Citizens of Columbia and the city’s public school district agreed that increasing support at home for students would lead to better academic performance at Wednesday night’s meeting.
Columbia Public Schools’ “World Café” community conversation event offered the public the opportunity to share ideas about how to improve educational achievement among students.
Assistant Superintendent for Elementary Education Ben Tilley said that some data results collected from the district identify a bigger problem.
“Our students who have a paid lunch do much better than our students who are free and reduced lunch,” Tilley said. He added the study indicated that living in poverty has a negative effect on school performance.
Retired civil rights attorney Steven Skolnick attended the event and also believes the type of home environment a student comes from correlates to performance in the classroom.
“We need to deal with the basic needs of the families that those children are a part of,” Skolnick said. “[Having] adequate nutrition and a safe house to live in are very important.”
Skolnick said some parents need public support from the time a child is born to before he or she is ready for preschool. He also said a high level of collaboration between early childhood education providers and the public school system is necessary.
“The public school system would help those providers better understand what skills a child needs to have when they enter kindergarten,” Skolnick said.
According to Tilley, one of the district’s goals is to have students reading at their grade level by third grade. He said it is important to help students coming from fragile family situations develop their reading abilities.
“It really is imperative that we work hard with our community and our families to help our students make more than a year’s gain in order to meet reading goals,” Tilley said.
He said the end goal is to better prepare the district’s students for transitions between each grade level so that they are eventually college-ready.
