Digicel Foundation, SJF partner on literacy school project
THE Digicel Foundation has joined hands with the Spanish- Jamaican Foundation to launch a Mobile Library Cart Programme designed to bolster literacy levels among primary school students. The agreement was signed last Thursday at the Spanish Embassy in Kingston.
Under the partnership, schools in the enrichment programme will be provided with mobile ‘carts’ of supplementary reading material. . The Mobile Library Cart is an effective way of safely securing learning materials that can be transported from classroom to classroom. Each cart will contain 210 books, including English-Spanish material intended to expose the students to a second language.
“We are absolutely delighted that the Spanish-Jamaican Foundation has come on board with us,” remarked Dane Richardson, programme manager for education at the Digicel Foundation.
“Having exposure to a second language is so critical, especially in today’s increasingly globalised world. Being introduced to Spanish at a young age will greatly enhance the educational opportunities provided to these students.”
The Enrichment programme, launched in 2009, is in keeping with the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of achieving 100 per cent literacy by 2015. The initiative provides individualised instruction for students in grades one to three who are experiencing severe difficulty in achieving the grade appropriate reading level.
Last Thursday, SJF General Manager Dr Rebecca Tortello said the foundation was pleased to be supporting literacy development.
“Through the SJF’s contribution of bilingual reading sets for each book cart/corner, we will not only be supporting emergent literacy
in the early grades, but also the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language — both are core
focus areas for our foundation,” she stated.
Nearly 20,000 books have been secured for inclusion in the
Mobile Library Carts. The carts will complement other literacy tools provided to 95 schools through the expansion of the Enrichment Programme over the next three years — an expansion that has been facilitated through a US$3.7 million partnership with the United States Agency for International Development.
