Lakewood – In a tiny room just large enough for a C-shaped table and a few chairs, reading teacher Lori Larson displays more than a dozen white cards in front of three second-graders and watches as they scramble to match up words that rhyme.
“You could use ‘crib’ and ‘bib,”‘ Emery Schattinger, an 8-year-old second-grader at Hutchinson Elementary School tells Larson proudly. His classmate Sami Diab chimes in, “I got, ‘skate,’ ‘gate,’ ‘mice,’ ‘dice.”‘
“Tell me,” Larson asks, “why do these words rhyme?” Tom Lyall, 8, explains: “Because they have the same ending sounds.”
Larson is able to split her time between Hutchinson and Rooney Ranch Elementary School each day, helping nearly 40 struggling readers with phonics, word fluency and vocabulary, thanks to Read to Achieve – a popular grant program created by the state legislature six years ago to help Colorado’s lowest-performing readers.
“It is a very significant grant” of $34,536 for Hutchinson, principal Beth Bacon said. “If we didn’t have a Read to Achieve grant, we wouldn’t have” Larson.
Helping 14,000 students
Read to Achieve benefits 14,000 kids in 70 school districts with such literacy programs as reading academies, summer reading clinics and after-school tutors. The grant program, which has disbursed $101 million over six years, is funded with settlement money from the lawsuit years ago against tobacco companies. During the next school year, the program is expected to target children in kindergarten through third grade.
The program came under fire last year in a legislative audit that said the state Department of Education did not track student performance well enough to show whether the program was working. The department’s review process also did not effectively target funds where they are most needed, the report said.
As a result, the legislature has tightened rules for the grant program to require districts to show their students are among the state’s neediest before they can apply for the money.
Districts awarded a grant are also required to test students to demonstrate that at least 25 percent of students had become proficient readers. However, each district has been picking its own test to measure progress.
Starting with the 2007-08 school year, state law will require all grant winners to use one common test to report student progress.
Debora Scheffel, director of competitive grants and Colorado Reading First at the Colorado Department of Education, said 90 percent of the schools reported that 25 percent of students were proficient, but the audit of the program last year questioned how that progress could be accurately measured without a uniform test.
The legislature wants “to make sure this money is being used to good effect,” she said.
State Rep. Debbie Benefield helped sponsor legislation this year for Read to Achieve to continue until 2014. For the 2007-08 school year, the state legislature authorized about $4.5 million for Read to Achieve.
Benefield, D-Arvada, said districts can use multiple tests for their benefit, but in reports to the state, the tool must be uniform to allow the state to compare students’ performance across districts.
She added that the state will be encouraging schools with the weakest readers to pursue the grant so that those students can be helped.
The State Board of Education could decide on which test will be used as early as today at its regular meeting.
Joy Perry, director of instructional support in the Fort Morgan School District, said having one test makes sense.
“We do need to have a standardized and uniform measurement so we know we are comparing apples to apples,” she said.
Staff writer Karen Rouse can be reached at 303-954-1684 or krouse@denverpost.com.
