UMaine Part of $45.6 Million National Youth Literacy Project
Contact: Mary Rosser, 581-2445; Anne Pooler, 581-2441
ORONO — The University of Maine Reading Recovery initiative is part of a national network of 16 colleges and universities receiving $45.6 million to help improve literacy skills for an estimated 500,000 first-graders struggling with reading and writing.
UMaine’s College of Education and Human Development is receiving $2.9 million in federal funds to substantially expand its statewide Reading Recovery initiative, a scientifically based short-term early literacy intervention model that already has helped thousands of Maine first-graders improve literacy skills.
The five-year grant will enable the Reading Recovery teacher training network to add 50 new specially trained Reading Recovery teachers per year, increasing their ranks exponentially to more than 250 throughout the state by the end of the five-year period, according to Mary Rosser, the University of Maine’s coordinator of literacy professional development programs and director for Reading Recovery.
The expanding training program “will make a huge difference for education communities in Maine,” says Rosser, the principal investigator for the grant and an internationally recognized researcher in early literacy education.
Anne Pooler, dean of the College of Education and Human Development, says the grant project will have a noticeable statewide impact on children performing in the lowest quarter of their class and having the greatest difficulty learning to read and write.
“Literacy is a key to education and a lifetime gift,” Pooler says. “This grant will benefit Maine school systems, families, and youngsters directly and could conceivably reach 1000 students. The impact will be statewide.”
Pooler adds that the College of Education and Human development is pleased to partner with Ohio State University and 14 other national institutions in this major research project.
The funding, available as a result of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was obtained by Ohio State, which brought the Reading Recovery concept to the United States in 1984. Ohio State is leading the national initiative to significantly broaden the network of trained Reading Recovery teacher leaders and teachers in schools nationwide.
Children in poor or rural areas are particularly vulnerable to literacy challenges statistically. Nine Reading Recovery teacher leaders are currently working in regional training sites in Enfield, Dexter, Old Town, Benton, Auburn, Lewiston, Oxford Hills/Western Maine and Westbrook, according to Rosser.
Two teacher leaders are working in Lewiston, working with many newly arrived children from Africa and attending the Gov. James B. Longley and Montello schools in Lewiston, showing positive results.
The new national Reading Recovery expansion initiative, the Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund, is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and is part of a $10 billion investment in school reform made possible through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
In Maine, the grant also will allow the UMaine-based Reading Recovery network to train one extra Reading Recovery teacher leader and establish another Reading Recovery regional training site.