Grant To Focus On Reading

Pilot Project Eyed For 5 City Schools

August 14, 2006
By Assoicated Press

Teachers at five Hartford elementary schools will receive training in a pilot project to improve reading instruction under an $844,000 grant announced by the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

The Hartford Board of Education is scheduled to vote Tuesday to accept the three-year grant, which will train teachers in 36 kindergarten through second-grade classrooms in a teaching model developed by New Haven-based Haskins Laboratories.

The grant is the largest made by the foundation to Hartford schools in nearly a quarter-century, said Donna Jolly, a foundation spokeswoman.

Hartford had some of the lowest reading scores in Connecticut in statewide mastery test results released last week, and school officials have said that many children, including more than half of those in second grade, are not reading at grade level.

Haskins, a research institute specializing in language and literacy, has developed an intensive, systematic teaching approach that has produced promising early results with youngsters in some of Connecticut's most troubled school systems. Under the Haskins model, trainers coach teachers to teach skills such as phonics, awareness of sounds within words, vocabulary, spelling, fluency and comprehension.

The project will reach about 875 children in Rawson, Moylan, Sanchez, Webster and Wish schools.