Thirteen years ago, Vance received a college scholarship from the Middletown Community Foundation. He recently released his first book, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” where he shared stories of his broken family life in Middletown. The book topped the New York Times Bestseller list and is in its 15th week in the top 10 best-selling non-fiction books in America.
Vance was the keynote speaker at last week’s MCF annual awards banquet and meeting at Miami Valley Gaming.
The foundation is raising money as part of its Ready! campaign that benefits children in Middletown, Edgewood, Franklin, Madison and Monroe school districts, said T. Duane Gordon, executive director.
Gordon said the goal of Ready! is to improve student performance and educational attainment through kindergarten readiness, improved school performance, and post-high school readiness. To date, he said, more than $3 million has been raised toward the $5 million goal that will fund the program for five years.
Much of Vance’s keynote speech centered on education, and he thanked his grandparents, aunts and uncles and his Middletown teachers for providing him academic opportunities despite his poor upbringing. He realized at Yale there were few people like him, those who grew up in Appalachia. He called it “upward mobility” when poor children rise through the ranks.
“Early childhood education is an extraordinary important to having a successful life,” Vance said as an audience full of educators nodded their heads in agreement. “We know that lower-income kids are not as prepared for elementary school, for middle school, for high school. You almost have to do it in a way that is tailored to each community and that community’s needs.”
Initiatives like the Ready! program are “going to help a lot of lower-income kids be better prepared for the future — and at the end of the day, that will be better for all of us,” he said.
Gordon said the average entering kindergartner in Middletown is coming in a full two years behind academically and socially, according to the district. Pockets of low performing students also exist in each of the surrounding districts, he said. As a result, student performance and school report cards suffer, which not only impact the children in the schools and their future lives but also hinder economic development and depress property values throughout the community.
But the most harm is done to the children, he said. Research shows a child who is unprepared to enter kindergarten is twice as likely to be placed in special education, not because of an actual learning disability but just because of lack of preparation before coming to kindergarten. These children are also 30 percent more likely to never attend college. And they are a “shocking” 70 percent more likely to be arrested as adults for a violent crime, become a teen parent, drop out of school, face chronic unemployment, or spend a lifetime in poverty.
“Our children deserve better,” Gordon said.
He said the financial success has allowed Ready! to start phasing in several projects. The group hired a coordinator, who is a contract employee at United Way’s Middletown office, who i responsible for three areas: Administering the grants and collecting data on impact and performance; developing over the next several months and implementing next year a public education campaign to explain the importance of early childhood development and the impact that has on education; and developing over the next several months and implementing next year the Bob Flagel Preschool Scholarship program.
The campaign has also added in recent weeks elementary school social workers in Edgewood and Middletown school districts, renewed the kindergarten orientation program throughout all five districts, added several new offerings at the Parent Resource Center, including dedicated speech therapy in partnership with Abilities First and Spanish language services; and a new home visiting social worker was hired by the Butler County Educational Service Center to assist with the waiting list facing Middletown-area families needing that help.
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