Kingfisher Public Schools’ aim to boost reading skills among students received its own boost last week.

The district was informed it will receive an Oklahoma Comprehensive Literacy State Development grant.

The grant will allow the district to implement Read to Rise, a family literacy program.

The grant period will be from March 2025 through June 2029 and will total about $620,000.

“It’s focus will primarily be on kindergarten through eighth grade, but we’re also going to move it up into high school as much as we can,” Superintendent Andy Evans told Kingfisher Lions Club members when mentioning the grant award last Thursday.

The OCLSD is part of the Division of Academic Affairs in the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

Earlier this year, the OSDE acquired a grant of $58.9 million with some $11.2 million allocated for the first year.

The grant is designed to fund an initiative in line with the state’s primary objective to enhance school readiness and improve language and literacy success among disadvantaged students.

The state made available some 25 subgrants to districts statewide in order to support their specific literacy initiatives designed for their student populations.

KPS will implement Read to Rise, a comprehensive literacy initiative with the purpose of advancing literacy skills including pre-literacy skills, reading and writing for students from birth through 12th grade.

Through the initiative, KPS will add vocabulary and writing curriculums as well as install Academic Parent-Teacher Teams (APTT) that are designed to take the place of twoday parent-teacher conferences and create a Read to Me project.

That project is designed for students in fourththrough- sixth grades who have preschool siblings. They will be trained on how the brain works to learn to read and will have age-appropriate books available to checkout to read to siblings at home.

Additionally, district staff from Little Stingers through 12th grade will participate in professional development in the science of reading, how to create project-based learning and strategies to create literacy-rich classrooms.

“It’s one of those grants that’s results based,” Evans told the Lions Club.

Evans said students even those who weren’t in school at the time - continue to struggle coming out of the COVID years.

“When you think about it, we’ve got a bunch of kids that when their formative years were hap- from birth to 4 years old, for about a year there, when they saw people, a lot of them were in a mask and they weren’t able to see how words were enunciated.

“They weren’t socialized near as much as what they should have been. So we’re fighting the curve on that and this is our effort to try to get that back in.”

Evans said the district is working on some staffing solutions, with which the grant money will help, and also at a new benchmarking system.

The district will receive $300,000 for the pre-planning period of the program, which is now through June. The remaining four years will see the district receive $80,000 each year.

“It’s to use as we need to do,” Evans said of those funds over the next four years. “We are going to have an instructional coach for reading and that is going to be central to moving our literacy rates forward.”