FutureReady leader to advance new focus
After about a year on hiatus, a public-private agency, created to bolster education in Columbus by helping its children, is back in operation.
In late March, the board of directors for FutureReady Columbus selected Jane Leach, a former administrator in the Columbus and Hilliard schools, to be FutureReady’s next leader, nearly 12 months after the former chief executive departed.
This time around, the mission will be to focus on early childhood education, birth to age 5. Before, the organization was trying to assist with issues from birth all the way to adulthood.
“I am very grateful for the focused goal,” Leach said. “There’s power in that.”
Lots of cities across the country are undertaking similar early-childhood education initiatives, including Learn to Earn Dayton, Pre4Cle in Cleveland and the Cincinnati Preschool Promise. FutureReady Columbus works by figuring out what all the local agencies and institutions offer and then bringing them together to fill gaps in service.
That birth-to-5 period is increasingly recognized for its importance in setting up children for future success. More than 1 million new neural connections are made every second in the first years, according to Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child. Adversity, such as poverty and its associated problems, can impede development.
Research has shown that children who participate in high-quality preschool, meaning with a curriculum and a good environment, are significantly more likely to graduate from high school.
During the past year, Leach has led Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther’s Hilltop Early Childhood Partnership to work on doubling the number of high-quality preschool seats available in the West Side neighborhood by 2020.
Ginther also is the co-chairman of FutureReady’s board. Through a spokeswoman, Ginther called Leach the “perfect person” because of her experience and passion to lead the group in this new direction. “Concentrating on the years leading to kindergarten will make FutureReady a natural bridge from CelebrateOne (effort to reduce infant mortality) to school,” he said.
While FutureReady was on hold during the yearlong search for a leader, most of its staff members moved on to other things. Leach said she is taking her time in hiring, learning first and then building a staff.
These past six weeks have been a whirlwind tour of meeting local groups that affect children’s lives — libraries, churches, doctors, social service agencies, child-care providers — to hear what they think needs to happen to help young children and to discover what is already available.
“I’m listening well to an awful lot of people,” Leach said.
She said there’s a new energy in town, with leaders of the United Way, the YMCA and YWCA all starting within the past few years.
Leach started her career as an elementary school teacher in Columbus City Schools. When she served as the principal of Highland Elementary School in the Hilltop about 15 years ago, she said she noticed that the kindergartners in that high-poverty neighborhood were arriving at school completely unprepared. That inspired her to move on in 2007 and start the Hilltop Preschool, which is still operating today.
She found a space, hired a director and formed a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, which took some doing, but she leaned on others’ expertise, she said.
“I’m a bit of a social-justice warrior,” Leach said. “When I see a need, I figure out what I need to do to fill it.”
She and her husband live in Upper Arlington. They have two grown daughters, a sonin-law and two grandchildren, ages 3 and 1.
Local business leaders and community leaders formed FutureReady Columbus in 2015 to take the place of three other education groups in town. The most visible of them, KidsOhio, an education research and advocacy group that focused on Columbus City Schools, was established by philanthropist Abigail Wexner in 2000.
FutureReady’s original mission, as described in an IRS filing in 2015, was to create “a new birth-to-degree-tocareer educational support framework that will provide Columbus’ young with a pathway to success.” Then, it had nearly $2 million in assets, about 60 percent of that private donations and 40 percent public funding, most from the Columbus Education Department.
The first chief executive officer, Lillian Lowery, left in April 2017 to take a job with the Education Trust in Washington, D.C.