SOUTHEAST GETS READING GRANT

Southeast Missouri State University has received a $750,000 grant to implement a statewide literacy program.

The Missouri Statewide Early Literacy Intervention Program will provide the Reading Recovery program to first-graders and literacy support services to children in kindergarten through third grade.

Locally, grant money is being used to train several teachers.

Statewide, 114 Missouri teachers are being trained this year in Reading Recovery at various colleges.

"I am very thrilled," said Jeanine Larson Dobbins, coordinator of the literacy intervention program and site coordinator and teacher leader for Reading Recovery at Southeast.

"With this grant we will teach many children to read who would otherwise not be readers. In some families, we're going to break the cycle of illiteracy," she said.

Funding for the program was included in Gov. Mel Carnahan's fiscal 1998 budget. The Legislature approved the funding, which is being distributed to Southeast through the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

The program educates teachers to work with children who have reading difficulties. They are primarily first-graders but also children in kindergarten through third grade.

Dobbins said the grant money would be used to:

-- Help school districts cover the costs to prepare a dozen Reading Recovery teacher leaders from around the state to train future Reading Recovery teachers. The teacher leaders currently are being trained at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock.

-- Offset the cost of training 114 teachers in Reading Recovery Statewide.

-- Help cover tuition costs for 95 of Missouri's previously trained Reading Recovery educators, who will be schooled on how to deliver the early literacy intervention program.

The grant covers one year, ending June 30. Beginning next year the state budget will include $250,000 to continue the program.

By next June, Missouri expects to have doubled its number of Reading Recovery teacher leaders.

In the past 16 years, 13 teacher leaders have been trained, Dobbins said.

"With 25 teacher leaders, we should be able to come close to full implementation of the program in Missouri by 2000-2001," she said.

"Almost every child in Missouri needing reading help should be served.

"This truly gives hope to at-risk children, and the rewards are immeasurable," said Dobbins.

Dobbins and her husband, Dr. Ken Dobbins, Southeast's executive vice president, began meeting with representatives of the governor's office, legislators and state education officials in April 1996 in Jefferson City to put the literacy program in place.

"When we can break the cycle of failure in school, we've really done something significant," Jeanine Dobbins said.