Pilot Summer Project Helps At-Risk Readers

After a summer crammed with long and short vowels, silent Es and a slew of other pronunciation rules, Joseph Dickson peered down at the unfamiliar word in his book.

Joseph, 7, who plowed through the first half of the sentence in a story about a noisy goose, paused at the word describing the bird’s persistent honking.

“Rocket?” he said, doubtfully. He stared at the troublesome vowel, trying it one way, then another. “Racket,” he said, finally, as his teacher cheered him on.

Joseph is one of 115 mostly first and second-graders who are learning to read at grade level this summer at Calvert Street Elementary School in Woodland Hills.

The pilot reading program, funded primarily by the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project, aims to give struggling readers the extra boost they need to bring them up to speed.

“We’re dealing with kids who didn’t know their letters or their sounds after finishing first or second grade,” said Tami Weiser. She is the Annenberg coordinator for the Taft complex of schools, which includes Woodland Hills, Calvert Street, Fullbright Avenue, Wilbur Avenue and Serrania Avenue elementary schools.

The summer program is part of a five-year, $1-million project that focuses on increasing literacy in this group of elementary schools to prepare students for Parkman Middle School and Taft High School.

The $40,000 grant helped fund the six-week program, and Joe Luskin, the Los Angeles Unified School District administrator responsible for the Taft schools, contributed $10,000 from the cluster’s budget.

In this year’s Stanford 9 standardized tests, only two of the Taft elementary schools scored below the 50th percentile in reading. But the goal of the program is not simply to increase test scores in comparison to other schools, officials said.

“It’s about saving every kid,” said Annette Star, the summer school’s principal.

The children, who were identified as at-risk readers through three assessment tests and teacher recommendations, attend two-hour classes on weekdays. They are instructed by teachers from the Taft complex who have experience teaching early literacy, Weiser said.

During this final week the children are being tested to see whether their reading has improved.

If the program proves successful, Weiser said, Taft officials will urge the district to start a regular summer school for elementary students.