Great By 8 Summit to Focus on Childhood Education

by Stephanie CrosbyAn education summit tomorrow in Lexington will bring together several groups that have been working to improve education for students up to eight-years-old. The Great By 8 Summit also kicks off a new program for those organizations in which they hope to work more collaboratively toward the same goal.Department of Education spokesperson Lisa Gross says they’ve recorded some achievement gaps between white students and their counterparts of other races, between low-income students and those who are not, and between students with disabilities and those that don’t have disabilities.“These are not unique to Kentucky," says Gross, "but we have a real focus in this state of eliminating those gaps, and we’ve done some work on that over the past ten or fifteen years, but we’ve got to do more work. The gaps are getting a little smaller when we look at actual test scores and those kinds of things, but we’re not improving at the rate we would like to improve at.”Gross says organizations like the Kentucky System to Enhance Early Development and the Head Start Collaboration Office have already been working separately on improving education for Kentucky’s youngest students, but with the new program they can work together.