KU News Release

KU-backed reading project earns $3.4 million Department of Education grant

LAWRENCE — Preschool children in Wyandotte County face enormous challenges. Nearly half live in poverty; 43 percent live in single-family homes; and kindergartners on average start their education below national proficiency levels and don’t catch up.

To help stem the tide, Wyandotte County Early Reading First, a language and literacy initiative supported by the University of Kansas, has secured a competitive $3.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. More than 500 grant proposals were submitted, and only 32 were funded.

The Wyandotte ERF is a collaboration between the Juniper Gardens Children’s Project, one of the 12 centers of KU’s Life Span Institute; Project EAGLE at the KU Medical Center; the Kansas City, Kan., Economic Opportunity Foundation Head Start; and El Centro Academy for Children.

The Wyandotte ERF will accelerate learning for 180 children from local Head Start and El Centro preschools in Kansas City, Kan., by enhancing their language, literacy and pre-reading development.

“We now know that language and literacy and attachment are the key indicators of a child’s future success,” said Martha Staker, director of Project EAGLE, a division of the Department of Pediatrics at the medical center. “That’s what’s so exciting about this grant. We’re going to build children’s language and literacy skills and get a closer engagement with their parents.”

Using research-proven instruction and materials, the program also will support the professional development of 27 teachers across nine classrooms to produce long-term benefits for young Wyandotte County children at risk of failing to learn to read.

“This new ERF project will build capacity by training additional Kansas City, Kansas, preschool teachers,” said Mary Abbott, assistant research professor with KU’s Juniper Gardens Children’s Project. “As a result, more teachers will have greater proficiency in delivering language. Additionally, the project will develop a handbook that details how to provide differentiated language and literacy instruction to preschool children. We hope to widely disseminate this handbook beyond Kansas City.”

Within the project, a teacher will be added to each classroom and three mentor coaches will work with the nine classrooms to improve instruction. In addition, an intervention coach will coordinate with teachers to monitor the academic progress of children who need more intensive instruction.

The Juniper Gardens Children’s Project provides research opportunities for KU faculty and students on the Lawrence campus to work within an urban community. Juniper Gardens began in the mid-1960s as a partnership between KU faculty and residents of northeast Kansas City, Kan., to improve child development in a low-income urban core.

Founded in 1989, Project EAGLE Community Programs offers family support and child development services to residents of Wyandotte County.

Including the new grant, Juniper Gardens and Project EAGLE have collected $6.5 million over the past six years to advance the education of preschoolers in Wyandotte County. The programs’ previous ERF initiative in Kansas City, Kan., cut in half the number of children who were below average in their oral language development.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Staker. “The children have scored way beyond in their language and literacy skills than we had ever expected.”

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