Adults to Get Help in 2 of the R’s : Education: Orange Coast College, with help from businesses and corporations, gears up to teach illiterate adults to read and write.

Some workers in Orange County have a hidden handicap: They can’t read or write.

There are no exact numbers on illiterate adults in Orange County, but countywide estimates based on national illiteracy rates range up to 400,000 adults--many of them English-speaking, native U.S. citizens, according to Douglas C. Bennett, executive director of the Orange Coast College Foundation.

But help is on the way. The community college plans to open a new, privately funded literacy lab--called Literacy Is for Everyone, or LIFE--on its campus next March.

LIFE aims to help men and women learn to read and write without any sense of embarrassment, college officials said.

“There are a lot of people out there who can benefit from this,” Orange Coast College President David Grant said. “But we on the campus are going to be real careful that not a big deal is made about their being here.”

The college wants the men and women learning to read and write to feel like any of the other 25,000 students at Orange Coast, Grant stressed.

The literacy students will have the chance to take other courses and programs at the college. “Sometimes you find that people with literacy problems also have other problems in their lives, and our college has a number of other programs that might be of help to them,” Bennett pointed out.

The lab will be housed in a classroom building immediately south of the campus softball field.

“All students who are interested in the program will receive a comprehensive evaluation by a trained reading specialist,” Bennett said. “They will begin the program at the appropriate level for them, and then progress at their own pace. . . . The lab will be using IBM touch-screen computers to help teach the students to read while at the time developing basic touch-typing skills.”

Bennett said the program can help a big segment of Orange County’s growing population of new immigrants, as well as the U.S.-born English speakers who cannot read or write. He said the literacy lab can assist foreign-language-speaking adults who can function adequately with spoken English but do not know how to read or write English.

“Our goal is to work with Orange County corporations, business and public-service agencies in providing this literacy training,” Bennett said.

“Many very good workers in this county cannot advance into better positions, such as supervisory roles, because they don’t know how to read or write. We think this program will not only be helping those workers but also will be helping the businesses.”

In some cases, students will be able to take literacy courses for college credit, Bennett said. Those students would pay a $5-per-credit-hour fee for the course. The fee for non-credit literacy courses has not been determined, and many companies and businesses probably will pay to train their employees, Bennett added.

The OCC program is being modeled after The Times Reading Lab, launched two years ago, which operates from a downtown Los Angeles office building to help people learn reading and writing. The total cost of setting up the new lab will be about $104,000--$84,000 of which already has been raised.

The Times Orange County Edition contributed $25,000 to help start the Orange Coast College program. Other major donors include the Weingart Foundation, $10,000; The Orange County Register, Pacific Bell, the Orange Coast College Foundation and McDonnell Douglas, $5,000 each; Hughes Aircraft, $2,000; and Orco Block, BFM Acquisition, Union Bank and Archive Corp., $1,000 each.

AST Research Inc. of Irvine donated four computers valued at $13,980, and the college spent $8,000 in remodeling classrooms for the lab.

The Orange Coast College Foundation, which conducted the two-year fund drive to raise start-up money for the laboratory, is the private, fund-raising arm of the community college. Bennett said the foundation will continue to seek donors for the $20,000 still needed to complete the lab.

Grant, the college’s president, said he is particularly gratified that Orange Coast soon will be able to offer the new literacy program.

“‘This is the best kind of thing a community college can do,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing a community college is almost founded to do.”