Report to the Community Trust Company from the Ralph Goodson Literacy Project

We are pleased to present this report to the Community Trust Company on the $50,000 grant awarded in August 2010. The past year has been a challenging one as we struggled to maintain and expand programs during a period of recession. It was also a time when our services were most needed. Now we would like to report to you the program’s many successes and several remaining challenges.

Family Literacy

The family literacy program seeks to improve reading and writing skills in families with multi-generational illiteracy. Your grant helped make possible our family literacy program, which served 85 families in this, its tenth year. Ralph Goodson, our founder, was himself a child of illiterate parents, which is why he founded this organization. Because of the success of this program, it has remained our signature program.

Illiteracy too frequently becomes a tradition handed down from parents to their children. Many adults have learned to function well enough that few people, even those close to them, realize they are illiterate. But illiteracy holds them back and is the major contributor to the poverty in which these families inevitably live.

The Social Thinkers Forum’s 2009 report on children in our state with inadequate reading and writing skills found that “in the majority of cases studied, children’s literacy problems stem from having illiterate or barely literate parents.” The Ralph Goodson Literacy Project’s family literacy program seeks to end this cycle of poverty and illiteracy.

Getting to the families who can most benefit from this service requires a number of strategies. Illiteracy is not something adults readily admit to. The Goodson Project seeks to identify and address these families by …

Through these outreach efforts, we identified 142 families with multigenerational literacy problems last year. Teachers from the Goodson Project began work with each of these families, but the drop-out rate continues to be around 40 percent, which left us with 85 families participating in the program for at least 6 months, a minimum period of time in which to make a significant and permanent difference in their literacy skills.

Goodson Project teachers worked with families in several ways:

The sessions with parents and children are the key to the program’s success. By making the activities of reading and writing family activities, the shared skills become an integral part of how the family relates to one another, thus strengthening these skills and family bonds.

Most family sessions are held at the Goodson Literacy Project facilities, although teachers frequently make house calls to families for whom transportation to downtown is a hardship.

One parent participating in the program last year told us that “being able to read with my daughter has brought us closer than ever before.” Another parent commented that “My Sara is so bright that I have to stay up late studying to keep up with her, but it’s worth it to see her doing so much better in school.” The program equally affects the children. Billy, one of three children in a family, let us know that “we all look forward to our weekly session with Ms. Thomas. The new books she brings us are great, and she even finds ones my dad wants to read.”

Evaluation

In the past year, of the 140 children participating, the 123 for whom we were able to access school records all recorded significant advancement in their schoolwork. For 90 percent, grades in all subjects went up by one to two levels. Of the 62 parents who were seeking work at the beginning of the period, 49 have found work.

One of the truest measures of the program’s success is the length of time families remain in it. As mentioned before, there is a considerable attrition in the first few months. Of the families that participate for six months, 90 percent complete a year in the program.

The Context

This program is complemented by our work with preschool children who come from families representing all economic and educational levels. The preschool program’s goal is to make reading a joy and a lifelong occupation. We also work with the after-school programs with the county’s elementary schools, providing tutoring in reading and writing. Twenty-nine children were involved in these programs who were also clients of the family literacy program.

Present and Future Challenges

Overcoming the natural reluctance many adults feel in admitting a lack of skill usually possessed by five-year-olds will always be a challenge. Frequently, even in two-parent households, one of the parents refuses to participate in the program. Addressing literacy as a job skill like mechanics or other manual skills has made the greatest inroads to this hard-to-reach group.

The extremely high teacher to client ratio of this program (1:4 per session, and 1:18 overall) provides the dramatic results for which the program is known. It also makes it a very expensive program to run. We believe that, given the higher levels of employment it creates for the present and the next generation and the contribution it makes toward more stable families, the program is actually quite cheap.

Funding will always be a problem, but we are pleased to report that the local factory of Firetown Tire Company has become our first corporate sponsor, making a five-year funding commitment and providing space at the factory for us to meet with clients.

A literacy center in Monroe County has approached us to provide training to its teachers in the family program beginning next month. This will provide us with modest service fees to complement the contributed income.

We hope you share in the pride we feel at the success of the family literacy program and all the programs of the Ralph Goodson Literacy Project. By acquiring literacy skills, the cycle of poverty can be broken, lives are made richer, and children will be allowed to reach their full potential. On behalf of all our clients, we thank you again for your generous support.