Austin Aspires is looking at education in a new light with five new goals.

Austin Aspires — a spin-off of Vision 2020 — formed to meet education leaders’ and the community’s vision for better education, and last week it released its goals to do just that.

Executive Director Jennifer Lawhead and the Austin Aspires board got community leaders together throughout 2015 to discuss the full cradle-to-career education system in Austin. The ultimate goal was to select a few key outcomes the community wants for students so each child is ready to leave school and join the workforce.

“We spent the 2014-2015 school year conducting focus groups with students and teachers and parents and community members,” Lawhead said. “Talking about educational excellence and what that looked like in an ideal world, talking about what students need to achieve educational excellence.”

Austin Aspires’ five goals include:

—All learners will be ready for kindergarten.

—All learners will be challenged to achieve their academic potential.

—The community will support and enhance parents and mentors in their role as primary influencers of our learners.

—The community will provide equal access to opportunities which encourage our learners to explore areas of personal interest and prepare for post-secondary education or career.

—The community will address social, emotional, mental and physical barriers to success for all learners.

To come up with the goals, Austin Aspires worked with focus groups consisting of students, teachers, school staff, community members, and community agencies. At the beginning of the summer, a leadership table comprised of community leaders from businesses, philanthropy groups, faith communities, nonprofit agencies, government, and schools met and looked over the feedback from the focus groups. Lawhead said the leaders made the goals from three main areas: the data collected through the the focus groups, local data with testing and demographics, and the national best practice in education.

“They identified five focus areas that as a community we could agree to support education-wise, realizing that education is so much more than what happens in the school day,” Lawhead said.

Moving forward, Austin Aspires will serve as the convening organization for community members to gather together to take action to achieve the goals. Action Teams surrounding each goal area will soon form, and community members are encouraged to consider working with Austin Aspires.

Lawhead said teams will likely start meeting in January 2016. She said the organization is lucky to have the support of many community leaders.

“I just really think our community is unique in the support of students, and I think we have an opportunity to do some amazing things for our children,” she said.

Lawhead explained they are using the collective impact model to improve education, which means bringing all areas of the community together to focus on the same set of goals.

Lawhead is excited about the goals and feels they are appropriate for the community. She said the first goal focuses on the knowledge that being ready for kindergarten is more than children having his or her shots and being 5 years old. The second goal will focus on the academic success of students. The third goal focuses on parents, which is one of Lawhead’s favorite pieces.

“When I was conducting the focus groups, I heard over and over ‘parents are really critical to success,’ ‘my mentor made all the world of difference in my education,’” Lawhead said. “I heard it and heard it and heard it, but then when I was actually logging the data and calculating how often I heard it, I heard it from students, I heard it from parents, in the top 10 from community organizations, from teachers. Everyone was saying that our parents have a critical role.”

The fourth goal focuses not only on getting students ready for college or a career, but also helping them find their interests. The fifth goal focuses on health.

“Because we know if a student isn’t healthy, they’re not going to learn,” Lawhead said.

 Taking action

Along with creating action teams around each goal, another step is to look at areas the community is already doing well in, and then groups will look at barriers to overcome.

Austin Aspires will also collect data throughout the process to make sure efforts are succeeding in their endeavor to help students become successful.

The first action teams meeting was Nov. 17 at the Austin Public Library. The public is invited to attend future meetings or to comment on goals via the websitewww.austinaspires.org.

“We want all students that go to school in Austin and live in our community to have the sky as the limit for what they can achieve in their life,” Lawhead said. “To be good citizens, to be healthy and happy productive members of our community. To remove any barriers to their success.”

For questions or to get involved with Austin Aspires, contact Lawhead at 507-437-0920 or lawhead@austinaspires.org. Or visit www.austinaspires.org or www.strivetogether.org.