Unacceptable is how Roxanne Fairweather of Achieve Literacy Greater Saint John describes the fact that one in four kids in the Port City aren’t reading at grade level.
Fairweather says one of the things the group wanted to do was to create deeper community awareness of this critical issue in our city. According to a presentation by Achieve Literacy research indicates that 60-percent of kids who don’t read at grade level by grade 2 grow into adults who rely on social assistance of some kind.
She says they are looking for sponsorship and support especially around the Elementary Literacy Friends, or ELF, program.
“We have proven over a six or seven year period that with one-on-one tutoring to these kids we can bring them up two levels within their academic literacy scoring,” says Fairweather.
Achieve Literacy Saint John is focused on getting 90 percent of our kid sin grade 2 reading at grade level by the end of the 2017 school year. She notes that in 2014-2015 they went up in double digits on average in terms of annual literacy score for grade 2 kids.
