STAR Center teams with Lincoln Elem. to boost reading levels
JACKSON, Tenn. — It’s STAR Center meets school system in a collaboration that’s helping kids reading levels soar.
For the past semester, 80 kids from Lincoln Elementary have spent extra time with a computer program provided through the STAR Center by private donors to help improve reading skills.
“It was just a natural thought,” Director for Development at the STAR Center Jon Abernathy said Thursday. “What if we could take this to a school and take some pressure off the incredible teachers that are already here?”
“The STAR Center, they’re experts at coming in and taking a kid who is really far behind and giving them the background knowledge to get them where they need to be,” Lincoln Principal Kyle Lutz said.
The results through just one semester show kids are making huge strides.
“What we’ve seen in just one semester is about 50 percent of the students have raised their grade level reading,” Abernathy said. “In fact, there’s about five to six percent that have gone up two grade levels. That’s someone coming in, maybe 5th grader reading at a kindergarten reading level, and in one semester they’re at a 3rd grade reading level.”
Students are improving their reading skills through the program, but school officials said having this much more exposure to computers is only going to help them when it comes to the state’s new standardized testing, the majority of which is done on a computer.
“They learn how to respond with what’s in their head in a tech-savvy environment where they can’t just write it down or say it to someone but they have to interact with a screen,” Lutz said.
“If you want to see the school system change, you can’t sit at the sideline,” Abernathy said. “You have to get involved. We saw a problem. We knew that it made sense for us to partner, and right now it’s yielding some really amazing benefits.”
The STAR Center said it currently is looking to expand the program into other schools throughout the system, but that comes at a cost.
Private donors raised $40,000 to implement the program at Lincoln.
