The Louisiana Board will take to the polls soon to choose whether to award more than $10 million in education grants to go towards 67 school systems across the state specifically to improve the reading and writing skills of struggling students.

The main focus of this funding is “to advance the pre-literacy, reading and writing skills of disadvantaged youth, birth through grade 12, including English learners and students with disabilities.” There were only 11 states in the US to be chosen to receive this funding and Louisiana was one of them.

According to State Superintendent John White, “Research shows the early grades are vital for later school success. The key skills students develop one year must be built upon and reinforced the next.  As we enter into the second year of this grant, we must focus our attention on ensuring our children have access to a high-quality continuum of learning that could make a difference in positive, long term achievement outcomes.”

In order to fulfill the grant requirements, if awarded each of the 67 school systems implement the following 4 policies:

• Extend CLASS, a nationally regarded system of measures used in Louisiana’s early childhood accountability system to evaluate teacher-student interactions, into Kindergarten classrooms;
• Collaborate with experts to review students’ writing samples to gauge their knowledge of language and conventions in grade 1;
• Adopt classroom observation tools to measure teachers’ use of standards-aligned materials that impact student learning experiences in grades 1 and 2; and
• Implement a new skills check-up at the end of grade 2 to provide insight on students’ mastery of literacy and numeracy.

For more details on educational grant funding in Louisiana, click here.

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