UD leads $3 million Head Start partnership project

Congressman Mike Castle: “These are the children who need the most help, and we are doing everything in our power to help them.”

5:05 p.m., Oct. 4, 2005--A new $3.3 million, three-year reading project, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, will serve 225 children in northern Delaware and their teachers through a partnership between the Delaware Center for Teacher Education at the University of Delaware in cooperation with colleagues from the University’s Department of Individual and Family Studies and New Castle County Head Start Inc., UD President David P. Roselle announced at a news conference today.

The Delaware Early Reading First project, which will support learning in 12 classrooms in three New Castle County Head Start centers, will serve an area that borders the city of Wilmington, Carol Vukelich, Hammonds Professor in Teacher Education at UD and director of the Delaware Center for Teacher Education, said.

“All early childhood education is of vital importance to the future of America, as well as to the future of the children in the Head Start program,” Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) said. “These are the children who need the most help, and we are doing everything in our power to help them.”

Roselle said the project will benefit many more children throughout the state because of the “built-in multiplier” of making better teachers so that they, in turn, can assist children in their development.

“We look forward to the long-term results of this investment for several reasons,” Roselle said. “Among the most important is that students who receive better education early in their lives will become better students when they reach the university level. A strong foundation in language and reading skills is, of course, critically important.”

Vukelich said the project will create three Centers of Excellence, where teachers in the state will be able to come to learn about how to deliver a high-quality, research-based program that has a positive impact on young children's language and early reading development.

“The teachers with whom we will be working already are good teachers who are providing their young learners with language and early reading activities,” Vukelich said. “Their children already are achieving. Our goal is to provide these teachers with a powerful professional development program so that they are not just good teachers, they are excellent teachers.”

Carol Vukelich, director of the Delaware Center for Teacher Education: “Our goal is to provide these teachers with a powerful professional development program so that they are not just good teachers, they are excellent teachers.”

Jeff Benatti, executive director of New Castle Head Start, said the additional funds for the new project will have a direct impact on children’s reading and language skills.

“We are looking forward to providing more support to improve the skills of our teachers and classroom staff and, in turn, improve the skills of our children. That’s our calling,” Benatti said.

The project aims to prepare teachers through ongoing professional development meetings and classroom-based coaching. The teachers also will be learning how to use a variety of resources, including using a research-based and standards-based early literacy program; applying a scientific method to monitor children’s progress and adjust instruction to meet children’s needs; strengthening family literacy practices through home-school linkages that build understandings and acknowledge children’s prior experiences; creating printed material to facilitate children’s language and literacy learning; and using a range of teaching strategies to meet all children’s needs.

The ultimate goal is to increase children’s expressive and receptive vocabularies and oral language comprehension performance, children’s knowledge of letter sounds and blending of letter sounds, children’s skill at naming the 26 letters of the alphabet and beginning to make letter-sound matches, and the children’s understanding of the purposes and conventions of print.

“This is going to give a group of children a true head start with their reading skills,” Jay Moyer, deputy secretary and regional representative in the U.S. Department of Education Region 3, said at the news conference.

All children to be served qualify for free or reduced price lunch.

Earlier in the day, Castle visited the Center for Composite Materials, where he heard about their military and commercial applications; the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he learned about ongoing research in imaging in the millimeter-wave (MMW) part of the light spectrum to potentially fly a military mission through a sandstorm or dense clouds; and the Delaware Center for Transportation, where he heard about the advancement of automotive fuel cells for transit vehicle applications.

Article by Martin Mbugua
Photos by Duane Perry

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