August 2013

The GLR Campaign is a collaborative effort by foundations, nonprofit partners, states and communities across the nation to ensure that more children in low-income families succeed in school and graduate prepared for college, a career and active citizenship.

Attendance Awareness Month Draws Broad Support Nationwide

Nearly 40 national organizations, including the GLR Campaign, and as many as 1,000 schools and communities have joined the Attendance Awareness Month effort, delivering a message that chronic absence can lead to academic trouble and eventually to dropping out.

Nationwide activities include:

• An Ad Council campaign — “Absences Add Up,” with public service advertisements andother materials — will launch Aug. 29.
• New research documenting the effects of chronic absenteeism as early as prekindergarten will be released Sept. 3 by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research.
• A “Twitter Party,” featuring attendance experts and using the attendance month hashtag #SchoolEveryDay, will be hosted on Sept. 10 by America’s Promise Alliance in partnership with the Taco Bell Foundation for Teens and State Farm.
• A policy brief documenting best practices and recommendations for state-level action will be released Sept. 16 by Attendance Works.

About 50 GLR communities so far have signaled their plans to participate locally on the Community Action Map, and we’re urging others to sign up, too.

Don’t miss this great attendance video featuring Oakland, California, schoolchildren and NFL running back Marshawn Lynch. Oakland also is releasing a toolkit; Marshalltown, Iowa, is sponsoring a poster contest; Vernon, Connecticut, is handing out alarm clocks; and Buffalo is posting hundreds of lawn signs.

Enlist Your Superintendents in the Call to Action

The activity around Attendance Awareness Month creates an opportunity to broaden the Superintendents Call to Action to more communities. The Call to Action, launched a year ago by the GLR Campaign and Attendance Works, asks superintendents to build public awareness, drive with data and mobilize the community to reduce chronic absence. About 70 school leaders from 27 states have signed on.

Please share the Call to Action document with your local superintendent and ask him or her to join.

GLR Communities Share Successes, Obstacles in “Tell Our Story”

GLR communities are reflecting on the successes and challenges of the past year through the Tell Our Story effort. More than 20 communities have filed short summaries of their efforts so far to promote community solutions to third-grade reading, and GLR Campaign Managing Director Ralph Smith urged more to submit their stories by Aug. 31.

“By filing your community’s story and commenting on those filed by your colleagues, you can strengthen your own work and theirs and help increase awareness and involvement among the many partners involved in the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading,” Smith wrote in a message to community members.

Community members signed up for the Ning platform can read more about the good work happening across the network by visiting the Tell Our Story page. Learn more here — we look forward to hearing your story!

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Arkansas Celebrates a Week of Early Reading Activities

The Arkansas Campaign for Grade-Level Reading (AR-GLR) celebrated AR-GLR Week from August 12–16. Governor Mike Beebe kicked off the week with the release of a video featuring elementary students from Little Rock reading the governor’s proclamation about AR-GLR Week.

Throughout the week, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation — principal partner and funder for the Campaign in Arkansas — announced grants to three communities as part of the AR-GLR Community Solutions Initiative: AR Kids Read in Central Arkansas, Marvell-Elaine Reads in Marvell and Elaine, and MLK Reads in Little Rock.  These three programs are stellar examples of how parents, schools and communities are working together across Arkansas to achieve reading proficiency for all children by the end of third grade.

The weeklong celebration wrapped up with the announcement of the Arkansas campaign’s new Business Champions who have each pledged to support the state campaign’s action agenda. Read more about the Arkansas effort here.

Ohio, Northern Kentucky Working to Boost Literacy Rates

This month, two GLR communities — Montgomery County/Dayton, Ohio, and Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky — launched Read On! Campaigns to mobilize the entire community toward achieving the goal of every child reading proficiently by the end of third grade. The Montgomery County campaign — spearheaded by ReadySetSoar — aims to create “Super Readers” by pursuing the GLR Campaign’s three community solutions: more children coming to kindergarten ready to learn, more children attending school regularly and more children attending high-quality afterschool and summer programming.

The Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Read On! Campaign — led by The Strive Partnership and the Northern Kentucky Education Council in partnership with United Way of Greater Cincinnati — will also work to engage partners and families in these community solutions to achieve their goal of ensuring that every third grader in the region reads proficiently by the year 2020. Read more about the initiative here.

Bellevue Leader Killed in Plane Crash

Bill Henningsgaard, a leader in the GLR Campaign efforts in Bellevue, Washington, died earlier this month when the small plane carrying him and his teenage son crashed in Connecticut. Henningsgaard,a former Microsoft executive who was executive director of Eastside Pathways, believed that the collective impact approach central to the GLR Campaign was the best way to support low-income children. “Bill walked the talk to make our community stronger,” Stephanie Cherrington, Pathways interim director, wrote in a newsletter to supporters.

Eastside Pathways has created the Bill Henningsgaard Fund for Children in his memory. For more information, click here.

New Britain Reduces Kindergarten Absences by 40 Percent

An intensive effort to emphasize good attendance and reach out to families of chronically absent students resulted in far fewer kindergarten absences in New Britain, Conn. With data showing more than 30 percent of kindergarten students missing 10 percent or more of the school year, New Britain launched an aggressive effort a year ago to track data carefully. Supported by a grant from the Community Foundation of Greater New Britain, the district also hired two part-time family outreach workers dedicated entirely to reaching out to families and helping them remove barriers to attendance.

“They work with parents, because the parent engagement piece is huge. They get involved … to find out what the root problems are,” Joe Vaverchak, attendance director for the school system, told The Hartford Courant. The results: The kindergarten absenteeism rate dropped to 17.5 percent. The rate in first grade fell from 24 to 13.5 percent.

States Spending More on Early Education

Investments in early childhood education are growing, according to a survey of 21 states by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Between 2012 and 2013, spending on prekindergarten programs rose by about $65 million while spending on home-visiting programs increased by almost $49 million. NCSL attributed much of this increase to the $224 million allocated to states under the Affordable Care Act. To access the full report, click here.

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Stay on top of all that is new with the Campaign and with the progress of grade-level reading by making regular visits to our website: www.gradelevelreading.net. The site offers a comprehensive news source on issues related to early childhood, reading development and achievement. Additionally, get the latest updates on federal initiatives and state campaigns and read recent studies on child development and literacy.

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GLR Communities Awarded Grants to Expand AmeriCorps Support

We would like to congratulate our GLR communities and partners that have been chosen through competitive selection processes to receive funding to support their early childhood efforts.

Nine GLR Communities were among those receiving awards in the first round of School Turnaround AmeriCorps grants through the U.S. Department of Education. The program provides a cadre of AmeriCorps members to support low-performing schools around the country with a goal of increasing academic achievement and attendance. Over three years, the $15 million in federal funds for School Turnaround AmeriCorps will be matched by about $18 million from grantees.

Out of the 13 awardees selected for funding, the nine GLR communities included Austin, Texas; Chicago, Ill.; Denver, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Miami; Detroit; New Orleans; and Springfield, Mass.

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Federal Grants Would Expand Children’s Access to Health Care

A number of GLR communities were also among 41 localities awarded a total of nearly $32 million in federal grant money to connect children to health insurance, a key component in ensuring youngsters learn to read well before they finish third grade. The Connecting Kids to Coverage Outreach and Enrollment grants through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will assist in efforts to reach out, enroll and retain eligible children in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The average grant was $775,000 and funding priorities included school engagement in outreach, enrollment and retention. For more information on the grants and a full list of communities receiving funds, click here.

Vote for Your School to Receive Funding from Target

Target has again launched their “Give With Target” back-to-school initiative on Facebook and is asking the public to help donate $5 million to schools nationwide to give teachers and students the resources they need. Guests can visit Target’s Facebook page to vote for the school of their choice once a week. When a school receives 25 votes, Target will donate $1 per vote, with a maximum donation of $10,000 per school. The campaign runs through Sept. 21 or until the full $5 million has been allocated. The program is part of Target’s commitment to give $1 billion to education by the end of 2015.

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Children facing “risk factors” such as learning disabilities, limited English proficiency and poverty are less likely to read proficiently by the end of third grade than their more advantaged peers. Unfortunately, these children — especially those living in poverty — rarely have access to the type of high-quality early education programs they need to be successful readers. A new report from the Institute of Education Sciences looks at early learning supports for young children with significant learning needs and offers a better understanding of how to close the learning gap between these children and their more advantaged peers.

During summer breaks, most students forget some of what they learned during the school year. Losses are cumulative and greater for low-income students. RAND’s new report “Getting to Work on Summer Learning: Recommended Practices for Success” is the second in a series providing the most comprehensive research on summer learning to date. It is part of a five-year demonstration project funded by The Wallace Foundation to examine whether and how summer learning programs can stop summer learning loss and create achievement gains.