$2.7 million grant to boost reading skills
in rural classrooms.
For some children, kindergarten is their first taste of school — the first time they don their mini-backpacks and head to class ready to learn. But First Chance for Children stresses the importance of preparing children before they enter kindergarten.
The organization, which prepares at-risk children for their first school experiences, will have $2.7 million in federal grant money to support its cause.
First Chance has been awarded a three-year Early Reading First grant from the U.S. Department of Education to improve literacy and language education in rural Boone County school districts. The grant will be used to fund First Chance’s Rural Excellence program, which uses a threefold method of teaching children.
Training teachers to turn their classrooms into language- and literacy-rich environments will be the main focus of the grant money. “Once we train the teachers, they’re trained forever,” said Eleanor Farnen, former president and current member of the board of directors of First Chance for Children. “It’s a great investment.”
The program will also provide technical assistance and mentoring for teachers as they go through the program. First Chance will bring in experts and speech pathologists to make sure teachers have what they need to educate their students, Farnen. Finally, the program will work with parents and school districts to ensure that students smoothly transition into kindergarten.
“In structuring this grant, we felt strongly about the need to bring everyone to the table — children, teachers, parents and school districts — to create the kind of seamless program that produces real and lasting results,” Lana Poole, executive director of First Chance for Children, said in a news release.
First Chance is one of only 32 programs in the United States, and of two in Missouri, to receive funding under the Early Reading First program, but the Department of Education has yet to say why First Chance received the grant. Farnen said she thinks one reason was the group’s ability to demonstrate the need for the money.
Last year, First Chance’s Ready for School program was awarded a $285,519 federal grant to improve behavioral and emotional skills of at-risk children in Boone County.
Farnen said she anticipates that First Chance will receive the grant money in October and will begin implementing programs soon after. “We’ve already begun contacting preschools,” she said.
Schools that will benefit from the grant include Centralia Head Start and preschools in Hallsville, Sturgeon, Fayette and Boone County R-IV districts.
Farnen said the grant will have a profound long-term effect. “If you spend money on early education, when kids enter kindergarten, their academic performance will continue to grow,” she said. “It’s the kind of grant that really will change lives.”