ROR Programs: Special Initiative

Initiatives

ROR in the Military

ROR American Indian/Alaska Native

Leyendo Juntos (Reading Together)

ROR in the Military

Given the countless sacrifices that members of our Armed Services and their families make for our country, they deserve nothing but the best, and quality health care and proven school readiness strategies are no exception. With support from the Department of Defense and its Office of Family Policy, Children and Youth, Reach Out and Read hopes to implement the pediatric literacy program in up to 20 military healthcare facilities laying the foundation for reaching all military families with young children.

The Impact in the Military to Date
Seven military bases currently participate in ROR programs.
More than 12,000 children of military families participate in ROR annually.
24,000 new, developmentally-appropriate books are distributed to children on military bases annually.

The Challenge: Help Military Families Cope in Difficult Times
ROR presents a unique opportunity to support and strengthen military families with young children. ROR helps parents understand developmental stages, build routines which reassure children, and develop skills and knowledge that are essential for families being tested by separation and deployment.
The military healthcare system provides full and systematic primary care for the children of military families. ROR has the potential to reach all these children, without building additional infrastructure, through a system parents already know.

For more information, contact Stacie Neff at stacie.neff@reachoutandread.org

For related links, visit
ROR in the Military coalition page
America Supports You

ROR American Indian/Alaska Native

Approximately 46 out of 300 Indian Health Service (IHS), Tribal, and Urban (I/T/U) hospitals and clinics are participating in ROR across the county. These programs collectively serve nearly 31,500 children ages 6 months to 5 years or only 25% of the American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) children who receive care through I/T/U programs. The ROR National Center is partnering with the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Native American Child Health (CONACH) to develop an American Indian/Alaska Native ROR Coalition that seeks to serve four primary functions:

Secure and appropriately distribute funding for each site's annual book budget
Provide site-based training, technical assistance, and quality assurance visits to I/T/U sites
Expand the ROR program to additional I/T/U hospitals and clinics across the country
Procure books with Native American themes and in Native American languages

For related links, visit
ROR American Indian/Alaska Native Coalition page
CONACH

Leyendo Juntos (Reading Together)

Reach Out and Read physicians and nurses provide primary care to hundreds of thousands of Latino children each year. In fact, 86% of ROR sites nationwide serve families whose primary language is Spanish.. ROR medical providers are in a unique position to develop a trusting relationship with families early in a child's life because they emphasize the importance of language, storytelling, and book-sharing to Latino families (in any language). Physicians and nurses, through their work with ROR, have demonstrated that literacy promotion improves primary care provider-family relationships in cross-cultural settings.

To ensure that the ROR message and model is delivered most effectively to Latino families, ROR has launched Leyendo Juntos,(Reading Together), an initiative that will develop linguistically appropriate training and materials for ROR medical providers. These materials will help providers to encourage Spanish-speaking parents and extended family members to read to their children. An important part of this process will be to learn from and build upon the best practices that medical providers at various levels of linguistic proficiency e.g., native Spanish speakers, near fluent speakers, and those who speak medically-appropriate Spanish have used when emphasizing the importance of early literacy to Spanish-speaking families.

The need for this type of intervention is clear. Consider the following statistics:
Children of Spanish-speaking families are more than twice as likely to fail fourth-grade reading assessments than non-Latino white children.
58 percent of Latino fourth-graders read below the basic level.
Latino families average 20 fewer books in their homes than their English-speaking counterparts.
46 percent of young Latino children (0-8 years) have mothers who did not graduate from high school.
28 percent of Latino children in the US live in poverty.
22 percent of all children in the United States under the age of 5 are Latino, but they are 20 percent less likely than other groups to be enrolled in early childhood education programs.

Through Leyendo Juntos, ROR medical providers will enhance their ability to help Spanish-speaking families:
Providers of differing levels of Spanish-language proficiency will learn strategies for effective anticipatory guidance;
The initiative will emphasize respect for the patients' cultures and primary language;
Providers will understand the cultural context of literacy and the link between literacy and cari o (love, caring, affection);
Providers will share with Spanish speaking families the links between reading and school readiness.

For related links, visit
RIF
Lee y Seras
Hispanic Family Learning Institute

To learn more about the Leyendo Juntos initiative at ROR, please contact Brian Gallagher, Director of National Expansion, at brian.gallagher@reachoutandread.org