Daily Outtakes: UWF, Warrington Prep, United Way

Dr. Martha Saunders said on “Real News with Rick Outzen” that the University of West Florida has set a new enrollment record.

• “We’ve hit another record enrollment,” said the UWF president. “We broke 14,000 students. We’re up 6% overall, so it’s shaping up to be a pretty good year.”

Pen Air Field will be ready for the first home football game against Kentucky Wesleyan on Friday, Sept. 1. See schedule.

Dr. Saunders has set her sights on building a football stadium.

“We are working on our planning for next steps where I want make sure that we have a good plan. Stadiums are not easy things to build. They’re not things that you get state money to do. And so we’re making a plan to figure out how we do that.”

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Managing Expectations

Warrington Preparatory Academy began its first school year with 620 students.

• The Florida Board of Education made the Escambia County School Board hand over the middle school after failing to improve its academic performance over the past decade.

Principal Dr. Erica Foster said the school’s first week focused on expectations. She said, “We went through what are the school-wide expectations of the students. We modeled to them how to walk in the walk in the hallway. We modeled to them how they should be responding in the cafeteria and in the classroom.”

“Young people need to know that before we get to academics because the building has to be safe, and the students have to understand how to respond when things do happen or when things don’t go their way.”

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A Better Way to Give

On the day that Escambia Children’s Trust executive director announced her resignation after complaints about its grant process, United Way of West Florida held its annual meeting to celebrate its $4 million impact on the community with any allegations of politics or favoritism.

• United Way’s CEO Laura Gilliam said their grant process has taken years to develop.

“It’s a volunteer-driven process,” said Gilliam.”We’re engaging the community in that process when we do our community investment grants, and we’re constantly looking at data.”

“We’re listening to what’s going on in the community. We’re having conversations about where we need to be investing our resources, whether that’s money, whether that’s time through volunteers. And we try to make sure that we’re being relevant and know what’s going on in the community.”

Dig Deeper

She said that United Way also looks internally and gathers feedback from volunteers on how to tweak the process every year.

“We have a rubric that our volunteers use to review and score the grant,” Gilliam shared. “We give agencies an opportunity not only to provide the written portion of the application but also to come in and do a presentation. So if they’re maybe better at one than the other that provides some balance.”

She added, “It is a very fair process, and I would encourage anybody who’s interested to step forward and volunteer for that.”