After state and national election cycles offered nary a word about education, it’s reassuring the Greater Waco Community Education Summit looms again on our calendar because this issue hits us not only where we live but where we’re bound as a community.

That said, we believe this is also the year that the summit proves its relevance with hard and fast recommendations about where educators, parents and business must focus. It is at that critical juncture where it must at last blossom as a dynamic force in local education or fade.

After a lively meeting with Greater Waco Community Education Alliance officials — executive director Virginia DuPuy, Waco Foundation executive director Ashley Allison and Richard Hinckley of the Center for Occupational Research & Development — we’re excited and confident this conference will be the former: imbued with urgency, focus and solidly pragmatic solutions.

No longer is this to be the stuff of theories and wishful thinking. It’s time for all to fire up this intricate community engine for the benefit of our children. That doesn’t mean the solutions will be easy, but they must get us on the track of pulling resources into a viable societal apparatus to truly advance.

We’ve been full of praise for the alliance’s work the past couple of years, including two previous summits. But much time has also been spent gathering data, setting up the alliance as a sustainable organization and gauging the abilities and even the willingness of nonprofit agencies to help out.

Our meeting with alliance officials convinces us that we’re past much of that and are poised for action. We found a drive and passion that we hadn’t seen before, a willingness to offer concrete ways that, for instance, businesses can help beyond the considerable mentoring programs that some already provide local students.

The exciting summit agenda this week defines how far the alliance has come: Walker Moore of Waco Community Development will discuss how parents can be engaged in an educational process that many are now sadly removed from. This is essential if our youths are to have any real success in life, both professionally and personally.

Diana Freeman of the Texas Association of School Boards will lead a discussion on how school boards can work closely with constituents — and, we hope, how boards can unite to crusade for meaningful educational improvements from an increasingly aloof Texas Legislature.

Jim Haller, executive vice president of marketing at First National Bank of Central Texas, will lead a forum on ways business can help schools — and how current partnerships involving business and education are working. This is crucial because business ultimately benefits from critical and kinetic young minds.

Rick Stephens, senior vice president of The Boeing Company, will discuss the poorly understood but critical role parents play in their child’s brain development and lifelong learning capacity. He’ll discuss why in 1963 the performance of U.S. high school students began to falter for the first time in our history. (Stephens speaks at tomorrow’s banquet beginning at 6:15 p.m. in the convention center.)

Alliance officials tell us a child should successfully learn to read by third grade, after which he reads to learn. With this third summit, it’s time for all involved to not only heartily discuss but embrace prescriptive solutions and in the process learn something about what we’re capable of as a community.

This isn’t just about the kids. It’s about us as an evolving society.