Our Work in Education
United Way of the Midlands is focused on education – in funding, community volunteer work and policy advocacy. We are doing it through Success By 6, galvanizing the community to raise awareness of early learning, support families, and push for programs, budgets and laws improving young children's lives. United Way of the Midlands also funds continuing education and adult literacy programs to provide a broad range of educational programs. We all win when a child succeeds in school, when a teenager graduates from high school and when an adult learns to read.
The Work We're Doing
Local volunteers on Community Councils use their knowledge of community problems to distribute funds through multi-year, 
competitive grants where the needs are greatest. To make the best use of contributor dollars, United Way holds agencies accountable for the programs they run, only funding programs with good results. Grants are typically awarded for a period of three years, with continued funding dependent on satisfactory outcome reports. Click on one of the following links to view United Way of the Midlands' Community Investments in Education:
competitive grants where the needs are greatest. To make the best use of contributor dollars, United Way holds agencies accountable for the programs they run, only funding programs with good results. Grants are typically awarded for a period of three years, with continued funding dependent on satisfactory outcome reports. Click on one of the following links to view United Way of the Midlands' Community Investments in Education:Why Focus on Education?
On average, South Carolina's more than 340,000 working-age dropouts each earn $8,000 less than high school graduates each year and reduce state employment by more than 37,000 jobs. Each new class of dropouts produces public costs of $98 million every year. The decision to drop out of school is a response to multiple educational and social factors over a student's lifetime usually beginning in the early grades. Youth often need attention at key transition points—from child care and kindergarten to first grade; from elementary to middle school; from middle school to high school; and from high school to healthy young adulthood. Unfortunately, there are indicators that too many children struggle at these points:
- More than 24% of today's kindergarteners are not ready for first grade.
2007 PACT scores indicate that 45.6% of the South Carolina's children are not reading proficiently by third grade, a strong predictor for academic success.The state's graduation rate is about 52.5.
