Diana R. Sieger is the president of the Grand Rapids Commmunity Foundation. For more information, visit Diana's President's pages or view her biography.

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President's Point of View: What is our Promise?

January 29, 2007

The Grand Rapids Community Foundation has played a key role in the development and implementation of the Grand Rapids Education Reform Initiative (ERI) for the past six years. The Steelcase and Frey Foundations have been our collaborative partners with support from other area foundations.

That said - we have been working diligently bringing in community support to address key issues affecting the students and their families of the Grand Rapids Public Schools. The ERI is often misunderstood and often misperceived. In fact, the former superintendent noted in the beginning days of his tenure as he spoke to Wendy Jackson, the ERI Director and me, “I will ignore you.” And he did attempt to do just that.

Two key programs have been initiated in the past six months that truly bring community support inside the GRPS! They are the Meijer funded and sponsored “Good Schools” program and the Kent School Services Network. Both efforts are described on our website.

As my previous post on January 24th detailed, this foundation has expended more than $2.4 million supporting families, children and schools within the Grand Rapids Public School District.

People are constantly asking why don’t we have the Grand Rapids Promise here? Communities across the country are trying to replicate the Kalamazoo Promise and as we have seen recently, efforts to the west of us in the Lakeshore counties have even recommended that a millage be created to finance the “Promise”.

The Kalamazoo Promise is a good program started by generous people who care deeply about the future of the city and wanted to create this to help bring a new dimension spurring more positive development in their area. Our community and our neighbors to the south are different communities.

My question is for Grand Rapids - how can we promise anything to our students and their families if the dropout rate is so high and student achievement has not reached a strong level across the board. While some MEAP scores showed improvement, it is not enough.

If a “Promise” like program would take shape in our community, it would be frustrating for the students if they are sent off to college when they may be ill-prepared for taking on the rigor needed to succeed.

What may be worthy of consideration but controversial would be to create a Promise-like program for students ONLY if certain student achievement rates are met by the school district. What a concept - connecting school performance which would trigger available support for their students. Hmmmm - now that would be most interesting.