Let’s stop the summer slide: Support Bee a Reader Fund

Third grade is a critical year in a child’s education. As a parent of an 8-year-old, I’m familiar with how these young minds make the switch from learning to read to reading to learn.

But in Stanislaus County, this transition isn’t happening as smoothly as it should. A staggering 71 percent of our third-graders cannot read at grade level. The consequences are dire and snowball into an educational avalanche that often cannot be stopped.

Students who fail to read at grade level after third grade are four times less likely to graduate from high school – a number that rockets to 13 times less likely if the child comes from a low-income household. Each of those high school dropouts costs our society an estimated $260,000 in lost earnings, taxes and productivity. The impact is real.

The good news is the Stanislaus Community Foundation’s Stanislaus READS! program has spotlighted the third-grade slide and how it can be reversed. The Modesto Bee is proud to contribute to this program with the Bee a Reader Fund, which increases community support for the free summer camps at pilot schools across the county.

Summer can be an educational wasteland, particularly in low-income households; it’s when the downward slide begins in earnest. More than two months of reading skills can be lost over a summer, and it can take up to six weeks to close the gap when kids return to classes in the fall. That’s often too difficult to overcome.

StanislausREADS! hits this problem head-on with pilot programs that offer free summer reading camps at schools across the county. As the program grows with your support, Stanislaus READS! will be able to roll out to even more schools.

The pilot programs are at California Avenue Elementary School in Riverbank, Las Palmas Elementary in Patterson, Moon Primary School in Waterford, and Burbank Elementary, Sylvan Elementary and Chrysler Elementary schools in Modesto. The program started at Chrysler School three years ago and already has recorded documented successes for students.

Stanislaus READS! is ably guided by the leadership of the Community Foundation, which does tremendous work on this and many other projects throughout the community. Foundation CEO Marian Kaanon and program director Amanda Hughes are impressive community-minded leaders who have made Stanislaus READS! a model program. We at The Bee are thrilled to partner with them.

But we need your help. Each year, The Bee helps raise thousands of dollars for the holiday A Book of Dreams program. We hope to do the same each year with the Bee a Reader Fund. Expect to see regular updates in the pages of the newspaper and at modbee.com about the donors who help make Stanislaus READS! a success. The foundation will provide up to $60,000 in matching funds to leverage contributors’ donations.

We live in the richest state in the richest country the world has ever known. Yet so many of our children fall behind in the basics of reading and writing, saddling our socioeconomic fortunes and costing us all dearly.

Let’s find a solution. Join me in donating to the Bee a Reader Fund. To make a gift, visit www.StanReads.org/donate.

This story was originally published March 11, 2016 at 4:34 PM with the headline "Let’s stop the summer slide: Support Bee a Reader Fund."