Sucess Stories

Community Collaboration as a Success Story

Eager to Learn is a grassroots literacy collaboration of about thirty nonprofit organizations in Austin, Texas. The goal of the group is to raise the literacy skills in seventy children who have been identified as needing help. Most of the children are pre-kindergarten and kindergarten age, and live near I-35 and Highway 183. This area is home for about one-fourth of all Austin children under the age of five years. Parents and childcare providers are involved as well in the program. A survey of the parents indicated that the parents had been unaware of the fact that learning begins before a child enters school. The parents in Eager to Learn are finding out that they are their child's first teacher, and how important interacting with, talking to, and reading to their child right from the start can be on the child's brain development and future literacy skills. The ASPIRE Even Start Program of Communities in Schools is part of the Eager to Learn collaboration. For more
information, please visit
http://www.theaustinproject.org/what_we_do/early_literacy.php

(Reported by News 8 Austin, Erin Ochoa, June 21, 2004 with input from Kirsten Siegfried, Even Start)