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Garrard, Lincoln to get share of $6 million grant

October 14, 2009

LANCASTER — The Garrard County school district is receiving federal grant money that could help students not yet reading at their grade levels.

Superintendent Don Aldridge announced at Tuesday's Board of Education meeting that the school system has been given a portion of the Striving Readers grant, a $6.6 million federal grant being divvied up among eight states.

The grant program aims to improve literacy in areas where many students read below their grade level or live in poverty. The money can be used through research-based literacy programs to target students' reading skills, vocabulary, comprehension and other abilities, according to the Kentucky Department of Education.

Kentucky's share of the grant money is about $649,000. The school districts in Garrard and Lincoln counties are receiving part of the funds, as well as seven other school districts.

The exact amount of money going to the Garrard County school district is not known yet.

Attendance strong

The board also heard some good news about the district's attendance numbers. It was reported that year-to-date, the district's overall average attendance is almost 95 percent. The week before fall break, attendance was still up in the 90s.

Aldridge said the attendance numbers are good, especially since neighboring districts have recently had to close due to poor attendance blamed partially on the H1N1 virus.

Aldridge said one case of H1N1 was confirmed with a student over fall break, but that student has fully recovered and is expected to be back in school today.

The school district is working with the county health department to send out H1N1 informational packets to parents sometime next week, Aldridge said. The health department is underwriting the packets, which will include a letter to parents and several sheets of information from the federal government about H1N1. The board is contributing the manpower to stuff the envelopes and get them in the mail.

In other business, the board:

* approved more than $525,000 in contractor payments and change orders on the new Garrard County high school building;

* approved spending approximately $345,000 to purchase furniture for the new high school building and have it installed;

* learned that it currently is under-budget on the high school building project, as far as the amount expected to be spent out of the contingency funds. The board currently has just under $800,000 left in contingency funds for phases A and B of construction.

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