about us

Click the link below to read our  2010 Community Report

http://hollandsentinel.mi.newsmemory.com/special.php?date=20100204

Ready for School in the News

Read about Ready for School in the Holland/Zeeland Community:

http://www.hollandsentinel.com/news/x1031041209/Program-aims-to-get-kids-ready-for-school

Preschool Pays Off:

http://www.hollandsentinel.com/archive/x1878073956/Preschool-paying-off

McDonald's Grant:

http://www.hollandsentinel.com/archive/x1920337809/-37-600-grant-will-help-young-students

About Us

Ready for School integrates civic, school, health, non-profit, corporate and faith-based efforts to assure that every child in the Holland/Zeeland area enters kindergarten prepared to succeed. At the beginning of the 2009-10 school year, the Ready for School initiative administered the DIBELS assesment (a screening tool to evaluate student progress in literacy) to kindergarten students in the area to evaluate the students aptitude for reading. Of the children tested, less than half (43%) demonstrated the benchmark pre-literacy skills expected of incoming kindergarten students. 

Current research indicates 90% of brain growth happens before age 5. Children who benefit from living in families with significant resources and access to early childhood education enter school with vocabularies of 40,000 words, as opposed to 3,000 words for those peers who do not. The Ready for School Initiative is determined to bridge this gap.

Ready for School’s goal is for 75% of all area children to meet benchmark criteria by 2015. The three objectives of Ready for School are:

1. Engage and inform parents about the role they play as teachers in the first years of their child’s development.
2. Enhance current programming through involving current pre-school and childcare providers.
3. Expand learning opportunities by removing barriers that discourage participation like cost and inconvenient hours of operation.