“We were delighted to receive an email of appreciation from Deborah Duitch. She has been a director at the Bellevue School District for 10 years, inspiring and leading her remarkable staff to expand high quality early learning for our community. Eastside Pathways is so grateful to Deborah’s leadership as co-lead partner for the School Readiness collaborative for the past five years. Her passion to serve all children and seek out creative ways to build partnerships and implement adaptive improvements to the early learning system has benefited both our partner organizations in the early learning sector and our communities’ families and youngest learners. Deborah will be greatly missed but her contributions will continue to strengthen our community.”
Eastside Pathways Board Member Cathy Habib and Executive Director Stephanie Cherrington
Email from Deborah Duitch, Director of Early Learning and Afterschool at Bellevue School District
Stephanie,
I wanted to take a moment to personally thank you for your on-going support and efforts that have resulted in increased opportunities for our most vulnerable young children to attend district preschool. From the beginning, Eastside Pathways has been a strong advocate for all children to enter kindergarten with the skills needed for success. When the BSD Head Start slots were eliminated in 2016, Eastside Pathways assumed a lead convening role to replace the lost funding and for our community to be able to provide universal access for all low-income children.
Last week as we were preparing a Bellevue School Foundation grant request, we realized that this school year every three- and four-year-old preschooler whose family was eligible for free/reduced meals was offered a seat in district preschool. This is great news! Through a community-wide effort, we have been able to establish a comprehensive tuition-assistance system that leverages a wide-variety of funding sources to make this dream a possibility.
Further good news is that every three- and four-year-old whose family’s income is below the 185% Federal Poverty Level (FPL) who has completed the application process has a seat in preschool next fall.
This is an amazing achievement for our community that might not have happened without the support of Eastside Pathways. Hundreds of young children have, and will continue to have, the benefits of high quality preschool participation.
Thank you Stephanie for all of your leadership and hard work,
Deborah