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In September 2005, The Lilly Endowment
approved The Community Foundation of Greater Lafayette’s Community Alliances to
Promote Education (CAPE) proposal, awarding $1.5 million for an early childhood
education initiative in Tippecanoe County. The grant administrator is the
Community and Family Resource Center. The goal of the CAPE initiative is
improved educational attainment for under-served residents.
“It’s important to understand that these grants are very competitive and are
awarded to communities that demonstrate compelling need and strong support of
the initiative,” said Jim Klusman, former President and CEO of The Community Foundation
of Greater Lafayette. “The grant award highlights our community’s ability to
come together and articulate both a problem and a solution. However, the
community needs to be a real partner in this venture, financially, morally, and
so forth. We have a challenge and a great opportunity before us!”
Plans for the project include a portion of the grant award to be invested in a
designated endowment fund at The Community Foundation of Greater Lafayette which
will help to provide operating funds in the future, after the CAPE grant has
ended.
To view an executive summary of the grant proposal, click
here. To view the proposal, click
here.
The CAPE
evaluation study has begun. Click
here to see the informative poster. Click
here to see a paper written by researchers
at Purdue University. Click
here to see the impact study they wrote
about the CAPE project.
More financial assistance is needed to make this project a success. To view
specific ways to help, click
here.
 Recognizing
that schools can function best when all children begin
their school careers prepared and able to learn, community stakeholders
identified “reducing
barriers to kindergarten readiness” as the highest educational priority.
Available for use over a five year period (2006 -2011), this grant will help to
launch the project, which is comprised of four initiatives:
Two initiatives, an Early Care and Education Program (ECE), modeled after
the best of Early Head Start and Even Start, for children aged 0-3 and their
families, and a Parenting Education Program, modeled after a
research-based program from the University of Minnesota, would be housed with
existing family literacy/education/job training programs to form a Model Family
Educational Resource Center. Partners include: the Lafayette Adult Resource
Academy, WorkOne, the Community and Family Resource Center (CFRC), Ivy Tech State College, and the Lafayette School Corporation. The
Family Learning Connection at Washington is located in the old Washington
Elementary School in Lafayette.
The third initiative is a Kindergarten Transition Program to orient
families entering Title 1 schools throughout the county to facilitate the
transfer of information from pre-kindergartens to kindergartens or to assess
students who did not attend pre-kindergarten, and to follow-up on those students
during the first month of school. Partners include the Lafayette, Tippecanoe,
and West Lafayette Community School Corporations, and CFRC.
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The last initiative is a Research Program to conduct a longitudinal study
of ECE children through their K-12 years, which extends the value of the ECE to
impact long-term community development. Major partners include the school
corporations and Purdue University.
Because research shows that poor family literacy is a barrier to education, the
need to assist children includes also the need to reduce the barriers adults
face both with respect to their own educational attainment and to acquiring the
parenting skills to support their children’s educational attainment. Because
research also shows that poverty is a significant barrier for children, the need
to assist children includes also the need to reduce barriers the community faces
in providing adequate employment.
While Tippecanoe County has excellent educational opportunities for its
residents, there are shortfalls. For example, the poverty rate for children
between 0-5 years is 19%. Of the 12% of residents over 25 who do not have at
least a high school diploma or the equivalent, 33% do not have more than an 8th
grade education. One-third of Spanish-speaking adults in Tippecanoe County
speak English poorly or not at all. At 5.3%, the Tippecanoe County
Hispanic/Latino population rate is tied for 7th in the state, and is
2nd among counties of comparable population. ISTEP scores in
Lafayette, with 10 out of 11 current Title 1 qualifying elementary schools, are
significantly below the state average. There are 300 families waiting for 40
Early Head Start slots, and nearly one-third of Lafayette’s kindergartners are
not prepared and able to learn when they arrive.
At one level there are specific needs to
 be addressed, such as increasing
Tippecanoe County’s capacity for early child care, and helping those children
who face barriers such as poverty make the transition to kindergarten. But at
another level, the needs arise out of systemic problems that require long-term
solutions. Through the CAPE grant, programs that address the most pressing
needs of capacity and transitioning will be the focus, while also using those
programs to develop the information the community needs to allocate resources to
provide sustained, long-term support for comparable programs.
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