Literacy – Spanning North America :: NY NY :: Falher AB :: Decatur IL

Literacy: Spanning North America      

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The ABCs of Austerity: Adult Literacy Classes Face Budget Axe

Independent: 4.26.2018 by Lydia McMullen-Laird

Julio Forbes sneaks into the intermediate ESL class almost half an hour late, red folder in hand and ready to learn. He joins the class of students from Colombia, Russia and Korea. Forbes is a 35-year-old a doctor from the Dominican Republic who’s come to the United States looking for a better life. But he’s unemployed at the moment — and he won’t have much luck in the job market until he improves his English.

Forbes is not alone. He’s one of the 2.2 million people in New York City who lack English proficiency or a high school diploma. The $90 million dollars required to run adult literacy  programs, which comes from a combination of city, state and federal funding, serves 61,000 people, a mere 3 percent of those in need.

An additional $12 million dollars was added last year for adult literacy programs, but advocates are worried some of their programs may be in jeopardy after the release of Mayor de Blasio’s preliminary budget for the 2019 fiscal year failed to include the additional funding. The New York City Coalition for Adult Literacy has been organizing rallies to demand the restoration of the funding.

The Coalition is not just advocating for additional 2019 funding, but for multi-year funding that would allow programs to thrive in the long term. According to a statement on the Coalition’s recommendations for the 2019 fiscal year, “One-year funding makes it difficult to operate programs… funding instability means programs cannot hire full-time staff with benefits and lose their best teachers as they search for more stable employment.”  READ MORE >>

SRCALP

Foundation literacy skills is the primary focus of “Smoky River Adult Learning Programs” while it also offers a broad range of community courses

Smoky River Express: 4.28.2018 by Tom Henihan

Smoky River Community Adult Learning Programs (SRCALP) has been offering services in this region since 1975, from its office in the MD building in Falher and for the last two years, having partnered with Northern Lakes College, it also runs an office and classroom in the NLC Smoky River Campus in McLennan.

SRCALP is grant funded by the Alberta Government with a mandate to offer foundation literacy skills such as numeracy, literacy, English as a Second Language, (ESL) and basic computer skills.

While SRCALP’s focus is foundation literacy skills, it also offers community courses such as a Hunter Education Course, First Aid, provincial certificate Food Handling Safety course, more specialized computer skills such as Excel or Word courses and instruction in the proficient use of iPads and Tablets.

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“We want to remind people that our focus is foundational life skills,” says Falher coordinator, Sherry Limoges. “People think we are here to offer community classes but that is not our focus. We can offer those classes on the side, but our focus is life skills, such as numeracy and literacy and we can help with resumes, filling out documents, or anything to do with computers such as setting up an email account.”  READ MORE >>

Project Read

Project READ inspires future educators

News: Illinois State: 4.30.2018 by Shannon Mittleman

When Dominique’s son came home from school complaining that he was not allowed to go to swimming lessons with the rest of his class, Dominique wondered what had gone wrong. Her tutor at Project READ, an adult literacy program in Decatur, discovered the unsigned permission slip for swimming in a collection of other unread school papers clumped at the bottom of Dominique’s backpack. That is when Dominique realized how much her inability to read affected not only her, but also her children and their school experience and education.

Another Project READ student recalls his memories of starting a fight in his elementary classroom to avoid reading aloud. He told the teacher he did not want to read, but she kept pressing until he panicked and punched a boy in the nose. He said that he would resort to anything and everything to prevent the embarrassment of stumbling through passages on a page.

One woman tells the story of how, little by little, teachers gave up on trying to help her. She was assigned to the lowest reading group but not given the support she needed, and she withdrew. Eventually, she was not in a reading group at all. She tells of how her family told her that she was “dumb as a box of rocks” so many times that she believed it herself. It was not until she started at Project READ, well into her 40s, that she realized she could learn to read and do math. Her newly found confidence changed her outlook on life.

Project READ provides one-on-one reading and math tutoring for adults.  READ MORE >>