Local educator selected to statewide consulting body to help determine the best resources to combat learning loss in students
Dr. Lauren Effler, Union County Schools K-12 Curriculum & Instruction Supervisor and Pre-K Director, has been named to Governor's Early Literacy Foundation's (GELF) 2022-2023 Executive Council, a group of 28 educators from rural, urban, and suburban communities across Tennessee who will help GELF determine the resources to best meet the needs of students statewide.
With only 35 percent of Tennessee third graders able to read proficiently, GELF’s Educator Advisory Council serves as a consulting body for the foundation’s early literacy initiatives, including its statewide K-3 Home Library program that mailed books to more than 160,000 students and teachers in the summer of 2022.
Twenty-eight Tennessee educators were selected from more than 60 applicants to serve on the 2022-2023 Educator Advisory Council, representing 19 school districts in all three regions of the state and three charter schools in Memphis and Nashville.
GELF launched the Educator Advisory Council (EAC) in 2021 to strengthen its early literacy initiatives by gaining the insight and perspectives of educators statewide.
“Educators are crucial to a child's journey, inspiring our children's dreams and shaping their futures,” said James Pond, GELF President. “Governor's Early Literacy Foundation is honored to work with them, listen to them and learn from them to best meet students and families where they are with the resources they need to build lifelong learners. Together, we will work to strengthen early literacy in Tennessee, one program, one family, one child at a time.”
Led by an executive team, the primary responsibility of the EAC is to select the books and curate the literacy resources that students and teachers statewide will be mailed through GELF's K-3 Home Library program in Summer 2023. Through its K-3 Home Library program, GELF collaborates with Scholastic to mail high-quality, age-appropriate books to kindergarten through third grade students and teachers over the summer to combat learning loss and support student learning in the home.
Third grade reading proficiency is the benchmark where children transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” and is a key indicator for a child's future educational success and workforce readiness.
Research shows that two to three months of reading proficiency is lost for students who do not read over the summer. However, reading 4-6 books over the summer can stop or even reverse this “summer slide.” Placing books directly into children’s homes combats learning loss, and the presence of a home library increases children’s academic success, vocabulary development, attention span and job attainment.
In Summer 2022, GELF's K-3 Home Library program mailed 970,000 books to the homes of 162,000 rising 1st and 2nd grade students and teachers across Tennessee, marking the expansion of the first statewide roll-out of an at-home book delivery program for K-3 students across the U.S. In the summer of 2023, GELF plans to expand this program to serve rising 3rd grade students statewide and rising kindergarten students in pilot areas of the state, bridging the gap between its Birth-5 Book Delivery program in partnership with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. This expansion will give Tennessee children the opportunity to receive free books from birth to third grade.
The EAC helps direct GELF’s K-3 programming decisions aimed at meeting students and families where they are with the resources they need to strengthen early literacy and combat learning loss statewide.
Dr. Lauren Effler is a product of Union County Schools. She has worked in the Union County School system for 16 years, first as a 6th grade ELA teacher. This is her second year serving as a member of the executive council.