The University of Alabama is launching Project LIFT, a five-year program to train teachers in 75 rural Alabama elementary schools to help struggling readers, including students with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
The U.S. Department of Education is funding the project with a $9.9 million grant, and the University is contributing faculty time as cost-share, bringing the total project value to about $11.2 million. It will use the Friends on the Block program, a phonics-based curriculum that takes about 25 minutes three times a week and ends each lesson with a game.
Greg Benner, the Helen and Pat O’Sullivan Professor of special education at the University, said the project targets students who have not succeeded with the interventions schools already offer.
“Every child can become a reader,” Benner said. “Project LIFT is built on a simple conviction: A child’s ZIP code, disability or level of need should never determine whether that child has access to instruction powerful enough to help them read.”
The program focuses on kindergarten through second grade, a window before gaps with classmates widen. Alabama has made gains in early literacy that some in the field have called the “Southern Surge,” but Benner said some students still struggle after traditional support.
The Friends on the Block program was developed at Southern Methodist University, and the University led a five-year randomized controlled trial of it that was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences. The participants were students who mostly had intellectual and developmental disabilities, and the study showed they made steady progress across different ability levels.
A follow-up a year later found that those students had kept the gains, with the trial measuring improvements in decoding, word reading, fluency and comprehension.
“What we learned is that IQ doesn’t matter,” Benner said. “If they get the instruction they need, they’re going to become readers.”
In the first year of Project LIFT, the team will work with teachers and rural schools to shape how the program is put in place. The goal is to build expertise that stays in the schools after the grant ends.
“We are building Project LIFT with rural schools, not around them,” Benner said.
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