INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — About 300 people attended the “Moonshot Moment Summit” on Wednesday to discuss what’s been accomplished and what needs to be done to attain the goal of getting 90 percent of Indian River County third graders on reading level by 2018.
Heidi Sparkes Guber moderated the day-long event. She pointed out Indian River County is a leader among communities participating in the national movement to improve third-grade test scores. It is among the first to build a community-wide coalition with over 50 partnerships. “Organizations are no longer the nexus of social change, communities are—communities continually learning how to learn together,” Guber said.
The Learning Alliance, a not-for-profit organization formed in 2009 with the goal of improving literacy in the county, launched the Moonshot Moment goal in 2012. Founding members Barbara Hammond and Liz Woody have children who struggled with learning disabilities.
“We as parents and our kids felt the shame of not being able to succeed in school,” Hammond said.
Third grade literacy scores can be seen as the barometer of an area’s social and economic health, Hammond said, which she likened to “the canary in the coal mine.”
The district’s third-grade score went down a point since last year, from 54 to 53 percent on reading level, but Hammond encouraged the community to hold hard to the goal, which will take years to achieve.
Guber also urged the group to recognize it is operating at “the edge of the system where breakdowns occur” before “the doorway to the next solution” will appear.
Participants broke into groups to discuss 13 areas that need work, such as how to extend the pre-kindergarten, in-school, after-school and summer-learning programs, which have been very successful.
Teacher training, support, recruitment and retention were also brain-stormed by participants.
The increase in poverty, a transitory student population, teacher- and school-administration turnover were also discussed.
