By Debra R. Sullivan

It takes a village to raise a child, but what does it take to create a village that prepares all children to enter our school systems? Members of organizations in King County, Wash., decided several years ago that we needed a communitywide conversation on how to address the many social/emotional, linguistic, and cultural needs of children.

So, in 2002, with a grant from the Foundation for Early Learning, more than 30 organizations serving children, youth, families, educators, and care providers came together to discuss the relationship between early childhood experiences and the academic achievement gap.

We wanted to make sure that we provide all of our children with exposure to quality care and learning environments that maximize and take advantage of the window of learning opportunity in those critical early years. And we wanted to start building community consensus around what we all could do to ensure that children are ready for school and schools are ready for the children who will be attending.

Diverse organizations such as the Puget Sound Educational Service District, Public Health, City of Seattle ECEAP, Child Care Resources, Comprehensive Health Education Foundation, Seattle Community Colleges, and Talaris Research Institute came together in this collaboration. After months of researching and planning we decided to have a series of community conversations. The idea was to get parents, early childhood educators, elementary teachers, and others in the same room at the same time with a well-trained facilitator to direct the conversation.

As the head of the Praxis Institute for Early Childhood Education, a small college in Seattle that specializes in preparing people for early childhood and elementary education, I know a number of graduates, teachers, pro-viders, colleagues, and collaborators in both fields. If we were going to model what it looked like to have a community conversation, I had to begin by facilitating a conversation in my own community. I invited elementary teachers I knew from the six schools around the college, teachers and providers I knew from the early childhood programs in the neighborhood, and many of the parents I saw regularly. Thirty people came. Many of them had never met each other and had certainly never discussed school readiness. They came because I invited them.