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Aspire says it’s ready to focus on education
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ZACK LEMON
The Blade
JUN 29, 2017 12:00 AM
It has been a quiet few years for Aspire Toledo, whose members on the non-profit have been studying the social problems that ail Toledo children and teens.
But now the group believes it’s ready to help other non-profits better serve students in hopes of improving the educational outcomes for Toledo’s next generation.
“We have what we need,” Dennis Johnson, Aspire’s Board Chairman said of Lucas County’s nonprofit and social service landscape. “It’s getting what we have to do better. ...The issue is how do we get all the assets we have working together.”
Aspire is not a social service provider. Instead, it uses data gathered from a variety of sources to evaluate other nonprofits on what they do and do not do well, and help bring all of the distinct groups together to improve outcomes for Lucas Couty children in five separate outcomes “from cradle to career.”
In the second chapter of its community report, Aspire is focused on ensuring students arrive in kindergarten ready to learn, and that they graduate high school prepared for what comes next.
“The community selected two to start with and even selecting two to start with is very ambitious,” Aspire Executive Director Katie Enright said. “We focused very heavily in the early childhood space, and then on high school graduation.”
The current picture is bleak. According to the community report, 18 percent of Toledo Public School children entered kindergarten ready to learn in 2015, and 69 percent of Lucas County high school students graduated in that same year, well below the statewide average of 90 percent. To bolster the outcomes in those areas, Aspire intends to use a trove of data collected to evaluate how well its nonprofit partners are meeting their goals, along with tracking to see how effective programs are for actual TPS students.
Ms. Enright said much of the data the group has collected points to the need to support parenting.
“How do we as a community help support the parents so they can support their kids?” she asked. “If we don’t figure out how to help parents be parents we’re going to continue to have this problem .”
The organization was founded in 2014, although discussions had started more than a year earlier. It is a member of the Strive Together network, which is a collection of community initiatives modeled after one started in Cincinnati in 2006.
Aspire got off to a rocky start, changing leadership less than a year after its founding. Since the end of 2014, it has been led by Ms. Enright, an Owens Corning employee on loan to Aspire from the company who previously worked as data and outcome network manager for the nonprofit.
The report says the organization is not yet at a point where it can point to tangible results from its work, though it is not far off from seeing some improvement. Ms. Enright said the group should see some tangible changes in the next two or three years in early childhood results, which will trickle up as those better-prepared students age through the school system.
Aspire has worked with Toledo Public Schools Superintendent Romules Durant to improve Head Start in Toledo to make sure children are socially and emotionally prepared for kindergarten.
The organization has specific targets for ensuring children are born healthy, enter school ready, succeed in school, graduate ready for the next step, and are ready for career opportunities.
It has a roughly $300,000 budget, which comes from its corporate sponsors and from the Toledo Community Foundation.
Contact Zack Lemon at: zlemon@theblade.com, 419-724-6282, or on Twitter @zack_lemon.
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