(By Jacob Mathews/The Center Square) — The Louisiana Literacy Advisory Commission met on Monday to discuss tutoring, early childhood literacy and an associated grant program.

The Comprehensive Literacy State Development Program awarded Louisiana $70 million to support literacy efforts for students, teachers, and schools most in need.

Applications for these federal grants are now open for submission and the deadline is Jan. 23, 2025 with no exceptions. Commission members said the process will be very competitive, partially because it lasts for five years, or through the 2029 school year.

This is the third consecutive year the Pelican State received this grant, and this year Louisiana received the most of any state in the country.

The Louisiana Department of Education made a presentation at the meeting with four goals they have using the five year grant.

The first goal will be building leader and teacher capacity around evidence based practices. The second is providing targeted capacity and research for schools serving the highest need students.

The third is ensuring every child has access to a highly effective teacher by providing literacy mentors to new teachers within three years of service in schools with high teacher turnover. The last is implementing high quality, evidence based practices.

Although all of the goals are aimed toward schools and districts with a high level of need, the department says a school doesn’t have to have the struggling label to receive this grant like they had to in the past.

The department also specified that this grant cannot be used for the same efforts as previous program funding. This is because the program wants to encourage innovation “above and beyond” the current literacy initiatives. It can’t be used for state mandated systems either, like the tutoring program they talked about next.

Act 771, which was passed in this year’s legislative session, says kindergarten through fifth graders who failed to achieve mastery on any statewide assessment in reading or math are eligible for expanded academic support. It requires one of the following: Prioritized placement in a class with a highly effective teacher or high dosage tutoring.

Accelerate is a specific program for high dosage tutoring. It is for kindergarten through third graders who scored below or well below on a statewide literacy screener or below proficiency on a numeracy screener. It’s also for fourth and fifth graders who scored an unsatisfactory, approaching basic or basic on the ELA or math portion of the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program test.

This tutoring has some rules. It must begin 30 or less days after the student is eligible, persist over a period of at least 10 weeks, take place three times a week, last 30 minutes per session, and use department approved materials and curriculum.

The sessions also have to be in groups of no more than four students, be led by a consistent tutor or small group of tutors, and be embedded within the school day.

The department not only wants to tutor up students in grade school, but they also want to improve early learning in Louisiana. After talking about the literacy grant, they launched the Early Language and Emergent Literacy Initiative.

LEAP literacy data showed that only 43% of third graders were at mastery level, and the commission thinks this percentage shows the importance of early childhood language and literacy development.

To start this growth the commission said they want to provide targeted regional and statewide professional development opportunities for teaching children from birth until age 4.

The department is also focused on developing strong, evidence based curriculums that understand language and literacy is built along a continuum that leads one skill into the next.

The key components or areas of focus are oral language development, alphabetic principle and print awareness.

The commission is currently developing a timeline for this initiative but said some parts have already begun in professional development and others can begin as soon as January.