The Readers for the Future project provides critical literacy skills to 49 students from a marginalized community in San Juan, Puerto Rico. These kindergarten through 3rd grade students are struggling in the process of learning to read due to untreated factors including dyslexia and learning disabilities. The next school year begins in August! Please help us create more Readers for the Future of Puerto Rico.
By the end of third grade, students are expected to have completed the process of learning to read in order to now read to learn. Only 43% of students in Puerto Rico finish third grade as proficient readers. Students who read below grade level at the end of 3rd grade are four times more prone to abandon school. In low socio-economic students, the probability is six times greater. Those not reading at grade level by 3rd grade continue to be struggling readers for the rest of their school years.
We identify kindergarten through 3rd grade students at risk of academic failure and provided them with systematic and cumulative reading intervention focused on developing phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, and comprehension by highly trained and certified Orton-Gillingham teachers. Our primary goal for this program is for students to reach grade level proficiency in reading by the third grade in order to transition into fourth grade prepared to learn.
Students who do not read proficiently by 3rd grade experience higher drop-out rates and lower access to post-secondary studies. This has a negative impact on their job potential and results in a less skilled labor force in Puerto Rico. Statistics show that more than half of these students end up in the criminal justice system . We are providing opportunities to these very students who without the proficient reading skills we provide potentially become one of these grim statistics.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
