Supporting Literacy for Kids

This is an article written by Jerry Large, Seattle Times Staff Columnist, and is not the original works of myself.

I think I can. I think I can.

Like "The Little Engine That Could," Carol Rasco and Susan Dibble face a seemingly insurmountable task, and like that engine, they are not giving up.

Rasco is the president and CEO of Reading is Fundamental, the oldest and largest nonprofit dedicated to increasing literacy among young children. Dibble is executive director of Page Ahead, a Seattle-based literacy program that serves 55,000 children in Washington state each year.

Page Ahead, like many reading programs across the country, gets a lot of help from Reading is Fundamental, which has long depended on federal money — money that was cut from the budget this year.

That's like giving the ax to Santa Claus. The government seems to be blindly slashing without considering longterm consequences.

RIF gets children excited about reading, especially low-income children. Its primary way of doing that is by partnering with local schools and groups to give books to more than 4 million children a year.

Dibble cites studies showing that, "If a child is not reading at grade level by the time he finishes third grade, he will never catch up."

A recent study by Donald Hernandez at Hunter College, the City University of New York, found that students who did not read at grade level in the third grade were four times less likely to graduate by 19 than proficient readers. The consequences of not reading at grade level are even worse for children in poverty, who are 13 times less likely to graduate than proficient readers who are not poor.

Being able to read well by then is critical, because that is when children switch from learning to read to using reading to acquire information.

Children who don't read well fail classes and often drop out altogether. And, Dibble added, there is a reason "seven in 10 inmates are functionally illiterate." What job would they get?
So RIF focuses on children at risk of failure to read, Rasco said. "And we know poverty is the biggest indicator."

Rasco was in Seattle last week for a meeting of literacy bloggers and to visit local reading programs.

RIF and local partners work with parents, encouraging them to read to their children, and they provide other reading-related programs.

But getting books into the hands of children is the main thing — books the children pick themselves from a selection ordered by local partners, schools, reservations, military bases, Head Start programs, and other locations.

RIF was formed in 1966 and was so successful that Congress created a book-distribution matching fund and contracted with RIF to manage it.

That relationship has continued for 34 years without a hint of corruption or waste, even with 17,000 sites and 400,000 volunteers.

The federal money constituted 75 percent of RIF's budget.

"We're not going to make up $24 million [last year's grant was $25 million] overnight," Rasco said.

Literacy is a path to success, and now, just as we have the most children sunk in poverty in 50 years, we decide we can't afford to give them a ladder.

"I was pretty disappointed," Dibble said. "The government is the people, isn't it? I feel like the people chose not to do something pretty inexpensive for children. The government is us. Where are our values?"

She and other partners are scrambling to keep programs alive.

"For us, RIF is more that the physical books," Dibble said. "RIF was efficiency. They had an ordering system, they paid for shipping." This month as school started and teachers sent in orders, Dibble said, "We had to recruit volunteers to count and pack books. It's added layers of complexity."

And Page Ahead is asking local sites to pay part of the cost of the books now. Many couldn't afford that, so 100 fewer sites asked for books this year. That's almost half.

Even with federal money, the programs reached only a fraction of at-risk children.

Maybe people don't see the need. Rasco said it's been a challenge helping people who grew up in homes full of books understand that there are people who didn't have that and who aren't passing a love of reading on to their children.

Children can be motivated to read, with books that matter to them.

Dibble said her job is satisfying partly because the problem of literacy is fixable. "We have a lot of information about how to get children excited about reading, how to help them with their reading. It takes time and money and effort, but it's not like we couldn't do it. This one is winnable."

That's why she's so frustrated now, but she and Rasco are still climbing their hill, looking for other sources of money, asking people to contact their representatives, and believing they will succeed.

I hope they can. I think they must