FRESNO, CA – The Spring ’07 semester at the Craig School of Business proved to be exceptional for two teams of Marketing 100S Service-Learning students who broke two previous ReadFresno records.
Instructor Guy Decatrel’s team of Luvpreet Atwal, Samantha Avants, Jered Cox, Dina Josan, Brian Menge, and Diana Morgan developed three separate book drives for their ReadFresno project and collected more than 9,000 books for kindergarten thru 3rd grade
children who read below grade level. This beats the old record set last year by more than 2,500 books.
Instructor Alan Canton’s team of Jill Garcia, Daniel McWells, Heidi Stark, and Katie Yager took a different approach by creating a bowling tournament that raised a net $2,575 for ReadFresno, beating the old record by more than $2,000. These funds will be used to purchase nearly 6,000 new books discounted by children’s book publishers.
In the three years since Mktg. 100S students began working with ReadFresno, more than 80,000 books have been collected or purchased for this program.
ReadFresno was initiated by One By One Leadership, a faith-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to engage people in urban leadership that results in the economic, educational and spiritual transformation of Fresno and the surrounding communities.
The entire concept of ReadFresno was based on startlingly poor literacy rates in the Fresno region:
+ 82% of Fresno Unified 3rd graders scored below “proficient”
on the 2005 CAT/6 reading tests.
+ Prior to entering school, children from low-income homes are
read to an average of only 25 hours vs. children from
middle-income homes who are read to, one-on-one, an average
of 1,350 hours.
+ More than 60% of low-income families do not have children’s
books in their homes.
+ 80% of the prison population are either low-level or non-readers.
+ 92% of low-level readers in 3rd grade will not go to college.
The disturbing reality of this data led to the creation of ReadFresno, whose vision is to have every child read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. To accomplish this, ReadFresno launched a literacy initiative in 2005 for children in pre-kindergarten through 3rd grade targeting children in neighborhoods surrounding the 50 lowest-performing elementary schools in Fresno County. This has been a collaborative effort with ReadFresno collecting the books and distributing them to numerous other organizations in the area who work one-on-one reading to children to inspire in them a love of reading. To reinforce this commitment to reading, each child is given five books to take home and share with other family members.
ReadFresno operates on the fact that through 3rd grade children “learn to read” and then “read to learn” in subsequent grades. So those first formative years are critical if a child is to be academically successful. |