State of California Awarded $60 million Grant to Improve Literacy in Grades K-3
July 20, 2000

Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today announced that the U.S. Department of Education will award the State of California a $60 million Reading Excellence grant, which will be used to improve K-3 reading instruction and family literacy in poor and low performing schools.

“All California children should be able to read well by the time they reach the end of the third grade,” Senator Feinstein said. “This grant will be of tremendous help in identifying the students who are having difficulty reading and providing them with the individual help they need to overcome those difficulties.”

The State of California will make these funds available to school districts on a competitive basis. In California, there are 226 districts eligible for funding under this grant, comprising 1,307 schools and 618,430 students.

The grant money will be used to provide professional development for teachers, purchase additional resources such as books and reading materials, organize early interventions, such as one-on-one tutoring, for students having difficulty with reading and support family literacy activities, including parenting and adult literacy education.

The state will also convene a task force to recommend content for professional development opportunities for English learners, to identify core knowledge for teachers in the area of language and to craft a consensus regarding effective strategies for teaching English language development and early reading in English.

California’s students are among the most diverse in the nation. Hispanic children comprise 39.7% of the 5.8 million school-age children in California, Caucasian students 39.5 %, Asian and Pacific Islanders 11.2 % , African Americans students 8.7%, and American Indian students 0.9%.