Reading program to benefit 50 children in public housing

By Angie Thompson/senior reporter

TIFTON May 15, 2008 10:14 pm

— An eight-week-long summer reading program that begins June 2 will benefit 50 children who live in public housing. Organizers and sponsors hope the program will help students improve and maintain reading skills over the summer and lead to higher graduation rates.
Mike Brumby, director of the Tift County Foundation for Educational Excellence, told Rotary Club of Tifton members Wednesday that he got the idea for the program from a show WALB’s Joe Courson aired that mentioned a summer reading program in Fitzgerald.
“It’s an extremely ambitious, exciting educational program and it involved reading,” Brumby said.
Brumby introduced Shaundra Clark, the director of the Tifton Housing Authority; Jodanna Johnson, the Tifton Housing Authority’s initiative director; Ashley Stone, a Charles Spencer Elementary School teacher; and Mendy Palmer, an Annie Belle Clark Primary School teacher.
Housing authority directors from Tift County submitted to Clark a list of children they nominated to participate in the program. Clark received 190 nominations and the names of the children nominated were then sent to teachers who teach the children in their regular classrooms. The list was then narrowed to 150 and then forwarded back to Clark, who narrowed the list to the 50 who will participate this summer.
Brumby said organizers decided to work with young children. First, second and third-grade students make up one group and fourth, fifth and sixth-grade students the other. One group meets in the morning and the other in the afternoon. The classes, held Monday through Thursday, last three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon.
Stone and Palmer will operate the program and teach the children, who will be bused from various housing authority residents and fed lunch.
Clark said the students will be tested the first day of the program and at the end of the program to determine how the students progressed.
“We are trying to enhance their reading skills so they will be successful and graduate,” Clark said.
In addition to instruction, students in the program will read Accelerated Reader books and take tests on those books.
Palmer, who will be conducting research on the program as a requirement for her master’s degree, said all children, whether they are considered at-risk or not, tend to lose reading skills over the summer. She said the students who participate in the program will be “benchmarked” at the beginning of the school year to determine their reading levels and then checked periodically throughout the year to determine their progress. Also, a control group of students who didn’t receive the summer program instruction will be monitored for purposes of the study.
Brumby said the program is scheduled to run for three summers and “there is potential for expansion of the program.”
Clark said 20 people who live in housing authority residences have volunteered to work with teachers as well as another 40 ABAC students who have volunteered.
According to Brumby, the Stafford Foundation donated $6,400 to help fund the first program. The Rotary Club of Tifton donated $1,000 to the program. Also, the Tift County Rotary Club donated $200 to assist with the cost associated with operating the program.
Brumby said Tift County School Superintendent Patrick Atwater had been very helpful to the program and has opened the book rooms at Annie Belle Clark Primary School and Charles Spencer Elementary School for use by the summer reading program.

To contact senior reporter Angie Thompson, call 382-4321.