For Immediate Release

Governor Riley to Visit Lakewood Elementary Summer School Classes

School is one of several Alabama Reading Academy campuses successfully bringing struggling readers to grade-level

Huntsville, AL - June 27, 2005- Governor Bob Riley will pay a visit to Lakewood Elementary School in Huntsville on June 27, 2005 from 10:30-11:30 a.m. During the visit, he will tour several classrooms that are part of Alabama’s reading intervention and professional development program, the Alabama Reading Academy. The Governor initiated the program, which was piloted last year with great success.

For six weeks this summer, more than 1000 kindergarten through third grade students will be taught by 80 Academy Teachers and 80 Academy Coaches at 20 Alabama Reading Academy campuses. Eighteen of those sites will be using the Voyager Passport ™ Reading Intervention System. At each grade level, an Academy Teacher instructs 10 to 15 struggling readers throughout the six-week session. Parents receive weekly progress reports, and tools to work with their child at home to improve their reading skills. At the same time, teachers from 229 schools across the state will travel to the Reading Academy campuses to sit in on the classes, observing and assisting Academy Teachers in action. They will also receive additional direction from Academy Coaches on effective instructional strategies.

During last year’s pilot of the Alabama Reading Academy, the assessment measures at each grade level showed students made phenomenal gains:

• After six weeks of instruction with Voyager Passport, kindergarten students far surpassed the benchmark goal of 35 sounds per minute, with a mean reading score of 63.4 sounds per minute.
• Exiting first grade students gained more than 2 words per minute per week in the Reading Connected Text measure .
• Second-grade and third-grade students gained an average of nearly 3 words per minute per week in Reading Connected Text, dramatically exceeding the average expected weekly gains of 1.5 words per minute and 1 word per minute, respectively.

The program originated after Governor Riley asked the state’s Superintendent of Education, Dr. Joseph Morton, to create a plan for improving teacher expertise in working with struggling readers to bring them up to grade level, with the goal of ending social promotion and retention. Representatives from across the

Alabama Department of Education collaborated with individuals from Classroom Improvement, Federal Programs, Special Education, the Alabama Reading First Initiative (ARFI) and the Alabama Reading Initiative (ARI) to develop an approach. Together, they decided that summer was the ideal time to give teachers hands-on practice teaching research-based intervention strategies. Impressed with last year’s results, ARI is continuing the program this summer.

Voyager Expanded Learning is a provider of core, intervention and supplemental reading programs, as well as ongoing professional development for school districts throughout the U.S. The Voyager Universal Literacy System ® and the Voyager Passport ™ Reading Intervention System are the only reading programs patented for their “method and system for preventing illiteracy.”  Founded in 1994, Voyager has delivered extended-time reading and basic skills intervention programs, as well as large-scale reading programs, to more than 1,000 school districts in cities such as Dallas, Phoenix, New York, Philadelphia, and the District of Columbia, resulting in dramatically improved student performance. Collaborations with the Discovery Channel and the Smithsonian Institution enable Voyager to provide timely and powerful curricula for the American classroom. Voyager Expanded Learning is a subsidiary of Ann-Arbor based ProQuest Company. For more information, please visit www.voyagerlearning.com.