The California State University in Northridge recently received a $1.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The funding will be used to develop a nationwide intervention program which will help kids with learning disabilities do better in high school.
Four special education professors at CSUN have already started work on the Literate Adolescents Intervention Project. Some of the program's key points include providing student-specific materials to teachers, conducting further research on children's reading competency and making the program more adaptable to all US high schools.
Sally Spencer, one of the proponents of the initiative, told CSUN Today that majority of kids with learning disabilities are put into special education classes due to reading problems. When they reach high school, they are usually four grade levels behind.
"What research tells us is that in order to intervene with their reading problems, intervention needs to start really early and be really intensive," said Spencer. "Many schools don't have the resources for that, and the kids get further and further behind."
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, 21 percent of all children with learning disabilities are put under special education classes because of speech or language impairments. The goal of the CSUN professors is to introduce special students to more general education classes.
Spencer and company plan to achieve this by creating a collaborative model which combines intensive reading strategies and content classes like science and history. That way, kids become better-rounded individuals.
The CSUN professors are thrilled to be part of the pioneering program. They said they chose to become educators because they want to help kids. This new initiative gives them the opportunity to do so on a national level.
They are currently backed by the Los Angeles Unified School District's Intensive Diagnostic Educational Centers. The Literate Adolescents Intervention Project is expected to be implemented in three Los Angeles high schools by 2019.
