| Hello,
All children and families bring unique talents, skills and gifts to the educational experience.
Multiple social influences affect a child’s educational success, many of which exist outside our educational systems.
For example:
- During the K-12 years, at least 52% of a student’s waking time is spent outside of school.
- During the ages from birth to 5 (a time of significant brain development), children and families have no systemic infrastructure that ensures consistency or quality of their educational experience.
- The impact of COVID-19 has disproportionately affected children and families in low socio-economic households many of which are families of color, and of Indigenous and Latino ancestry.
This is why LAUNCH Flagstaff views our educational systems in more broad terms than K-12 or P-20. We work from cradle to career.
Many of the important milestones that children and young adults need to experience along this cradle to career continuum for success in education and in life happen outside of any formalized educational system.
Improving educational outcomes for every child requires our entire community to take collaborative action.
Our children are members of families which are unequally impacted by the various socio-economic systems in our community, reducing their household stability.
While some change in a child’s life is normal and beneficial, sudden and extreme disruptions without the buffer of a supportive adult can be detrimental to a child’s ability to learn. Data show that by supporting families in creating stable home environments, we can improve educational outcomes for the children in those homes (Sandstrom & Huerta 2013).
For this reason, the partners of LAUNCH Flagstaff commit to a strategic, coordinated use of community-wide, cross-sector data and information sharing to better identify the common factors that are disproportionally impacting the families and children of Flagstaff.
With this data, we can implement strategies that create an equitable starting placefor our most vulnerable children, thereby improving their access to more world-class educational experiences.
An equitable starting line ensures that every child has an equal opportunity for the success.
 Establishing equity often requires a non-equal distribution of resources. The first step toward equity is the critical reflection and examination of our policies, practices, traditions, beliefs, and routines to uncover the existing inequities in our systems which perpetuate instability for many families and children in Flagstaff.
Achieving equity will not be easy but is one of the most important components of the work of LAUNCH Flagstaff.
In the next email, I’ll dive into our preschool expansion pilot program called Elevate PreK.
With gratitude,
Paul Kulpinski,
Partnership Director |
