According to a report from myarklamiss.com, a
Louisiana-focused news site, the nation's Department of Education has granted
our state's Department of Education a generous sum of $42 million to be used
for a five-year plan to bolster literacy. Rather than going exclusively and
directly to obvious literacy hubs like English classes, this money will give
schools opportunities for creative and nuanced ways (think extracurriculars)
for students to be engaged in learning the intricacies of the language, even
outside of school. Families will be provided with plans and support in
literacy-based activities for their children to participate in, for example.
This amount of money also allows for schools to go the extra mile if they so
choose and hire actual professionals, such as literacy coaches, to create an
environment where a student is almost always learning in one way or another.
According to Louisiana's Department of Education, nearly
70,000 underprivileged children will benefit from this grant and the literacy
programs that will stem from it. Seeing as how this is a new development,
schools are still mostly in the dark as to the specifics of this distribution
and its applications, but the Louisiana Department of Education has promised to
officially inform all recipients in a timely manner.
This sort of aid is a welcome and sorely needed gauze for
Louisiana's sucking education wound. As has been recently reported, our
state ranked the third worst in the nation for mathematics in a poll by Wallethub.com.
Literacy, unfortunately, is the next horse in the losing race and has been at
unacceptably low levels for far too long. Hampered learning environments due to
the pandemic are certainly not helping children either, as remote learning is
beginning to show its weaknesses as the months drag on. Hopefully, with an
eventual return to social normalcy, this grant can be put to effective use to
turn our state's children into fine writers of noteworthy caliber.
