“Research has shown us that children who are ready for kindergarten are far more likely to experience greater educational achievements, strive toward higher vocational aspirations and contribute to society later in life,” PNC Regional President Jim Hoehn said at Sinclair Community College during a kindergarten-readiness summit for local educators.
The bank will collaborate on the program with Dayton Public Schools, which has roughly 1,100 preschool students, the University of Dayton and the local early childhood advocacy group ReadySetSoar. The program will start at Dayton Public’s Preschool Academy at 329 Abbey Ave. and hopefully expand from there, said Karen Lombard, the district’s director of early childhood education.
“We’re going to be able coordinate activities with the Boonshoft Museum, Dayton Metro Library, the Dayton Art Institute and Dayton Philharmonic,” said Lombard, noting 38 percent of the district’s preschoolers need significant intervention. “They all work with Dayton Public already, but now we’ll have a concentrated effort to correlate the activities that they do with our students to the outcomes that are expected of preschool students.”
The PNC program is part of the bank’s broader Grow Up Great program, a 10-year, $100 million effort to improve early childhood education, especially for underserved children, in the PNC service area, which includes much of the Midwest.
The bank also sponsored today’s summit at Sinclair, which was designed to establish a common definition of “what it means to be kindergarten-ready,” said Thomas Lasley II, dean of the University of Dayton School of Education and Allied Professions.
“We’re trying to move toward getting more kids to be college-ready in our region; we’re an under producer of college-ready people,” Lasley said. “Well, the way we get college-ready kids is to go all the way back to the beginning and make sure we’re getting kids kindergarten-ready.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-7408 or agottschlich@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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