Supervisors May Fund Early Literacy Effort

Intent on giving children from welfare families a better chance at learning to read, Ventura County supervisors Tuesday are set to approve spending $70,000 to join forces with a nonprofit group that has launched an early literacy program.

For the past three years, El Centrito de La Colonia, a social services agency in Oxnard that serves mostly Spanish-speaking families, has used private grants to run the literacy pilot program.

El Centrito officials are encouraged by the proposed one-year partnership with the county.

“We’re very hopeful that we’ll continue to work together,” said the program’s executive director, Luann Rocha. “This is a vision they [county officials] are showing. There’s potential there for the future.”

Supervisor John Flynn, who helped get the county involved in the literacy project, said that was a possibility.

“The program is absolutely first-class,” Flynn said. “I hope we can eventually expand it. But we’ve taken a big step just getting where we are.”

He said 48% of CalWORKS participants live in Oxnard, where the classes will be held.

The one-year funding level from the county would help help 25 children whose parents are CalWORKS recipients learn to read. The program features computer software that displays colorful graphics and sounds to teach 4- and 5-year-old children to pronounce the letters of the alphabet and recognize words.

Parental participation is an important part of the process. Instructors give children books and videos to bring home so their parents can read to them.

“We can’t work in a vacuum,” Rocha said. “What we’re doing with the child here has to be complemented with what’s going on in the home.”

An evaluation by Cal Lutheran University researchers released in July gave the program high marks, noting the parental involvement portion was particularly successful.

Researchers at the university will conduct another evaluation before the county decides whether to fund another year, officials said.

Bruce Stenslie, an administrator at the county’s Human Services Agency, said the program is intended to give children a scholastic foundation and help prevent them from dropping out of school. The aim is to prevent another generation of welfare recipients, he said.

“We’re specifically looking at this as an intervention for CalWORKS families,” Stenslie said. “We’re talking about beating a very fundamental problem. If kids are interested in education and their parents are more engaged in literacy, then they are more likely to stay in school and less likely to go on welfare.”

El Centrito uses the Waterford Early Reading Program, which employs computers and educational software to help children boost reading skills. The Waterford program is used in more than 2,600 elementary classrooms nationwide.

For three years the program was made possible with grants totaling $500,000, which came mostly from the James Irvine Foundation and the Ventura County Community Foundation.