Yesterday, the US Department of Education awarded over $108.8 million dollars in Early Reading First Grants to education organizations across the country spanning 18 states and Washington D.C. The grants aim to improve how well prepared children are upon entrance into school with a focus on low-income families. Essentially, the funds are to be used to improve preschool programs supported by Title I, Head Start and publicly funded child care.

According to the researcher, James Crawford, LEP students are 50% more likely to live in poverty than the mainstream population. Keeping in mind that the Reading First Grants are intended to bolster the academic success of kids from low-income families, I certainly hope to see a significant portion of those funds allocated specifically to ELL students and their education translation needs. All too often, school districts do not have the necessary funds to provide culturally sensitive language translations for their ELL student population. Hopefully this $108.8 million dollars will help to close this truly unfortunate education translation gap.

Keep Learning!
Maggie
K12Translate

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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