On September 29, Congressman Jim Langevin and other public officials helped us celebrate this award. Click here for highlights.
Ready to Learn Providence is one of just 28 recipients this year of an Early Reading First grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The $3.9 million award is the third ERF grant R2LP has received since 2004.
This funding will allow R2LP to work with five early-care programs in Providence, Pawtucket and Central Falls – Children’s Friend Child Care Program, Heritage Park YMCA Early Learning Center, Pawtucket Day Child Development Center, Progreso Latino and Roger Williams Day Care Center – over a three-year period. R2LP will provide directors, teachers and assistants at these centers with college-level courses and intensive on-site mentoring, all designed to strengthen instruction, improve teacher-child interactions and create environments that support early language and literacy development. Funding from the grant also provides the participating centers with hundreds of high-quality children’s books and other classroom materials
The federal Early Reading First grants, initiated in 2002, are highly competitive. This year the Department of Education received a record number of proposals – over 450 – from nonprofit organizations and school districts across the country. With its ERF grants, the DOE seeks to improve the instruction and environment in preschool programs supported by the Title 1 program, Head Start, and publicly funded or subsidized child care.
“Increasing the number of high-quality, early learning opportunities through programs like Early Reading First, especially for low-income families, improves a child’s chance for success in school and in life,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan when announcing this year’s ERF award recipients.
In its 2009 proposal, R2LP broadened its geography to include preschools in the adjacent cities of Pawtucket and Central Falls. Collectively, these cities and Providence represent one of the nation’s most distressed urban centers, marked by high levels of child poverty, linguistic isolation and residential mobility. While research shows these indicators to be directly linked to school performance, it also shows that high-quality preschool education can play an instrumental role in changing a child’s academic trajectory.
"Our five partner sites are all strong early childhood programs," says R2LP Director Leslie Gell. "They have leaders who are powerful advocates for children and families, and classroom staff who are passionate about their work with young children. With these grant resources, we will have a tremendous opportunity to build centers of early learning excellence upon the strong foundations that exist in these programs. We're so pleased to be partnering with such committed organizations."
R2LP’s first ERF program began in 2004 and its second in 2006. The two projects, involving nine preschool centers in Providence, have yielded positive, measurable changes in classroom environments, teacher practice and children’s school readiness. Partnerships with the Community College of Rhode Island and the University of Rhode Island have made it possible for ERF participants to obtain college credits for many of the courses R2LP offers in the program.
Ready to Learn Providence
The pictures above were taken at participating child-care centers in R2LP's first ERF program, which ran from 2004 to 2007.
