SIDNEY — Council on Rural Services (CORS) is a nine-county non-profit organization that has provided holistic education and service programs to children, youth and adults in west central Ohio for 43 years.
“Kids Learning Place, our outstanding early childhood program has been involved with Head Start and early childhood education for over 40 years. The focus of our agency is always been to bring programs to our clients through new opportunities to learn and increase their overall growth for the future,” said Deborah Brayfield, public relations coordinator. “We have a history of achieving outcomes for children by supporting their health and learning and enabling their families to achieve their own goals for education, employment, stability, and success. During the last year we served 2,271 children in our nine counties of Auglaize, Champaign, Darke, Logan, Greene, Miami, Shelby, Preble and Van Wert.”
Her report continues:
As the children grow and change our seamless services extend to Gateway Youth, Achievement Center for Education Success (ACES) and Community Connectors that focuses on positive youth development in Darke County. These programs use their ability to build healthy relationships and innovative approaches to support the youth of our communities in the process of transition from dependent child to independent adult. Last year we supported over 395 youth and their families as they moved towards a higher sense of self and achievement.
The agency management team began a new strategic planning process of defining its organizational direction, setting priorities, focus, and strengthening its operations through strategic planning. This will ensure everyone is working towards a common goal that produces fundamental decisions to adjust in changing environments. During this past year the Board of Trustees hired Daniel Schwanitz as the CEO to lead our agency towards the future.
Kids Learning Place participates in Ohio’s Step Up To Quality (SUTQ) rating system for early childhood centers. This program administered by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services recognizes programs that exceed licensing standard in early learning education, staff training and staff qualifications. In Shelby County our Kids Learning Place is the only education and child care that has earned the highest level of five stars. We have five additional centers with five star ratings and five with four star ratings also.
In order to improve operational efficiency the agency implemented a new web-based program to track child and family outcomes, assessments and data management initiatives that enable the agency to direct better implementation of school readiness skills and engage families.
In order to share CORS school readiness goals with the education community at-large, CORS hosted a Community Stakeholder’s meeting to ensure more productive transitions for children and families from the early childhood program to the public school systems. Members of the education community in all nine service areas were invited to attend this meeting. Specific efforts were made during 2015 with Piqua City Schools and Sidney City Schools to collaborate.
The coming year will bring plans to adjust the overall Head Start and Early Head Start child slots and move four of our school setting centers to longer four day/six hour instruction in the same schools where the child will be attending kindergarten. These changes will improve school readiness services and better prepare children for transition to kindergarten. Family engagement will be enhanced by reducing family advocate’s caseloads for parents to receive timelier goal setting and referrals to meet their personal goals toward self-sufficiency.
CORS is proud of our working families and staff who are dedicated to the mission of CORS and to Head Start. We believe our continued efforts of education, information, and purposeful intent will lead to more positive impacts in the communities we serve.
