Ohio Receives $35 million Federal Reading Grant

Some good news on Ohio's education front. The U.S. Department of Education has given the Ohio Department of Education a three-year, $35 million grant to improve reading among our state's most at-risk youth.

About 95 percent of the money will be distributed to local schools to deal with the challenges they are facing with reading, according to the ODE news release.

This is providing at least some of the funding necessary for the state's Third-Grade Reading Guarantee to work. While there has been much hoopla over the TGRG from politicians, as with most Ohio education initiatives, funding didn't really follow the rhetoric. Yet despite the fact that the TGRG is essentially an unfunded (or very underfunded mandate), nearly 94 percent of Ohio's school children met the guarantee last school year.

Now that the state will be able to bump up the funding commitment to the TGRG, perhaps our percentage can increase even more than the 0.5 percentage overall increase we saw last year.