Executive director of Achieve Escambia, Kimberly Krupa wants all children to have the same opportunities and privileges that baby Ida Mae Wells had.
KINDERGARTEN READINESS and me THE BEST WAY TO ACHIEVE A KINDERGARTEN-READY COMMUNITY IS TO GIVE POWER BACK TO PARENTS AND COMMUNITIES BY Kimberly Krupa ACHIEVE ESCAMBIA
M
y fourth child was born at 9 p.m. on July 4, 2020. The exact moment she debuted, a rainbow of backyard fireworks exploded outside my third-floor window at Baptist Hospital, all greens and blues and sizzling pinks. It sounded like 1,000 bottles of champagne popping, fizzing over, and popping again, a celebration of life and freedom and hope in the middle of a perilous pandemic summer. I don’t usually write about myself when I write about kindergarten readiness. But the collective trauma of the past year has meant, for me, casting aside my old ways of doing things and forcing myself into the story. I am privileged to lead a partnership, Achieve Escambia, whose members have set a bold goal of 75 percent of children entering kindergarten ready to learn by 2025. I am privileged to work with people who live and breathe this goal every day. I am privileged to now share the communitywide burden of achieving this goal as I
12 2021
raise up a member of the entering kindergarten class of 2025. I am privileged to be a 42-year-old white woman whose children have “zero” opportunity gaps. My first three babies entered kindergarten ready to learn, and I have no doubt my newest baby will follow, if not surpass, their lead, as youngest children sometimes do. My oldest, a high school freshman once complained in a fit of rage, “I have to rake the leaves; they get to walk down the path.” This 2020 baby? Don’t worry about her. She has a clean and clear path ahead of her, lined with excellent prenatal care, an uncomplicated birth, regular pediatric checkups and developmental screenings, a year of breastfeeding, rooms full of books, toys to meet each milestone, from crawling and pinching to clapping and singing and solving. Beyond that, a neighborhood with sidewalks and parks. Married parents with two incomes. And, above all, white skin.
BUILDING BLOCKS, A PARENT MAGAZINE
It is important to state what my privilege is, to make the invisible visible, to put myself in this story. I am not on the receiving end of a patchwork quilt of inequitable investments and practices that, in our country and in our community, are not distributed fairly to support young children on their journey to school. I have access to rapidly expanding insights into early brain and child development. I can afford every leg up our system provides because I know that system and, having power and privilege, I know who to call when the system malfunctions. I can’t change the fact that I am a white woman raising children in a society where race and ZIP code are destiny. What I can do is reveal how I’ve been able to experience an unequal set of opportunities, do something about it, and at the same time get more parents into the work of raising children to be ready for school … and ready for life. One of the things I’m most excited about as we break out of our pandemic
