Issac Bailey | Coming together for kids

Save the date:

On Aug. 27 at 3 p.m., I will be hosting a three-hour seminar based on what I've learned from recent reporting about local violent crime.

The event, "Moving Beyond Colorblindness: Examining the Intersection of Race, Culture, Crime and Education along the Grand Strand," will be at Christ Community Church at 1500 U.S. 501 Business, right where U.S. 501 and U.S. 501 Business intersect.

We are hoping to convince a bevy of local leaders from the business, education, sports, government and other industries to participate.

Invites are going out soon, but this column doubles as a general invite for local leaders and the public.

The event will include a presentation from Freedom Readers, a non-profit literacy group founded by my wife. The challenges and opportunities they've discovered during a year of working to improve the reading skills of kids growing up in two Conway Housing Authority complexes will be discussed, along with practical solutions that could help address the stubborn achievement gap.

Carolyn Ellis, a Freedom Readers board member, has already indicated she plans to be there with her husband, Coastal Carolina University men's basketball coach Cliff Ellis and other associates.

The story of a little girl who witnessed a shooting shortly before a reading session - and had to block out that experience to focus on her work - will be addressed and teachers who struggle with how to reach this set of students will find the presentation particularly useful.

Reaching kids in stressful situations early in life is vital. Children who grow up in poverty and are not reading proficiently in the third grade are six times more likely to not finish high school than those who are proficient readers, according to "Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation," a study funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

I will present data and insight based on years of reporting and writing about race, culture and crime, which culminated recently in a series of stories about the efforts being spearheaded by a group of Myrtle Beach mothers to curb crime. They each lost children to violence and their stories have sparked new initiatives and rekindled old ones designed to grapple with this particular problem.

Some of those efforts received a tacit endorsement from Myrtle Beach City Council on Tuesday during a workshop presentation led by community activist Bennie Swans and others. The program, which would combine the coordinated efforts of multiple private and public agencies designed to serve youth, if approved and supported, could provide an example that can be duplicated in other areas of the Grand Strand.

It's a heavy, multifaceted lift that can - and probably will - run into all sorts of unforeseen land mines if those involved aren't careful.

Those landmines include the too-often misunderstood or underappreciated intersection of race, culture, education and crime.

We all know it's there. Some of us want to believe it is irrelevant, while others don't deal with it well when we try.

The Aug. 27 seminar is designed to help local leaders and members of the public better identify those landmines - and how to ensure those mines don't blow up their well-intentioned and important efforts.

Any questions, get in touch with me.