Back to School with 20/20 in the News

Posted on September 16, 2009

This month, two local newspapers and a national magazine profiled 20/20 Vision for Schools as part of their back-to-school coverage.

In New York, both city-wide Christian monthlies published “Why Public Schools Matter to God (and Should Matter to You Too),” a column that makes the case to pastors and faith leaders why literacy and education reform are issues requiring their leadership and congregational investment.

Outreach magazine, one of the nation’s most widely circulated Christian magazines, profiled 20/20 in their “Going Public” article about reimagining how churches can engage public schools.

Here are excerpts and links to both articles.

// “Going Public,” by Dave Urbanski, with Sidebar by Jeremy Del Rio, Outreach (Sept/Oct 2009)

A growing number of congregations are learning that outreach to public schools doesn’t mean tearing down an iron curtain or diving into a sea of protests and lawsuits. There’s very little to figure out, invent or dream up. In fact, apart from discovering and meeting the schools’ needs, everything else—spiritual conversations, church attendance, rsion experiences—happens naturally.

[They] have discovered the painfully obvious truth that the church has a credibility problem in America, and if churches have any hope of influencing lives within schools, they have to meet the schools on their terms. This starts with serving with no strings attached — along with an open ear to helping schools overcome their biggest stated obstacles.

// “Why Public Schools Matter to God (and Should Matter to You Too),” by Jeremy Del Rio, Tri-State Voice and Love Express (Sept 2009)

How many eighth grade Bible studies lead with Lamentations? Or Leviticus?

Yet last I checked, Lamentations and Leviticus are part of the Biblical canon, along with Romans and Revelation and lots of other heady reading material.

Should it matter to pastors then that average graduates of America’s city schools read at eighth grade levels?

If pastors believe Scripture, then absolutely it should. Romans teaches that spiritual transformation occurs by renewing the mind according to the Word of God – not at altar calls or church services. Besides being ill-equipped to compete in an information economy, where the currency is fluency with words, how likely are poor readers to engage the written Word?

Regardless of whether literacy matters to pastors, it matters to prison wardens. States allocate prison construction dollars based on fourth grade reading test scores.

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