Teachers receive funding for reading instruction training

Eighteen Kansas teachers are getting help from the state to assist children with reading difficulties catch up to their classmates.

The state support is in the form of scholarships which pay for classes at Emporia State University. The $7,500 scholarships pay for the teachers to be trained in Reading Recovery, a program that focuses on the lowest performing first grade students. The scholarships are part of $250,000 the state legislature approved for Reading Recovery last spring.

Once a child begins sessions with a Reading Recovery trained teacher, research shows that within 12-20 weeks 70 percent of the children in the program will be performing at the level of their classmates, said Connie Briggs, director of ESU’s Reading Recovery Center and trainer in the program.

"The philosophy behind Reading Recovery is to catch the children who are falling behind in the classroom, quickly intervene by delivering a highly intensive, short term program designed for each individual child, and have them at the level of their peers within a short amount of time," she said.

"The difference between this and other reading programs are the teachers, who can concentrate on the students' needs and can accelerate the children's learning because they are highly trained in early literacy development," said Briggs.

In Kansas during the 2001-02 school year, it took an average of 13.6 weeks for students in Reading Recovery to be reading at the level of their peers. Subsequent studies show students who are no longer struggling with reading do not become disengaged from their education.

"The longer we wait to intervene with children who are having literacy difficulties, the wider the achievement gap widens. Most of these students never make up the discrepancy and the negative impact it makes on their school performance and subsequently, on their lives," said Briggs.

Reading Recovery includes 22 university training centers, nearly 3,300 school districts and approximately 18,000 teachers serving more than 150,000 students through the program nationwide.

The Kansas Regional Reading Recovery Training Center is located in the Jones Institute for Educational Excellence at Emporia State University.
The center currently oversees 11 teacher leaders and over 150 Reading Recovery teachers in Kansas, eastern Colorado, and northern Oklahoma. ESU was approved as the 23rd Reading Recovery University Training Center in the spring of 1998.

Scholarship winners include:

Altoona-Midway

Cheryl Landwehr

Barnes

Nancy Roegge

Burlingame

Linda White

Central Heights

Libby Self

Chanute

Peggy Meyers, Jane Richardson, Julie Shaw, Linda Tiegreen, Karen Vallier

Fredonia

Sherryl Weber

Garnett

Dawn Bonham, Rachel Umbarger

Hugoton

Brittani Mahan

Montezuma

Shelly Hibbert

Prairie View

Janette Bennett

Riverton

Christy Mercer

South Lyon Co.

Jane M. Schneider

Wellington

Julie McGuire

Last Updated July 2, 2007>