PED awards literacy grants to over 70 schools

In the fight to improve reading proficiency in New Mexico schools, the state Public Education Department is making incremental changes.

Earlier this year, the department named eight schools “structured literacy model schools” and another 64 structured literacy support schools — titles that came with grant awards for as much as $50,000 each.

The model schools, according to a mid-June news release, will each get $50,000 in part to provide teachers more professional learning in incorporating structured literacy in the classroom.

One of those schools — Whittier Elementary School — was in Albuquerque Public Schools. Two more were APS charter schools.

Support schools, on the other hand, were awarded up to $40,000, the release said. At those schools, coaches provide support to teachers and administrators to help get them on their way to “fully implement structured literacy,” Literacy and Humanities Director Severo Martinez wrote in an emailed statement.

“By earning the grant they showed to already be on the way to having a culture of structured literacy and needed support to more fully implement (it),” he said.

Eighteen of those schools were APS schools, and one more was an APS charter.

The grant funding, which Martinez said will be distributed by mid-September, is to be used to buy things like materials, curriculum and professional development.

New Mexico has long looked to structured literacy — which often comes in the form of professional development that breaks down how people learn to read — as the way forward to increase reading proficiency.

According to standardized, statewide assessment results from last school year, just over a third of New Mexico students were proficient in reading.

Teachers at all of the schools must either be enrolled or have completed the state’s flagship structured literacy training, Martinez said. As of the June news release, 6,500 educators were enrolled in the training, and almost 1,300 had already completed it across New Mexico.

“We are at a pivotal moment in New Mexico, one in which student outcomes are about to surpass past performances, all because the teaching of reading is our unwavering focus,” Education Secretary Arsenio Romero said in the release.