An eventful year for Read Fort Worth ends with momentum towards 2020, as we continue to support the dedicated and mission-driven elementary school teachers and leaders that work every day in our classrooms so that children can learn how to read.
Along the way, we’ve focused our early-literacy efforts on a Strategic Framework consisting of Three Pillars of Work: In-District, Out-of-School and Family. The Three Pillars are grounded in the philosophy that to reduce or mitigate a child’s barriers to learning, we must meet students where they are throughout their lives. The work done within each of these pillars is directly tied to third-grade reading, with strategies and action items designed to produce measurable results.
Among the highlights in 2019:
• The Summer Scholars Collaborative consisted of 12 programs at more than 60 sites serving more than 3,000 kids. Each program contained a purposeful literacy component designed to help curb “summer slide,” the loss of literacy levels between school years. Read more about the programs here.
• The Classroom Library Campaign outfitted every prekindergarten through second grade teacher in Fort Worth ISD with 50-100 books for individual classroom libraries. In total, more than 130,000 books were donated to the District’s 84 elementary schools. Read more about the Campaign celebration at Carroll Peak Elementary here.
• We assisted in the coordinated recruitment of at least 1,000 Reading Volunteers as part of a comprehensive reading volunteer initiative to support FWISD for the 2019-20 school year. Read more about it here.
• In partnership with FWISD, we created a Bright Spots series to spotlight District elementary schools making meaningful academic progress, specifically in the areas of early childhood literacy.
• Read Fort Worth also participated in a number of FWISD and community events, including the Arlington Heights Literacy Rally, Unity in the Community Coalition’s Family and Youth Summit, the NCAA’s Readers Become Leaders, Día De Los Niños Libra’s Festival and the Mayor’s Summer Reading Challenge.