Rock Hill elementary schools will soon have another weapon against illiteracy – two new programs funded through Gov.

Monday, January 10, 2000

Rock Hill elementary schools will soon have another weapon against illiteracy – two new programs funded through Gov. Bob Taft’s OhioReads program.

The school district recently received $240,000 – $60,000 for each of four elementaries – to begin an accelerated reader program and a reading recovery program, said Sam Hall, district assistant superintendent.

"We had all of our elementaries make applications for the OhioReads grants, and all four of our elementaries received them," Hall said. "The grant is to be used for reading improvements within the buildings."

With the impending consolidation of all elementary-aged students in the district, Rock Hill school officials decided to concentrate on similar programs for each individual building, Hall added.

"We want to have a common base of things when we come together as one," he said.

The reading recovery program will involve training teachers to work one-on-one with troubled students, while the accelerated reader program supplies both training and computer software to help teach the basics, Hall said.

"We’re working to get teachers trained with the new ways of presenting the reading material," he said. "Reading recovery has a large success rate. It’s a program where you don’t have a lot of pupils per teacher, so it can be very costly. But through this grant, we can get several teachers trained.

"This is a big plus for our district."

One to two teachers in each elementary school building will attend an intensive training program this summer using the reading recovery grant funding, said Vickie Evans, Rock Hill Elementary No. 4 principal.

"We applied for this grant to target our low functioning first-graders in terms of their reading ability," Mrs. Evans said. "We also felt we needed a program to help the bulk of students in kindergarten through fifth grade that takes a child at his or her own pace."

Mrs. Evans said the district elementaries will be able to do both these things with the OhioReads grants.

While the reading recovery program will only target first-graders, the accelerated reader program will be available for all teachers and students in kindergarten through fifth-grade, Mrs. Evans added.

"We’re very pleased and positive about this," she said. "There were over 1,600 applications in the state, and we received all four of our OhioReads grants. I think this will make a positive impact on the children and help increase the students’ reading ability."

Other districts in Lawrence County that received similar grants include Chesapeake, Ironton and Fairland.