FARMINGTON — A teacher with Regional School Unit 9 will be going back to school free of charge thanks to a MaryRuth Books scholarship; Jennifer Ladd will be focusing on how best to help first graders who are struggling with reading and writing during a full time year at the University of Maine at Orono. The study is part of a training program that will qualify Ladd to be a Reading Recovery teacher leader.
Teacher Leader Training Scholarships are awarded to school districts that have demonstrated a commitment to Reading Recovery and selected a suitable teacher leader candidate. The scholarships provide support for the initial training of teacher leaders, which consists of training and coaching Reading Recovery teachers in their districts who teach children that are having extreme difficulty learning to read and write.
Three $15,000 scholarships were awarded to train teacher leaders during the 2019-20 training year. Funds were generously provided by MaryRuth Books, Pioneer Valley Books, and Hameray Publishing Group/Yuen Family Foundation. The awards are administered by the Reading Recovery Council of North America.
Ladd brings 24 years of teaching experience to her training and has a master’s degree in educational leadership from the University of Maine Farmington. In this role, Ladd will be responsible for the Reading Recovery intervention implementation in nine Western Maine School Systems, and will be providing support for 38 Reading Recovery Teachers. She looks forward to the journey of the district becoming a training site for Reading Recovery that supports all teachers working with struggling literacy learners. All of the elementary schools in the Mt. Blue Regional School district are Title I schools.
The Reading Recovery Council of North America is a not-for-profit association of Reading Recovery professionals and partners. The Council provides a network of professional development opportunities and is an advocate for Reading Recovery in the United States and Canada.
More than 2.4 million struggling first-grade readers and writers in North America have benefited from the one-to-one teaching expertise of Reading Recovery professionals. The intervention, introduced to North America in 1984 by educators at The Ohio State University, has more research proving its effectiveness than any other beginning reading program.
I’m hard pressed to think of a more worthwhile project. This will pay big dividends for decades! Thanks to all involved!
Congratulations! All your hard work is paying off!!