Members of the Troy community joined officials from the Troy City Council, Troy City Schools and Troy University Tuesday night to discuss action plans for local education.

The meeting was the next step in the “Cradle to Career” series, sponsored by the three entities and moderated by the David Mathews Center for Civic Life, to bring the community together to tackle the tough challenges of the school system and take actions to embrace opportunities to improve.

Council and board officials met Monday to discuss the first series of meetings and come up with actions they can take to improve education.

“It’s time now to move from talking to taking action,” said Councilwoman Stephanie Baker, head of the city’s education committee. “We all have a voice, an experience an opinion. It has value here and it is safe here. We’re asking you, inviting you, to talk together about what we can do as a community for our children. Let’s try to consciously move from abstract ideas to concrete solutions. There’s an opportunity if you’re willing to invest and make that happen.”

“We need to recognize we have a lot of common ground that exists,” said Jonathan Cellon, school board member. “We have differences, but we have a lot of shared commonalities when it comes to making the future of our children as strong as possible.”

Residents including business and education leaders and elected officials broke into tables based on five topics that came from the first round of discussion in October. The categories included:  creating increased opportunities for parental involvement, diversifying afterschool programs, focusing on workforce development, capitalizing on existing assets and promoting communication, and addressing community mental health and wellbeing.

Residents broke up into the tables that they were most interested in assisting with.

On each of the topics, the groups discussed questions including what project idea can address the identified challenge, what the objective of that project is, who else might be passionate in the project that could be involved, when the project would take place, how funds could be raised, and challenges the project could face.

The discussions were all recorded to be compiled and released on the forum series website in the future. The website is c2ctroy.com