day reminder

The signs of our progress in advancing world-class education in Flagstaff aren’t always so obvious. That’s why I hope this monthly email is useful to you as we highlight just three of our advances in the work of our collective impact partnership.

This month you’ll see the progress our partners are making around financial literacy education, the analysis our Data Team is doing around early childhood literacy, and the standing room attendance at our film screening of Teaching in Arizona.

Read about how the Senior Corps Volunteers are making a difference in the lives of our students in our Partner Spotlight.

Election day is next week and if you’ve already voted an early ballot, I thank you.  If you have yet to vote, please mark your calendar for the November 6th Election Day.  Visit our advocacy page for more details about what is at stake for our students.

Our children are counting on you.

With gratitude,

Paul Kulpinski,
Partnership Director

This shows up in confusion around purchasing a consumer warranty on an appliance or understanding the true cost of health insurance.

The team has decided to use a tool that portrays a “financial hierarchy of need”, similar to the familiar hierarchy of basic needs, to guide the level of education and support that partners can provide to students and families.  This will also serve as a means for students and families to self rate themselves along this continuum.

This information will be obtained through a pre and post survey of clients utilizing services of partner agencies.  Additional information in the survey will measure the student’s or family’s demonstrated change in behavior from implementation strategies provided by the partner agencies.

The next meeting of the Financial Literacy Team will be tomorrow, November 1st at 11:30 am.

The first phase of the LAUNCH Flagstaff Literacy Acceleration Project began this month with a Data Analysis Institute hosted by Read On Arizona in Phoenix.  The Flagstaff project is looking at a cohort of schools participating in the multi-LEA implementation of the Kindergarten Developmental Inventory (KDI).  Those schools include: Killip, Kinsey, Marshall, Mountain, PEAK and Sechrist Elementary schools. The team looked at a variety of data ranging from population demographics to reading proficiency.  The team discovered several patterns of interest related to 3rd grade reading scores.

A root cause analysis, conducted as part of the days activities, brought the team to conclude that access tohigh-quality pre-Kindergarten for 3 and 4 year old children would be an important strategy for the LAUNCH Flagstaff partnership to consider.

The film was produced by Tucson Values Teachers (TVT) and directed by Lisa Molomot, a documentary filmmaker and professor at the University of Arizona.

“One of the biggest misconceptions of the teaching profession is that teachers work part-time, until 3pm with weekends and summers off,” said Molomot. “What I learned following these teachers for over six months is, this could not be further from the truth.”