Education Pensacola's great challenge


  • November 26, 2015
  • /   Carlton Proctor
  • /   education

"The Studer Community Institute Presents: The Pensacola Metro Report," a discussion about the link between education and a community's economic prospects.

One of the key metrics company executives look at closely when considering a move to a community is the high school graduation rate.

And in Escambia County's case, the report card is not good.

Last year, for example, just 66 percent of Escambia's high schoolers earned a diploma. Based on the typical classroom grading scale, 66 percent is a D.

The state average is 75.6 percent, and Santa Rosa County's rate was 79 percent. Of Florida's 67 counties, 12 including Escambia, have a graduation rate of 66 percent or below. 

This disparity is not lost on the citizens of the greater Pensacola area.

And that's borne out by the Studer Community Institute's most recent Pensacola Metro Dashboard survey, which clearly shows education is the number one priority, and perhaps the community's biggest challenge.

How to fix this problem, and move the community forward economically and socially, is the focus of a recent roundtable panel discussion has its final re-airing on BLAB-TV at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 27.

Hosted by BLAB-TV's Mollye Barrows, the panel features Dr. Rick Harper of the University of West Florida's Haas Center for Business Research and Economic Development; Jennifer Grove, community development manager at Gulf Power; Reggie Dogan, contributor and fellow at SCI; and Shannon Nickinson, editor at SCI.

While the panelists all offered different takes on the extent of the problem, they all agreed on one thing: the poor high school graduation rate is just the tip of the iceberg.

A hard, unvarnished look at the problem leads down the educational ladder to middle school, elementary grades and to the critical developmental stages of age 3 to birth.

{{business_name}}Reggie Dogan, fellow at the Studer Community Institute, speaks about the findings of the 2015 Pensacola Metro Report.

Reggie Dogan, fellow at the Studer Community Institute, speaks about the findings of the 2015 Pensacola Metro Report.

"What we've found in Escambia County is that the graduation rate is 66 percent; the free-and-reduced lunch rate is 66 percent; and the kindergarten readiness rate is 66 percent," Dogan said. "We thought those data were striking because what we're seeing is that poverty impacts how students are doing in school.

"And that kindergarten readiness is an issue because kids are not prepared for school.

"If we can't fix early learning, we're going to have a hard time fixing education and graduation rates as children move through our education system to high school," Dogan added.

While graduation rates are a concern, there is also concern those students who do graduate from high school, and even college, are unprepared for the rigors and competitiveness of the workplace.

Grove said Gulf Power increasingly become involved in education in the Pensacola community because the company is seeing unsettling trends among those young graduates — whether in entry-level engineering, accounting or technical jobs — hired by the company.

"We were finding that some of our new employees were having a hard time taking the academic content they learned in school and applying it in daily work practices," Grove said. "We're also seeing a lot of challenges in workplace behaviors.

"A lot of students are not working in high school, or even by the time they complete an associate's degree, or bachelor's degree," Grove added. "So, the work environment is new to a lot of these students."

{{business_name}}Gulf Power's Jennifer Grove speaks about the findings of the 2015 Pensacola Metro Report.

Gulf Power's Jennifer Grove speaks about the findings of the 2015 Pensacola Metro Report.

When this trend showed up even among college level graduates, Grove said Gulf Power reached out to universities to see what they could do to help develop programs that would improve graduates' readiness to enter the workplace.

But Grove said that endeavor lead them to work with community colleges, then high schools and even further into middle school and beyond.

"When we got to high schools we realized it's really what comes in through the middle schools that's a key factor in graduation rates," she said. "Then, ultimately we realized we really need to focus on birth to 5-year-olds."

If the starting line for fixing high school graduation rates goes all the way back to 3-year-olds, and even infancy, how does a community tackle that challenge, and move the graduation needle into the 80 and 90 percentiles?   

It's a challenge not only for the local school systems in both Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, but also for the private sector, and the community as a whole: Do we want to merely survive economically or do we want to thrive?

"In my view that's the single most important thing we can do as a community, make sure every child that shows up for kindergarten is ready to learn to read and write," said Harper.

Early intervention, exposing a child to a rich verbal environment and parental engagement at home, is a key element of preparing of that child for kindergarten and beyond.

{{business_name}}Shannon Nickinson, fellow at the Studer Community Institute, talks about the 2015 Pensacola Metro Report. Shannon Nickinson, fellow at the Studer Community Institute, talks about the 2015 Pensacola Metro Report.

"That's a great thing about the nature of the brain of infants and young children, that those interventions early on are so much more effective, and decidedly cheaper, than what happens when you intervene with a 16-year-old," Nickinson said. "But that's not the way early education has been viewed traditionally. It's been viewed as a kind of glorified babysitting service. But it's as much an important part of the early educational path as any other."

Grove said the fundamental approach to this problem — reaching children from underprivileged backgrounds who enter the school system unprepared to read and learn — is "family capacity building."

"I think it really is about equipping that parent or parents, who probably grew up in generational poverty, to be that child's first teacher, along with understanding that education really is the great leveler in our society,” Grove said.

"I think if we can, as a community, take ownership of this challenge and start the learning process very early in a child's life," Grove added, "our education system can bring critical thinkers to the workplace, and help students to learn, analyze information and form their own opinions."

 
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