ECARE - Every Child A Reader In Escambia

If you are reading this, thank a teacher. Whether or not that teacher is your parent or a professional educator, someone cared enough to help you learn to read. Perhaps it was something as simple as sharing a book with you as an infant, teaching you a song as a toddler, or helping you increase your young vocabulary. Investments such as these in early literacy in childrencan make a huge difference in a person’s life as far his or her education, employment, and ultimate life style. It is also proven that early literacy education can have a dramatic result in the success and overall positive impact on an area’s workforce and economy.

Despite everything that Escambia County has to offer its citizens, it is faced with serious challenges in the area of literacy. Not only does it rank as the second poorest county in the state of Florida, it ranks at the rock bottom in literacy. As Pensacola News Journal publisher Kevin Doyle said, “In this day and age, it is unconscionable for a community like ours to have such a serious problem with literacy. We should all be aware that literacy is the cure for poverty, education, advancement, and jobs.”

Years of research provide the evidence: Good parenting and good preschool programs provide a solid literacy foundation that helps children learn to read when they get to kindergarten. Because reading is the gateway to so much of the learning that follows, this critical skill serves children far beyond elementary school. We know that high school graduation can be predicted based upon a student’s early reading ability. We also know that, later on, our children will need good reading skills to succeed in an increasingly complex and demanding workforce.

It is clear, that until the community acts upon implementing a solution, Escambia County will continue to face an economic spiral with low-skill jobs, limited or no economic growth, and will sink even lower into the poverty cycle.

It is this challenge and ultimate solution that Every Child a Reader in Escambia (ECARE) has chosen to pursue. Through the organization of a community-wide collaborative effort to improve emergent literacy, they are investing where the payoff is biggest and most fruitful for the community as a whole…in its youngest citizens from birth to five years old. It’s the perfect beginning for a happy ending!

In an effort to create a better Escambia, a caring group of community leaders, businesses, and other agencies and organizations are teaming up to do just that. They are working tirelessly toward a successful solution through the formation of ECARE, Every Child A Reader in Escambia. The vision of this dynamic group is to share the message that a quality preschool education is a top priority ensuring literacy for our youngest citizens, in turn, growing a healthy, vital community.

ECARE serves as an umbrella type organization for all early literacy related organizations in the county. It seeks to provide a common ground through which these organizations might work toward a collective goal of ensuring all pre-schoolers entering Kindergarten are ready to learn.

One of the main goals of this collaborative effort is to educate Escambia’s citizens about the importance of early literacy investment and to help provide the necessary tools, partners, and resources to empower them for success. This progressive organization, along with the cooperation of all partners and Escambia’s citizens, will make our county a better place for all in which to live, work, play, and call home.

Vision:

To create a literate workforce that contributes to economic growth and development in Escambia County.

Goals:

All children entering Kindergarten in the Escambia County School District in 2011 will be ready for Kindergarten as measured by then current state standards. When achieved, this will lead to all third graders in the Escambia County School District testing as proficient on the reading portion of the FCAT by 2014 as measured by then current state standards.

How do we achieve our goals?

ECARE and its collaborative of other literacy-related partners aim to impact the community through emergent literacy-specific programs, projects, initiatives and community events that serve young children and their parents. ECARE currently endorses the Escambia County School District’s Wee Read program, Escambia Early Learning Coalition’s Imagination Library, United Way’s Born Learning campaign and Illiteracy is an Injustice. ECARE also works closely with a host of other literacy-related organizations and groups throughout the community to achieve its goals.