SPARK
(Supporting Partnerships to Assure Ready Kids)
The Lastinger Center for Learning is committed to ensuring early childhood success through initiatives that support school ready children.
Toward this end, the Lastinger Center has partnered with the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's SPARK Program. Through this endeavor, the Center has been able to implement its professional development model, preparing practitioners to assess, evaluate and implement instructional practice focused on early childhood learning.
The success of this endeavor has resulted in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation awarding the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation and the Lastinger Center for Learning a $10 million grant to launch the Ready Schools Program--an ambitious, far-reaching comprehensive, multi-partner initiative that that connects community-based agencies, early childhood learning centers, philanthropies, universities and public schools to ensure children's healthy development and academic achievement.
The SPARK Program: An Overview
Of the four million American children who start school each year, as many as one-third are unprepared to learn. Many never catch up. The reasons are complex, but clearly the multitude of systems that should be supporting young children too often fail in that mission – from family to schools to government. SPARK seeks permanent improvement in the systems that affect children’s learning.
The SPARK initiative of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is designed to unite communities so that all children can be successful before and after they enter school. SPARK fosters partnerships of selected communities, schools, state agencies and families to ensure that they work together effectively for the early learning of children. With the initiative serving as a catalyst or “spark,” the goal is to ensure that vulnerable children are ready for school and that schools are ready for children.
The initiative is now at the midway point and has grantees in eight locations: District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina and Ohio.
