You asked for information on the Early Reading Success grant program, including the most recent changes and grant allocations.

In 1998, the legislature passed a law PA 98-243 requiring the education commissioner to establish, within available appropriations, an Early Reading Success grant program. The purpose of the program is to help local and regional boards of education for priority school districts and districts with priority elementary schools: (1) establish full-day kindergarten programs; (2) reduce class size in grades kindergarten to three to a maximum of 18 students per class; and (3) establish intensive early intervention reading programs, including after-school and summer programs, for (a) students at risk of failing to learn to read by the end of first grade and (b) students in grades one to three who are reading below grade level.

The law, codified at CGS § 10-265f(a), requires grant eligibility to be determined for a five-year period based on a school district's designation as a priority school district or as a school district with a priority elementary school for the initial year of application. In order to receive a grant, an eligible board of education must submit a plan for the expenditure of grant funds to the State Department of Education (SDE). The district can receive a grant for one or more of the stated purposes as long as at least 50% of the grant funds are used for reading programs. If the education commissioner determines the school district is addressing the issue of early reading intervention sufficiently, he may allow the school district to set aside a smaller percentage of the funds for such programs.

The most recent changes to the Early Reading Success grant statute were made by sections 43 and 44 of Public Act 07-5 (June Special Session). The act requires SDE to develop efficacy measures for early reading intervention programs used by Early Reading Success grant recipients and make a list of effective programs available to grant recipients. It must provide the measures and the list to the governor and the legislature by January 1, 2008. Beginning with FY 08, SDE must annually use the measures to determine the efficacy of the programs used by each grant recipient. If SDE determines that a grant recipient is using an ineffective program, it must require the recipient to use a program from the SDE list. The act requires program proposals to provide for program monitoring, in addition to student monitoring. It also requires the proposals to provide for the establishment of performance indicators that are aligned with the SDE efficacy measures, as well as the statewide mastery test, Early Reading Success Panel findings, and other methodologies, as existing law requires.

State law designates the following towns as priority school districts:

• The eight towns with the largest populations, based on the last census.

• In the first year of each biennium, the 11 towns with the highest numbers of children on welfare plus the largest numbers of children scoring below the remedial level on the state mastery tests.

• In the first year of each biennium, the 11 towns that rank highest in number of children on welfare divided by grant mastery percentage. The grant mastery percentage is the number of mastery tests on which students in the district score below the remedial level divided by the total number of tests taken in the district (CGS § 10-266p (a)).

Districts that no longer meet these criteria are considered former priority districts and receive phase-out funding for the first year after they lose their status. Newly designated districts receive phase-in grants for the first year. By law, a priority school is a school in a non-priority district at which 40% or more of the school lunches served are served to children with family incomes low enough to be eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches under the federal school lunch program. Table 1 below shows the Early Reading Success grant allocations for FY 2007 and FY 2008 (year to date).

Table 1: Early Reading Success Grantees and Amounts

Source: State Department of Education

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