Pathways Early Education Center of Immokalee, INC.

Our main priority is to increase our students’ Kindergarten readiness and to provide them with quality educational experiences. Preparing children for Kindergarten and beyond is not a one-year task, but we can easily measure each student’s improvement in a given year. We aim to ensure that every student who attends Pathways to graduates from preschool ready to succeed in Kindergarten. Further in the future, we also expect them to graduate from high school and attend college or find a well-paying job. These children will be the future of Immokalee, and our hope is that the long-term data shows that their achievement of early education makes an impact in the rest of their lives.

We create individualized education plans, or Pathways Plans, for each student based on where they are developmentally and what they need to succeed. Based on standard, age-appropriate developmental guidelines, we assess at the beginning of the school year whether each student is meeting standards, is on track to meet standards, or is not meeting standards in a variety of areas. We use this information to craft a Pathways Plan that tells teachers and parents what we need to do and what we need to provide to each student. We also evaluate growth throughout the year and update each student’s Pathways Plan accordingly.

The wrap-around services we provide to students and their families go far beyond basic education. We work with parents to engage them in their children’s learning process, provide 2 full meals and one snack every day, connect families with resources to help them deal with difficulties outside the scope of Pathways’ work, provide meal assistance to families through local food pantries, and provide free vision, oral health, hearing, and mental health screenings for every child enrolled. In response to COVID-19, we have also begun offering virtual VPK to students who cannot safely return to classes.

We are typically open 51 weeks of the year, because we know the parents work year-round and the children still need the safe and enriching environment we provide to them. These are resources that many of these families would not be able to afford without the financial support we provide.

Our programs are incredibly effective, largely because we provide individualized attention to each student, identifying in which areas they need help. We can see based on our assessments that this approach is effective. Between September 2019 and March 2020, we saw the following developmental improvements in our students:
- In social development and physical/coordination development assessments, we saw a respective 47% and 40% increase in the number of infants achieving developmental goals. By March, there were no infants scoring as not developed.
- Toddlers saw a 47% increase in those meeting expectations in physical development, a 45% increase in language and communication, and a 54% increase in meeting expectations in cognitive assessments.
- VPK students saw a 44% increase in meeting expectations in emergent math, a 33% increase in emergent literacy, and 26% increase in meeting expectations for fine motor skills.

These improvements are even more impressive when we consider that many students enter our programs with significant developmental delays. For example, we admitted 22 new preschool students last year who had little to no early education. 44% of those students were scoring below expectations and only 23% were meeting expectations. By March, 82% were meeting expectations and the remaining 18% were on track to meet expectations by the end of the year.

Our programs will continue to impact our students and more members of the Immokalee community as we expand our services to reach even more children.