<p>Florida schoolchildren will have a better shot at success thanks to a $10 million grant given to the University of Florida and a private nonprofit group in Miami, university officials announced Monday.</p>
<p>The W.K. Kellogg Foundation grant will be shared by UF's Lastinger Center for Learning, an institute with particular focus on improving high-poverty elementary schools, and the Miami-based Early Childhood Initiative Foundation, which launched in 1999.</p>
<p>The grant will help to fund a program called "Ready Schools Florida," which aims to help children succeed in school by improving teacher quality and eliminating the barriers many children face outside of school, including lack of health care. The program would first focus on schools in the Miami-Dade area, where the foundation and center have already begun their work, and then expand into other Florida counties.</p>
<p>Don Pemberton, director of UF's Lastinger Center, said the grant marks an important first step in tackling the myriad issues that must be confronted if education reform is to take hold. Basic health care, dental care, a strong pre-kindergarten program, adequate after-school options and skilled teachers for students are all ingredients necessary for children to succeed, Pemberton said.</p>
<p>The grant would be used to stimulate greater communication among all the entities involved in making children's success possible, he said. Dentists, doctors, teachers and education officials all need to be talking with each other, he said.</p>
<p>"You have all of these different organizations that provide services to kids, but none of them are connected," he said. "Because of that, kids fall through the cracks."</p>
<p>Pemberton concedes the broad-based reform agenda put forth by "Ready Schools Florida" often seems overwhelming.</p>
<p>"Many of these systems are inefficient and dysfunctional and now we're working across several systems," he said. "Yes it's hard, but we see no other way but to begin (reform)."</p>
<p>To help improve teacher quality, UF is already offering a "job-embedded" masters program in eight high-poverty schools in Miami-Dade. The program, which is free except for the cost of books, allows teachers to earn a master's degree in two years if they commit to staying in the school for five years.</p>
<p>David Lawrence, president of the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation, said the grant will help the foundation continue its work in early education. Lawrence, former publisher of the Miami Herald, said the foundation wants to continue improving child care providers. The foundation has focused its efforts on helping child-care centers earn accreditation, which recognizes centers for quality. Since the foundation began its work eight years ago, the number of accredited child-care sites in Miami-Dade grew from 17 to 361, according to the foundation.</p>
<p>"If you improve the quality of teaching, and improve the health and well being of kids, you're going to see results," Pemberton said.</p>