Cal Lutheran to Receive $10,000 Grant

Cal Lutheran’s School of Education has been pegged to receive $10,000, its share of a much larger grant funding a professional development program that will study what is being done in schools to help kids learn to read and build their language skills.

“We’re trying to find out what the best practices are and how to implement them,” said Cathleen Jones, Cal Lutheran’s director of teacher preparation.

The Cal Lutheran grant came out of a $201,000 grant from the state Department of Education under the Federal Goals 2000 program. The grant will fund a three-county partnership among school districts, Cal Lutheran, UC Santa Barbara and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

From there, Jones said the college’s teacher-training program will be evaluated and updated.

“Hopefully, we’re already doing most of it,” she said, adding that the research will help make Cal Lutheran’s teacher-training program “more current and in tighter compliance with the current framework.”

Jones said she hopes to use the Cal Lutheran part of the grant to send faculty members to training workshops, to pay for substitutes so other professors can work on the project, and to provide additional pay for faculty members who put in hours on the project in addition to their regular duties.

“But these things have not been finalized yet,” she said.