Our Impact

Investing in the Early Childhood Education Initiative Delivers Proven Success.

It has been widely proven that high-quality preschool programs generally support substantial early learning gains and enhance children's school readiness. This is not only in mathematics and literacy skills, but gains have also been seen in social-emotional skills by the time children enter kindergarten. (Meloy, Gardner, & Darling-Hammond, 2019). 

The Early Childhood Education Initiative has been well aware of these benefits to our children. Since 2014, we have made enormous impacts on the development of preschoolers on Orcas Island. Through the funding of our program, over 250 students have gained access to high-quality early childhood education including cognitive, language, literacy, mathematics, physical, and social-emotional development. Over half of the children were classified as educationally at-risk. Those at-risk students experienced the greatest percentage of our initiative-funded hours.

Since 2019, over 80,000 hours of high-quality preschool education have been provided to students whose families could not afford these hours. We have provided over $1,000,000 in awarded grants to support this work. Kindergarten readiness on Orcas has increased by 20%. The largest improvements have been seen in student literacy, which is a key element of school success in the future. 96% of the 30 students in 2025 were assessed as fully prepared for kindergarten.

Moving forward, we will look to continue to advocate for the children and their families in our community by supporting them and improving on our metrics for success.

References

Meloy, B., Gardner, M., & Darling-Hammond, L. (2019, January). Untangling the evidence on preschool effectiveness: Insights for policymakers (Research Brief). Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/untangling-evidence-preschool-effectiveness