Whatever It Takes Announces Community Plan for Success

Members of the Athens initiative unveiled a comprehensive plan on Monday to help more Athens children to graduate college and pursue a career.

The Athens Community Plan for Children contains 77 solutions to monitor and encourage childhood success that were identified over the course of a year. More than 500 people collaborated to create the document after a community-wide assessment, focus groups, surveys and door-to-door conversations with more than 300 households, Whatever It Takes Engagement Facilitator Terris Thomas said. 

“The plan we created today is nothing short of a work of art,” Thomas said at a press conference held at the H.T. Edwards Learning Center.  “This plan is the most strategic, aggressive attempt ever undertaken to ensure the success of every child in this community.”

The solutions are divided into six major categories to strengthen services for early child care and learning, K-12 education, post-secondary education and careers, health and wellness, safety and community stability and neighborhood engagement.

Among the solutions are plans to:

• Create a School Readiness Academy to provide ongoing training and support and to mentor parents so they may be the best teacher of their own children while preparing children for success in kindergarten.
• Expand Communities in Schools Site Coordinators, who currently work at Alps Road Elementary, and , to identify and help students who are at risk of dropping out of school.
• Create a College & Career Success Office to help students enter and excel in college and transition into a successful career.
• Have neighborhood leaders serve as lay health educators to ensure members of their community have access to health care services and increase individual health knowledge.
• Hold citizens police academies to help community members learn how to better protect their neighborhoods.
• Train neighborhood leaders in conflict resolutoin, mediation, public speaking, cultural competency and community advocacy.

and other community agencies hope the plan will help them reach a goal that by 1 p.m. July 1, 2020, all young people in Athens-Carke County are on track to graduate from a postsecondary education.

Several community partners, such as Mayor Nancy Denson and Superintendent Philip Lanoue were on hand to comment on the undertaking and highlighted the extent of the community collaboration invovled to address each solution.

“I'm sure many people are probably out there saying education has been studied ad nauseam,” Denson said. “How many studies does it take and what is another study going to do?

"I'll tell you what, it's going to work this time beacuse this time is different. The entire community has come together...schools, local government, higher educaition, the faith community, parents, and the great institutions we have in Athens that have been doing great work for years are going to do even greater work together.”

Many of the solutions proposed in the 700-plus-page plan call for strengthening or expanding existing programs that are working now, while some require a few new programs to address needs, like a college and career success office to help high school graduates find scholarships, navigate and be successful in college.

Whatever It Takes organizers created the plan after receiving a federal Promise Neighborhoods Planning Grant from the United States Department of Education to develop a cradle-to-career continuum of solutions to ensure all children are healthy, safe, engaged in the community and on track to graduate from a post-secondary education. They are among 20 communities that received similar grants and may be elligble for millions in additional federal grant funding. Local organizers maintain they don't need additional funds for their solutions to come to fruition, however.

“There's so many resources that we already have, it's just about lining them up,” Earnest said. “Outside resouces will always allow us to do new things, but we can't be dependent on those.”

Going forward, Whatever it Takes organizers will spend the next two years applying the master plan in the Alps Road Elementary school attendance zone, concentrating a network of community services in the area to help create a “culture of success.”

Eventually, the solutions will be expanded to other neighborhoods and the entire county over the next 10 years, and their progress in fulfilling each solution will be monitored quarterly.