Leadership Matters February 2014

Poverty in the public education classroom

(Continued from page 7)

reading program with Barnes & Noble, the local libraries and even a group called Therapy Dogs International that provided therapy dogs for students in the summer program to read to as part of the “Paws for Readers” program. Flynn said the summer reading program helped stop a summer slide among students from low- income families. “What we were seeing was that we were making gains during the school year, in many cases greater gains among the poor and minorities, but then the problem was during the summer, when they were not in school, they would slide back behind the other students,” Flynn said. “After we started the summer program, the low-income students who participated have been able to maintain their grade-level advantages. “The state’s poverty block grant has been very helpful,” Flynn said. “When General State Aid was cut, the poverty grant helped offset those losses.” There are six preschool programs in Freeport and Flynn estimated that as many as 200 of the 300 kindergarten students had attended one of the preschool programs. When funding for the preschool program was reduced, Freeport kept the program going by using reserve funds that had been built up by years of conservative budgeting. Flynn credited the teachers union in Freeport with helping keep the program and other programs alive. “Our union got it,” he said. “We were able to budget responsibly in part because of the reasonableness of our union. We were able to maintain a rainy day fund, and it’s a good thing because it’s pouring out there.”

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