Download Fact Sheet (70kb PDF) Education / Youth Development

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Goal:
To ensure that our children are well educated and equipped for the challenges of the 21st Century.

The Lorain County Urban League believes that academic achievement is the foundation for success in life.

Read! Rise & Achieve

The Read! Rise & Achieve Program (RRAP) is designed to promote the love of reading and to support young children to become independent readers by the time they reach the fourth grade.

Background of Program

For over 5 years, the Lorain County Urban League has been receiving over 5,000 books each year from Scholastic and Houghton Mifflin. We distribute the books to school children by partnering with after school programs, churches and other organizations that serve young people who are from, primarily, low-income background. The target areas are Oberlin, Elyria and Lorain, but we will help needy children anywhere in Lorain County. Our goal is to help these young scholars to build up a collection of books that they can read at home.

Read and Rise Neighborhood Reading Centers (NRC)

In the fall of 2006, LCUL did a survey of families who received books in the past and found out that over 50% of the children did not have anyone at home reading to them on a regular basis. This is how the idea of the NRC was born. The concept is simple. LCUL is now working in collaboration with local churches and neighborhood centers to provide opportunities for trained, adult volunteers to read to children at least once a week. Education experts say that children who have adults reading to them on a regular basis are more likely to succeed in school and grow up to develop a lifelong love of learning. As the Governor of the State of Ohio, Ted Strickland, puts it, “Where a child grows up in Ohio should not determine where they end up in life.” Young children will also be encouraged to read out loud as a means to develop their confidence as readers.

Four Neighborhood Reading Centers have already been opened this year. It is the hope of the LCUL that this initiative will lead to strong community partnerships that promote learning and broad community engagement. The LCUL believes very strongly that the entire community needs to work together to ensure that our youngest children are developing academically, socially and emotionally.

The goal of the project is to develop broad partnerships that promote learning and community engagement.

The objectives are to: 1) use this broad community support network to promote family literacy, 2) stimulate the love of reading in children at a very young age, and 3) help children to become independent readers by the 4th grade.

Here’s how it works -

LCUL will partner with churches, neighborhood center, and any organization that works with children or wants to provide reading activities to children. We will:

1. Provide Donated Books - Each center will have a rich collection of books that they can use for reading activities.
2. Provide books for low-income children to take home and develop their own collection of books they love to read, and
3. Provide training for volunteer reading coaches/tutors who read to the children at each Reading Center.

Here again, are additional remarks that Governor Strickland made about early childhood Development:

“While every child deserves a fair start on their way to school, too many of our children begin the race not only behind the starting line, but facing in the wrong direction. We cannot afford to abandon those children who face a poverty of resources and a poverty of experiences. We must recognize the facts: we have a readiness gap that leads to an achievement gap that results in an outcome gap.”

The work of the Urban League in the community and the schools has uncovered the sad fact that most parents are unaware of the “starting line” and the “direction” their children ought to be facing in order to have “a fair start on their way to school.” Most of those parents did not have a fair start.

The Parental Involvement Project (Read and Rise Parent Circles) will train parents on how to:

1. Create a home environment that promotes a love of reading,
2. Work together with teachers and the school system to help their students,
3. Understand essential developmental Milestones (things their children should know and be able to do from Pre-K to 4th Grade.)

• Parental Guide that includes how to supervise homework,
• Tips on how to furnish the home to support learning, and how to create quiet reading time in the home, and lots of reading resources,
• Quarterly newsletter and Read and Rise magazine,
• Supply of books that are age/grade appropriate for their children, and
• Periodic reading alert and invitation to future trainings.

We invite any group that works with low-income children to contact:

Peter Ogbuji
Lorain County Urban League
401 Broad Street, Suite B, Elyria, Ohio 44035
Phone: 440-323-3364 x24
Email: pogbuji@lcul.org