Community Foundation of Northwest MS for Hernando Excel By 5

Excel By 5 is an innovative early childhood community program focusing on a community's young children. It sets forth a variety of standards involving parent training, community participation, child care, and health to help communities focus on supporting young children and their families. It emphasizes the important roles parents and early childhood educators play in the lives of children during their most formative years - birth to age 5.

Excel By 5 is a community-based program designed to improve a child's overall well-being by age five with a goal that all of the community's children will be ready to learn when they start school at age five. Hernando Excel By 5 aims to provide all children in Hernando, ages birth to age five, with age appropriate books to prepare them for Kindergarten. The DPIL is promoted on the city's social media and the DeSoto Times Tribune has written articles about the program. Forms are available at city hall and the library, as well as all Excel By 5 community-wide events. The coalition gave away over 800 children's books and 100 DPIL forms in October at Trunk or Treat on the Square. Forms are dispersed and referrals are made at Head Start, local child care centers, and preschools. When the program commenced Mayor Chip Johnson, city staff, and coalition members knocked on doors in some disadvantaged neighborhoods in an effort to enroll children who were most in need. We continue to look for ways to find funding and promote the program to enable us to enroll even more children.