A nonprofit group that wants to improve children's literacy will start a summer reading program in central Arkansas, thanks to three matching grants.
AR Kids Read and its literacy initiative has received three $10,000 Read for Success matching grants from Reading Is Fundamental, the largest children's literacy group in the nation, the group announced Tuesday. With the help of local donors -- including the city of North Little Rock, the Pulaski County Special School District and Crain Ford of Jacksonville -- the program will operate with more than $75,000, said Charlie Conklin, AR Kids Read executive director.
"We're pleased that we will be serving over 600 kids and providing over 5,000 books to these children in the 12 schools, 20 classrooms and seven Boys and Girls Clubs," Conklin said.
Central Arkansas was one of 12 areas nationwide that received the grants to carry out the Read for Success program, an initiative that was tested with some 33,000 third- and fourth-grade students in 16 states over two years. Results showed that 57 percent of the participating students improved in reading from the spring to the fall, compared with the 80 percent that were usually falling behind, the Reading Is Fundamental website states.
Last year, the Whetstone Boys and Girls Club in Little Rock tried out the Read for Success program and thought it worked out well, Conklin said. Because of that, AR Kids Read expanded the program to the Pulaski County school district earlier this month and will take it to the Boys and Girls Clubs starting June 13.
More than 9,000 out of 24,300 elementary school pupils in Pulaski County Special, Little Rock and North Little Rock school districts are not reading at their grade levels, AR Kids Read leaders said. And the majority of students from low-income families don't have access to books, losing three months of reading knowledge during the summer, they said.
"If you compound that over five years of schooling, they can be as far as two to three years behind over the long term," Conklin said. "Sixty-five percent of those students that are reading below grade level at fourth grade are most likely not to graduate and are prone to become part of potentially the prison system or rely on social and government financial assistance."
The grants will allow the children to take home about eight books each.
"A vast, vast number of our students now have no print material in their homes," said Laura Bednar, an associate superintendent and chief academic officer at the Pulaski County Special School District. "When they enter school, that is the first time that many of them have even held a book, much less been read to. I can't tell you the impact this will have."
The school district started the Read for Success program April 1, giving teachers access to new materials and resources, Bednar said. A part of the initiative includes a collection of 35 science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics-themed books for the classroom and media center and access to "standards-aligned curriculum and scaffolding activities" for teachers to incorporate into lessons.
For example, Conklin said, one of the 35 books is Touch the Sky, which is about Alice Coachman, the first black woman to win a gold medal at the Olympics. Her quirk? She sucked lemons before her races as a form of inspiration. Activities for the readers can range from making lemon water to picking out perseverance traits.
Another book is about rivers and how a child designs a submarine, and the field trip associated with that is for the students to visit the USS Razorback, he added.
The program is in place at Cato, Crystal Hill, College Station, Joe T. Robinson, Oakbrooke, Oak Grove, Pine Forest and Sherwood elementaries. It is also in four elementaries in the soon-to-be Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District: Pinewood, Taylor, Tolleson and Warren Dupree.
The curriculum and activities would work the same for the Boys and Girls Clubs.
"It's so exciting when at first you understand and you know that a child is learning to read, but when they switch over to that reading to learn, it is such an exciting time in their life," said Cindy Doramus, the chief executive officer of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Arkansas. "And it's so, so important that we spend their summers being able to give this to the kids and ... give these kids the same opportunities that their friends in school have and that they get to have hands-on opportunities and actually touch and feel what's going on."
While the grant funds will provide the books for this summer alone, Conklin said he's hoping to continue the program in the future -- and expand it.
"The only thing that will happen next summer is they'd need to reorder the books given away," he said. "We'd like to see this potentially expand to the other school districts and more classrooms in the Pulaski County Special School District and the new Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District. We're excited to bring this kind of program to Arkansas so that we can prevent summer learning loss and again utilize the community of volunteers to serve."
Metro on 04/27/2016