August 4, 2020
The A. Sophie Rogers School for Early Learning, an early learning program serving children from birth to age five and located in Weinland Park, has won a four-year grant of $394,000 from the Ohio Department of Education to become a model site for literacy. The grant will allow them to improve children’s language and literacy development, provide educators with high-quality professional development and support, and engage with families to promote seven research-based practices that best support literacy development at home.
The award is part of an initiative by Ohio’s Department of Education (ODE) to improve student literacy and offer new opportunities to students who are traditionally underserved. Since 2017, ODE has implemented a targeted approach to literacy development called Ohio’s Plan to Raise Literacy Achievement. As a part of this effort, ODE received a five-year Comprehensive Literacy State Development Grant from the U.S. Department of Education to develop model sites across the state in classrooms ranging from early childhood through to elementary, middle, and high school. As a subgrant recipient, the A. Sophie Rogers School for Early Learning will serve as an educational and training site for other programs in the region and state, and will work to increase both educator and family capacity in best practices in language and literacy instruction.
A. Sophie Rogers School principal Anneliese Johnson said that
We are excited to have been selected for this competitive award and to help build capacity not just in our school but as a training site for other programs. This grant enables us to create an even more robust curriculum to support early literacy development and to understand the data around these efforts. It will also allow us to create deeper partnerships with families and increase parent confidence in supporting children’s language development.
A national model for best practices, the A. Sophie Rogers School for Early Learning uses a blended-funding model to ensure that children from all socio-economic households have the opportunity for high-quality early childhood education. The school is housed within the Schoenbaum Family Center which works in partnership with the Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, all within Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology.
