Putnam County Schools will now expand literacy support to students in grades 5-12 using an estimated $90,000 grant from the Comprehensive Literacy State Development Program.
Secondary Instructional Supervisor Bubba Winningham said the grant helps school students advance their reading, speaking, and writing skills from birth to grade 12. Winningham said the school system has received a similar grant for the past five years from the state to help students in grades K-4. Winningham said the new grant will allow the school system to support students in grades 5-12.
“We know that some of these kids are coming from the elementary school, you know, very high academic achievers, and so we just want to make sure that those kids- that we sustain that work throughout the middle and high school,” Winningham said.
Winningham said that providing additional literacy support to students in elementary and middle school helps set them up for higher ACT scores in high school. He added that the funding primarily enables the school system to purchase high-quality instructional materials to strengthen literacy instruction.
“We partner with a vendor, and our vendor is the New Teacher Project, TNTP,” Winningham said. “We’ve used them for the last five years with the K-4 Literacy Implementation Network grant, and so we’ll continue to use them, and basically, you know, they just help support us, make sure that our kids are getting grade-level access to text and curriculum throughout that process.”
Winningham said typically $80,000 goes to purchasing instructional materials, and $10,000 is used to purchase other materials to support literacy support. Winningham said Putnam County’s K-4 schools have seen a dramatic increase in scores thanks to literacy support grants like this.
“If you look at our trend data over the last five years in third and fourth grade specifically, you can for sure see that that trend line is going up,” Winningham said. “And so again, part of this work is to sustain that. And we know just from research alone that the engagement of kids drops off when they get to middle school and high school, and so part of this is to help support that engagement as they go through middle school and high school.”
Winningham said school systems not only in Tennessee, but across the country, are emphasizing literacy improvement as literacy scores have dropped over the past couple of decades. Winningham said the school system is not only pushing students to read at grade level but also to read well above that.