If you’re investing in improving a community’s early childhood outcomes, how do you know if it is working? 

That is a key question facing officials in Guilford County, N.C., where local leaders have joined forces with the Endowment and other funders to build a groundbreaking early childhood system of care. 

Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready), the local “backbone” agency driving the effort, aims to build a connected, innovative system of care for Guilford County’s youngest children and their families. The agency envisions a countywide system that reaches all children, even those who have yet to enter preschool and kindergarten. 

But few, if any, American communities have ever built such a system, so local officials lacked comprehensive data points or benchmarks to consult, especially regarding children who haven’t reached preschool. 

To resolve that dilemma, Guilford County Schools in 2025 began administering the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a well-researched community measure of children’s health, development and school readiness. By assessing young children’s development levels in virtually every kindergarten class in the county, the EDI can help identify areas to improve early childhood services and community conditions so that more children are prepared for success in school. 

“As a school system, we know that readiness doesn’t begin on the first day of kindergarten,” said Guilford County Schools Superintendent Whitney Oakley. 

“The EDI is a powerful tool to understand the whole child and to partner with families and the community to build a stronger, more connected system of support as they transition to school-age.” The EDI hopefully will supply a baseline reading on local children’s early development so officials and the public can follow along in subsequent years and get a sense of the initiative’s impact, said Ed Kitchen, a former co-chair of the board of Ready Ready. 

“We wanted to come up with something that would be a measure of population-level outcomes,” he said, “something that the community writ large could look at and say, ‘Yes, we’re making progress.’” 

The 2025 results showed 49 percent of children were on track across five domains of readiness, with neighborhood-level rates ranging from 19 percent to 87 percent. It marked the county’s firstever comprehensive assessment of school readiness. Now, leaders can use the data to recommend improvements to better coordinate services and target supports in select geographic areas. 

Two local grantmaking organizations — the Joseph M. Bryan Foundation, led by Kitchen, and the Cemala Foundation, led by Susan Schwartz — pushed for the data collection. Schwartz and Kitchen served as co-chairs of the Ready Ready board from 2018 to 2023. 

The two leaders said their foundations see the EDI as both a diagnostic tool and a potential lever to help build community will behind early childhood priorities. Schwartz said leaders hope to administer the EDI every one to three years, and as the longitudinal data builds, the community will get a better sense of how early childhood needs and gaps are changing before kids arrive at kindergarten. 

“If they’re coming to school unprepared, then you can try to do things earlier in the neighborhoods to address that,” she said. “That would help us.” 

The Endowment has supported Ready Ready’s work in Guilford County since 2018, and sees the countywide introduction of the EDI as an encouraging development. 

“This is an ambitious community-wide effort with audacious goals,” said Meka S. Sales, director of Special Initiatives for the Endowment. “It will take the entire community coming together to reach them. The introduction of the EDI gives local leaders a good solid base of data to guide them as they build and refine this critically important new system of care that families want and deserve.”