Teresa Rupp: Early learning critical to success

If you’re reading this, pause for a moment to think how lucky you are. You can read! More than 36 million adults in the U.S. can’t — can’t read, write or do basic math above the third-grade level.

That’s a sobering statistic. We live in a time when global competition is greater than ever. How can we hope to compete if so many of our citizens, and the workers we want to hire, can’t read above the third-grade level?

According to the just-released 2017 KIDS COUNT report compiled by Kansas Action for Children, nearly 27 percent of third through ninth graders in Sedgwick County do not meet standards on reading assessments. These children are who we hope will be designing and building aircraft in 15-20 years, reading our X-rays, driving in the lane next to ours, and raising the next generation.

It comes as no surprise to those of us who work in the field that early childhood education is critical to school success, and school success is in turn critical to life success. Study after longitudinal study documents that a dollar invested in high quality early childhood education produces a 7- to 10-percent return on investment. Early childhood education helps our children do better in school while making them more likely to attend college or earn a technical certification and less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. They also earn more in wages and pay more in taxes.

Learning in early childhood builds the foundation for all the learning that comes later in school. Today’s 2-year-olds are the workforce of our future, and we must prepare them as well as we can to be productive contributors to our community. That means, among other things, reading to children — starting when they are newborns and right through the many years when they can read by themselves. Studies show that early reading helps kids in multiple ways, from learning to talk to becoming empathetic citizens.

And yet, for the nearly 21 percent of Sedgwick County children who live in households earning less than the U.S. poverty threshold (about 4,000 children ages 0-5 years), there are a total of 660 Head Start and Early Head Start slots available in Sedgwick County — 17 spaces per 100 eligible children ages 3-4 years and only 3.05 slots per 100 eligible children ages 0-3 years. Is anybody reading to the children who are not in Head Start? Do their parents, many working two jobs to make ends meet, have time to read to children?

As a community, we have worked to create training opportunities to help build the adult workforce needed by our local industries and employers, and we’re gearing up to train another 1,000 aircraft workers for Spirit Aerosystems alone, much less its supply chain, in the next two years. It’s time we also look at the beginning of that workforce pipeline, kids ages 0-5 years. Schools can’t do it alone, and starting at kindergarten is not starting soon enough.

Lots more of us need to volunteer with United Way’s Read to Succeed project helping third-graders read at grade level, and all of us — especially policymakers — need to support high-quality early care and education for children 0-5.

This story was originally published December 22, 2017 at 4:44 AM with the headline "Teresa Rupp: Early learning critical to success."