CA Newspaper feature brings funds to afterschool
After school program gets a boost
Ukiah Daily Journal, Ukiah, CA
By LAURA CLARK/The Daily Journal
Posted 3/1/2006
http://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/Stories/0,1413,91~3089~3255306,00.html
Daily Journal sports feature brings $1,000 to reading classroom
Frank Zeek Elementary School is $1,000 richer thanks to a friendly competition among sport enthusiasts -- and their sponsors.
"Take it to the Bank" -- a Daily Journal newsroom charity contest in which employees picked winners from a weekly pool of pro and college football games -- assigned sponsors to 10 prognosticators. But the forecasters selected their own charities to "play" for -- including Frank Zeek.
"Seth Freedland called me way back when, telling me he wanted to play for Frank Zeek School because he lived near there and that would be a way to contribute to us," Frank Zeek Principal Barbara Boyer said of UDJ's city hall reporter. "It was amazing ... my husband had been watching the pool every week and toward the end he said, I think this guy is going to win this pool for Frank Zeek.' It's an enormous help."
The money will go toward Frank Zeek's after school reading intervention program, and its on-site day care.
The reading intervention program -- in its first year at Frank Zeek -- serves first, second and third grade students who are struggling with learning how to read. Third graders in the intervention program meet for an hour after school, four days a week; first and second-graders meet three days a week.
"These are children that are struggling to learn to read," Boyer said, noting such students are identified by their teachers. By working in small groups of no more than five students each, the children get more one-on-one time. The teachers do a pre- and post-assessment on the students, she said, noting they are targeting specific skills. Children who have not learned these skills by the end of the six to seven week program go through another intervention course. If they have acquired the skills they need, they exit the program and other children come in.
Boyer said so far the results of the new reading intervention program have been positive.
"When they do their (state testing) scores they are showing that the children are acquiring those skills -- phonic skills, letter recognition, sound recognition, consonant blending ... basic skills needed to decode a word to make sense of it -- so hopefully we are turning them into readers," the principal said. "If the kids have that, then they work on other things, like requiring a lot of sight words - words you can't sound out, but must memorize. There are about 300 really crucial sight words kids need to have."
Proceeds from the donation will also pay for supplies to be used in the after school day care program, which currently serves about 30 Frank Zeek students.
"It's much more than day care. The director, Melana Kaye, is wonderful with creating craft ideas for the kids. She also does tutoring, cooking and nutrition with them, so it's much more than a day care," Boyer said.
Freedland, who reports on local politics for the Daily Journal, said he was delighted to be a conduit for education funding.
"As rewarding as kicking my colleagues' collective tail was, the fact that the children now have improved opportunities to learn such important abilities fills me with a gleeful pride," Freedland said.
Laura Clark can be reached at udjlc@pacific.net
Posted 3/10/06
