LITTLE ROCK – The Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) announced a new $14.7 million federal grant aimed at strengthening early childhood education and expanding access to high-quality learning programs across the state.
The federal grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is for the Preschool Development Grant Birth Through Five. The grant is intended to advance the state’s early childhood education system over the next year through several key initiatives.
The first initiative is strengthening statewide coordination among families, educators, Head Start programs, and school districts to build a unified system.
The second is to support the LEARNS Act implementation through the ongoing transition to a single early childhood system, which includes improving data systems and supporting the early childhood workforce.
The third initiative is expanded access, increasing the availability of high-quality early learning opportunities for children from birth to age five, regardless of their location.
Creating local partnerships for collaborating with local lead organizations to ensure educational plans reflect community-specific needs is the fourth initiative.
The final initiative is Higher Education involvement. The program is collaborating with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock which recently received $4.2 million of the funding to help expand these early childhood initiatives across the state.
This most recent award brings Arkansas’ total federal Preschool Development Grant funding to approximately $54.25 million since 2019. The Secretary of Education, Jacob Oliva said, “the grant will help strengthen coordination and ensure children across the state have access to strong early learning opportunities, regardless of where they live.”
ADE has also been awarded two competitive Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grants from the U.S. Department of Education, totaling nearly $25 million over five years, to study and strengthen literacy instruction and improve outcomes for all students, especially those in rural communities.
Arkansas is the only state to receive more than one award, affirming the state’s investments in strong literacy foundations through the LEARNS Act. One of the EIR federal grants awarded to Arkansas, worth nearly $15 million, will be used to evaluate high-impact tutoring initiatives at rural schools. The project will be used in partnership with a virtual tutoring program, Air Reading. Stanford University will independently evaluate the program to determine its impact.
A separate grant totaling nearly $10 million will be used to study a program that teaches early literacy skills in partnership with the University of Florida Literacy Institute. Together these grants build on Arkansas’ recent investments to strengthen literacy statewide through the LEARNS Act.
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