In December, The First Bank presented the Starkville Oktibbeha Early Learning Collaborative with a $75,000 donation to support prekindergarten in Oktibbeha County. The SOELC is housed at the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District’s Discovery Center and currently provides funding and resources for fifteen pre-K classrooms at four locations: Sudduth Elementary School, West Elementary School, Emerson Family School and the ICS Head Start – Oktibbeha County. The donation is part of an ongoing commitment from The First which qualifies for Mississippi’s one-to-one state tax credit program designed to support expanded early learning opportunities across the state.

“Banking is a lot more than just finance,” said Will Reedy, vice president and branch manager of The First in Starkville. “As an organization, we believe investing in the community helps to provide healthy homes, healthy households, healthy schools, and financial health follows suit. For us, it starts with our youngest students. We’re giving the money to help teachers have the resources to be able to meet each child’s need.”

SOCSD’s Director of Educational Enhancement and Innovative Research, and the shepherd of the district’s grant-based programs, Brandi Burton, echoed the importance of this type of community investment and how it extends well beyond the classroom.

“There are certain things that we can’t do within the requirements of the Early Learning Collaborative grant,” she said. “These dollars from The First make a lot of the things that we do for our students, teachers and families possible. We’re able to help pay for parents to further their education. We’re able to put on family and community events like the annual Possibility Fest and our recent holiday event for families.”

That impact is evident in the growth the SOELC has seen in prekindergarten in the last three years. Since the 2022-2023 school year, the collaborative has increased from seven to fifteen PreK classrooms across its four sites and enrollment has grown from 196 to nearly 300 children for the 2024-2025 school year. This growth is largely a result of the investment from community partners like The First. Plus, investments help the Discovery Center and the Early Learning Collaborative provide greater opportunities for entire families through parental engagement programs.

“Donations like these allow us to do things with our parents that we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise,” said Mary Coleman, program coordinator for the Early Learning Collaborative. “We offer workforce development classes. Parents can take classes at (East Mississippi Community College). We’re also partnering with the Center for Excellence in Literacy Instruction at University of Mississippi right now to host a Parent Academy, which is six sessions on kindergarten readiness to help families prepare children for entering school. These donations help us fund those programs in addition to what we can provide in our pre-K classrooms.”

This whole family approach found at the Discovery Center and through the Collaborative is a strategic way to extend impact from family to school to community, and The First sees the benefit.

“We want to be involved right where we are,” said Reedy. “A bank is supposed to be about enriching our community. So, we’ve used this one-to-one tax credit with the Early Learning Collaborative as a way to invest right back into where we are. We start with setting our schools and our children up for success. In setting them up for success, it grows. We build stronger people and stronger homes that lead to a stronger community.”

Mississippi’s Pre-K Tax Credit program offers a win-win way for businesses or organizations to invest in early learning in their own communities through a one-to-one credit on Mississippi state taxes. The tax credit matches donations up to $1 million that are given to one of the state’s more than 30 Early Learning Collaboratives, providing a significant way to boost educational opportunities for the state’s youngest students.

Robin Barnett, also a branch manager and vice president of The First, said giving back to the community in this way made the choice to invest an easy one.

“It’s just giving back and starting to do more,” he said. “Mississippi is sometimes at the bottom in a lot of areas, but this is a way we can help some of our youngest to get a jumpstart.”