ACE News
A Cause for Celebration: ACE Doubles our Impact
November 13, 2012
We have exciting news to share! This fall, ACE has doubled the number of low-income students who will receive intensive and effective tutoring in reading to ensure they will become skilled readers before third grade.
This year, 1,600 students at 22 elementary schools will receive individualized daily tutoring in reading from ACE’s highly trained AmeriCorps tutors.
ACE has also doubled the size of our prekindergarten program, ACE Parent Advocates for Literacy (PALs), which engages adults from our school communities as AmeriCorps tutors to ensure our pre-K students are ready for kindergarten.
This growth was made possible through increased support from AmeriCorps and from our key stakeholders- Austin and Manor independent school districts, foundations, corporations, and individuals—who support this ambitious vision because they know that ACE gets results!
In a year of very tight budgets, the Austin and Manor school districts both doubled their funding of ACE in order to double the number of students who will receive the tutoring they need. Austin district Board of Trustees President Mark Williams has called ACE a model of a public–private partnership that helps the district advance their strategic goal of building a strong foundation in reading for all students.
ACE has an ambitious vision—to build a robust AmeriCorps reading intervention program that will truly meet the growing need for early intervention in our community. As many as 75 percent of low-income students start school already more than a year behind their more economically advantaged peers, and this gap widens in each subsequent year. But the good news is that we can close this gap.
ACE works! An evaluation of the 2011–2012 ACE program by the University of Texas at Austin’s Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk found that ACE is very effective in helping young children build foundational skills in reading—75 percent of the kindergarten and first grade students who received ACE tutoring reached grade-level benchmarks in critical early reading skills by the end of the year.
Because of our partnership with AmeriCorps, ACE is able to deliver this high-quality intervention at low cost - roughly $500 per year per student compared with an estimated $3,500 per student with private tutoring.
We invite you to join us in this exciting growth. Come and see us in action in the schools. We guarantee you will be impressed by the quality and dedication of our tutors and by the significant results they are achieving.
As one of our second-grade students said to his tutor last May in the middle of reading a story, “Remember, Miss Karla, when I couldn’t read? Now I can!”
Mary Ellen Isaacs
ACE Director