Burbio School Tracker 11/12: Reading Interventions

1. Burbio's State-Level Funding Tracker features continuously updated, state-specific grants for PreK-12 schools. Burbio has identified over 1,400 grants covering over $30 billion in spending. The data is updated daily and covers grant category, application deadlines, district eligibility, and funding start and end dates.   
 
Burbio tracks grants that are issued by states, but also Federal grants where the states administer those funds and set their own state-specific criteria. An example we are currently monitoring is the Comprehensive Literacy State Development (CLSD) program, a multi-year program recently awarded to 22 states plus the District of Columbia. The grant aims to "advance literacy skills through the use of evidence-based . . . practices . . . and interventions, including pre-literacy skills, reading, and writing, for children from birth through grade 12, with an emphasis on disadvantaged children, including children living in poverty, English learners . . . and children with disabilities . . ."
 
We have tracked the announcements from each of the state awardees. Among them: 

• Rhode Island, awarded $40 million, "will utilize these federal funds to provide subgrants to local education agencies with a focus on activities that help improve the quality of literacy instruction and achieve stronger student literacy outcomes," and "use the funds to help improve reading instruction in K-12 classrooms, not just K-3, and help students who have fallen behind with reading comprehension get back on track."
• Louisiana, provided $70 million, "will award funding to schools and systems through a competitive grant process that will begin this school year," targeting "the funds to support literacy efforts for students, teachers, and schools most in need," and focus on districts meeting six high-needs criteria. 
• Nebraska ($55 million) will "focus on a number of proven strategies including providing professional development, improving family literacy, providing high quality instructional materials, utilizing tutoring and extended learning opportunities outside of school hours, and working towards reducing chronic absenteeism."
• The District of Columbia ($49.8 million) will "launch a competitive grant competition" and use grant funds to "Provide science of reading training . . . Create and implement local literacy plans for improving literacy instruction . . . (and) ensure the adoption and implementation of high-quality, literacy instructional materials . . . "

2. Burbio recently added operating and capital spending budgets covering over 60% of students to our PreK-12 Intelligence Hub, our analytics tool for mapping and high-level analysis across all our datasets down to district-level investigation. In addition to district financial statements, we also capture narratives and presentations that accompany the documentation.  

Depending on the industry category, the level of specificity in these documents varies, but, as a rule, when keywords appear, they tend to be meaningful, as they reference spending levels, initiative details, or both. The following is a list of industry keywords and the percentage of districts that mention them in their budgets at least once: