Campus News

UK Receives $2.5 Million for Reading Recovery

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Sept. 24, 2010) – Kentucky families will benefit from a new federal grant to extend reading education assistance to young readers. The Reading Recovery University Training Center at the University of Kentucky will receive $2.5 million to train 50 Reading Recovery teachers across the state each year for the next five years.

The Reading Recovery Center is part of Kentucky's Collaborative Center for Literacy Development (CCLD), located at the University of Kentucky. It partnered with The Ohio State University (OSU) and several other states to win the federal Innovation (i3) grant.

The OSU Reading Recovery partnership was one of only 49 awardees announced and only one of four scale-up proposals awarded, receiving the highest overall rating. The intent of the proposal is to build upon the success of the current Reading Recovery intervention program. The total funding for the OSU award is nearly $46 million dollars.

Right now, there are nearly 400 Reading Recovery teachers in Kentucky and 24 Teacher Leaders managing the program across the state. Judy Embry, director of the University Training Center, was recently elected as the president of the Reading Recovery Council of North America.
 
"The i3 grant gives us the opportunity by scaling up Reading Recovery to meet our goal of full implementation in breaking the cycle of literacy failure for the primary student in Kentucky," Embry said.

Reading Recovery is an intense, short-term, early intervention designed to support classroom instruction for struggling readers in the first grade. Students receive daily 30-minute lessons taught by a highly-trained teacher as a supplement to their regular classroom instruction for 12-20 weeks. The goal of Reading Recovery is to assist the least strong readers to become independent readers and writers. This supplemental instruction continues until students can function independently within the average reading range of their peers.

The i3 funding is a result of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It provides funding to support local educational agencies and non-profit organizations partnering with educational agencies or schools. The purpose is to provide grants to applicants with a proven record in student achievement improvement with the idea of expanding implementation to reach more students.

Reading Recovery Kentucky is a professional development initiative of the CCLD housed and operated by the University of Kentucky College of Education. CCLD was created by legislation in 1998 and is a partnership of the eight state public universities and the National Center for Family Literacy. CCLD was created with the mission of promoting early childhood through adulthood literacy in professional development and research for Kentucky educators. Additional information about CCLD may be found at www.kentuckyliteracy.org. The Reading Recovery University Training Center is an affiliate of the Reading Recovery Council of North America (www.readingreacovery.org) housed at The Ohio State University.