City Of Fort Worth: City, FWISD, Read Fort Worth Partner On Summer Literacy Training

Press release from City of Fort Worth:

June 23, 2021

The Fort Worth ISD is teaming up with Read Fort Worth and the City of Fort Worth to ensure all youth summer learning programs are on the same page in teaching literacy education.

The school district will host in-person training on June 24 and virtual FWISD Literacy Training events June 28-30 for volunteers from community youth summer learning programs.

The training events, the first of their kind offered by the FWISD to community volunteers, are designed to support community partners that are providing summer learning opportunities to youth through camps and day programming. Community volunteers participating in the training sessions will be equipped with exercises that align with FWISD’s new literacy curriculum framework.

Most summer youth programming offers an instructional component, and the FWISD Literacy Training events provide community volunteers with evidence-based literacy practices to best support students with their reading abilities, according to school district officials.

Over the course of two weeks, FWISD curriculum personnel will instruct approximately 150 community volunteers on phonics and foundational reading skills. School officials say the FWISD Literacy Training events educate community volunteers on how to best prepare students for the upcoming school year and close literacy gaps among youth with a “one city, one voice, one approach” method. It ensures that students, whether they’re participating in community summer learning or FWISD’s Summer Launch programming, receive quality literacy instruction throughout the summer months.

“This is huge,” Marcey Sorenson, FWISD assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, said. “It’s about ensuring that all students across the city are engaged with and learning from high-quality literacy practices. Because we’ve never done anything like this before, we have to help ensure that we are approaching the teaching of reading with a common approach across the city of Fort Worth.”

FWISD Literacy Training is being offered in person June 24 at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden to volunteers from 100 community sites who are partnering with the City of Fort Worth to offer summer learning programming. The following week, the school district is providing virtual training sessions to 50 Summer Scholar Collaborative Partner groups collaborating with Read Fort Worth to offer youth in-person and virtual literacy programming this summer.

Photo: Most community summer programming gets underway the week of June 28.

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This press release was produced by City of Fort Worth. The views expressed here are the author’s own.