Public education advocates want Nashville to be known as a great place for kids, not just tourists

One of Nashville’s biggest public school advocate groups are asking Metro officials to make bigger moves to support local students. The Nashville Public Education Foundation wants the city to create what’s called a child opportunity index.

It measures “neighborhood resources and conditions that help children develop in a healthy way.” These are social factors tied to education, including: air quality, school performance and grocery stores.

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In Nashville, with rising housing costs, many families lack access to a sustainable place to live and good wages. Kids who do grow up in communities with access to those things are more likely to grow into healthy and productive adults, according to children’s research program diversitydatakids.org.

Metro Schools already has dozens of academic programs and partnerships with community groups to address environmental factors that may have a negative impact on students. But, some education leaders say that’s not enough.

“We have some neighborhoods that have no access to a library, or a health care facility that is going to meet their needs,” says Katie Cour, president of NPEF, “and that’s not the type of city that we want for our kids.”

Cour told WPLN News that where a child lives affects the type of resources they have. Creating a local child opportunity index, she adds, will help inform policymakers on how the decisions they make trickle down to students. She says “what gets measured, gets done.”

“Only 12% of our schools are considered to be in high opportunity neighborhoods in Nashville,” Cour says, “and in addition, a large percentage of our struggling schools are in very low or low opportunity neighborhoods in our community.”

Many Nashville kids live in high-crime and underinvested neighborhoods. The city hasn’t provided them with basic necessities, like safe parks. The experience that kids have in Nashville is different than what’s experienced by tourists.

“One of the real hopes here is that the city and the school system are aligned and advancing together, in parallel, to drive the outcomes that we want to see for our children and youth,” says Jennifer Hill, the foundation’s vice president of policy and programming.