Act Now, or React Later? The Choice is Clear

Imagine that you could invest $1,500 to prevent a house fire. Without that investment, the cost to rebuild this hypothetical home soars upward of $460,000. This doesn’t include the devastation that goes along with the loss, the inevitable heartbreak as you and your family rebuild and recover from the trauma – and that’s if all of you make it out alive. Wouldn’t you rather spend $1,500 to keep your family, your home, and your future intact? J3 Foundation is asking that very same question – but for the future of our nation’s children.

When we lose these kids, and they end up in prison as adults, California spends approximately $460,000 over the life of an average inmate’s incarceration. J3’s goal: intervene early and use the power of literacy to interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. It takes only $1,500 per J3 student to keep the community, the families, and these kids’ futures intact.

This isn’t just charity, it’s strategic; a transformative shift. Will we wait for grim statistics or proactively shape a brighter future for these kids, for our community?

Schools: Too Little, Too Late

Reading instruction typically ends after grade 3. Although California recognizes that low literacy students risk falling behind, vital programming is focused on beginning readers. Sadly, many fourth graders have “aged out” of literacy programs.

Even before the pandemic, student achievement was plummeting, and the steepest decline occurred among lower-income students of color. Post-pandemic, a  Brookings Institute study found that reading test score gaps expanded dramatically between students in low-poverty and high-poverty schools. The gap “grew 15%, primarily during the 2020-21 school year.” Without intervention, struggling kids could instead become high school dropouts – a group 3.5 times more likely to be arrested than kids who graduate. What if we could turn today’s below grade readers into tomorrow’s highly effective adults? J3 is filling that strategic need in the greater Los Angeles area.

Your Support Can Change Lives

J3’s in-school reading intervention creates and fosters fundamental reading skills such as vocabulary and decoding, and more sophisticated learning strategies including reflection and discussion. Their after-school Cozy Reading Club builds strong connections to joy and achievement in reading and learning. 

Supporting J3 can change the trajectory of a child’s life—especially when compared to the real-life dollar costs of not intervening. A single school can receive an entire year of J3’s transformative services for just $32,000. A contribution of $100,000 enables J3 to open three additional schools and change more than 100 lives. 

Back J3 Foundation, and be part of rewriting these young lives’ stories. The stakes are high, the cause urgent – the choice is clear.

Reference Index:

• California now spends about $106,000 each year to keep a person incarcerated for a year, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
• Bureau of Justice Statistics states that “The average time served by state prisoners released in 2018…was 2.7 years.”
• ⅔ of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare (NAAL)