2012-2013 i3 Grant
Scaling Up What Works
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Shippensburg
University will share in a $46 million federal grant to expand the Reading
Recovery program. The grant was awarded in early September to lead partner Ohio
State University, Shippensburg and 13 other partner universities and colleges.
Shippensburg's
portion of the grant is $1.8 million distributed over the next four years
includes $300,000 this year. The balance of the grant will be shared with the
14 other partner universities and colleges.
“It was one
of only two grants awarded nationwide,” said Dr. Janet Bufalino, associate
professor of teacher education and Reading Recovery trainer. She estimated that
there were more than 170 applications for the grant.
The federal
grant will help continue the training work, especially due to the recent end of
a three-year Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE) grant that trained
Reading Recovery teacher leaders and teachers but only for Pennsylvania school
districts. “This will expand the training into more districts and into the
three states that weren’t serviced by the PDE grant.” She expects to train 23
teachers this year and 50 teachers in the following three years with the grant
monies.
According
to Bufalino, Shippensburg has been training teacher leaders since the
mid-1990s. “I was hired here and immediately Shippensburg sent me to Ohio State
for a year of training and we have been a training site ever since.”
Bufalino
said she spends a lot of her time with school district administrators, helping
them see the value in Reading Recovery. She noted that the program is always
well received and respected, but current financial constraints at local school
districts often take precedence. Specifically, she said, the use of one teacher
for one student is problematic for many elementary schools.
“I help
them think about the future, that these children won’t go into special
education classes or repeat a grade,” she said. “These teachers may only see
four children for half of a day, but the other half is spent with groups of
kids. And, kids are out of the program in 12 to 20 weeks.”
The result,
Bufalino said, is a lot of children are learning to read, approximately 22,000
since 2001 through Reading Recovery in the mid-Atlantic region.
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