By Josiah Brown
The Greater New Haven Literacy Coalition sponsored a forum Monday morning, April 21, to address Connecticut policy toward education and prisoner re-entry, among other things, as well as a community-wide reading of a Ray Bradbury novel about a book-burning dystopia. Held at the New Haven Adult Education Center, the event featured three speakers as well as participation by a range of coalition members from across the region.
Toni Walker (at left in picture) was the opening speaker, in her capacity as a State Representative and a Deputy Majority Leader as well as Vice Principal of Adult Education for New Haven. Bringing greetings from Speaker James Amann, Majority Leader Christopher Donovan, and Mayor John DeStefano, she discussed connections between her work on juvenile justice issues (including the “raise the age” legislation) and appropriations for literacy-related programs.
From the federal Second Chance Act to state and local measures on re-entry of former prisoners to society, she related how ex-offenders’ reading levels and educational opportunities figure into this transition. Individual education plans are now to be developed through assessments of prisoners’ reading skills; the Department of Corrections and local boards of education and their adult education units are increasingly working together. According to Representative Walker, her regular visits to prisons around the state have reinforced her determination to make greater educational opportunity a focus of corrections policy. She remarked on how she donates her old books of state statutes to prisons whose inmates request reading materials of all kinds.
Distance learning, a topic raised by a question from Chris Alexander of the New Haven Reads Book Bank, drew interest from around the room. A consensus emerged that the State might consider allowing prisoners to purchase laptops (the inexpensive “one laptop per child” model was mentioned), assuming filtering devices commonly used in schools and libraries could prevent offenders’ access to objectionable, even dangerous online material in this era of cyber crime. If TVs are allowed, why not computers that could have greater value in furthering learning? The understanding, again, was that prisoners themselves, rather than taxpayers, would pay for the laptops as they do for personal TVs. Concern about early learning opportunities for young children led to conversation about preschool availability and quality. Yet the balance of the discussion was about teenage and adult literacy.
Toni Walker’s remarks recalled what Jill Jensen, chief analyst of the state legislature’s Program Review and Investigations Committee, had told the Literacy Coalition at an earlier forum in presenting the committee’s report, “Coordination of Adult Literacy Programs.” Jensen had noted a “large unmet demand” for literacy services amid the increasing literacy levels required for success and employers’ need for more workers with sufficient reading skills. While acknowledging the virtue of the many options providers offer, she lamented fragmentation of service delivery. The report recommends a sharper statewide focus on literacy, including creation of an automated, interactive database of public and private services throughout Connecticut. Concluding that collaborative service delivery is the “most effective approach for many adult literacy services,” the report endorses the role of regional and local partnerships. Jensen described literacy coalitions in greater New Haven and in greater Hartford as “models of what needs to be done at the state level.”
At the forum on April 21, Toni Walker said, “Data is what drives everything right now.” She emphasized the importance of documenting literacy providers’ waiting lists and service effects in order to address the “results-based accounting” used for budgeting.
(Pictured: Maureen Wagner, left, of the Literacy Coalition board, who helped organize the event.)
Robert Fort of the Workforce Alliance noted the low rate of literacy among the incarcerated and the State of Michigan’s requirement of a GED for virtually all ex-offenders before they may leave the corrections system. Representative Walker responded that a similar requirement was proposed this year for Connecticut, though the bill did not make it out of committee.
In the second portion of the forum, Mary Lou Aleskie and Andria Matthews, executive director and manager of community and ideas programs, respectively, of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, spoke about the Big Read. That was previewed in an earlier Independent article here . (A broader story on the festival appears here.)
(Pictured: Miriam James of the Literacy Volunteers of Greater New Haven board, at left, and Mary Lou Aleskie at right.)
The Big Read, funded by the National Endowment of the Arts, this year encourages all community members to read and discuss Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, many free and discounted copies of which are available. Mary Lou Aleskie expressed appreciation for the support that Representative Walker and other members of the greater New Haven legislative delegation have offered to the festival, which she characterized as “a statewide entity that is based here in New Haven.” She said the NEA regards New Haven as “a poster child” for the Big Read because our region reportedly had some 14,000 people “addressed directly” – and a more broadly representative, diverse cross-section of the region by age and ethnicity than most other communities – through the event in 2007.
Andria Matthews (pictured) spoke movingly of the effect the 2007 Big Read selection, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, had on Cheshire prison inmates who read it last year. She suggested the Literacy Coalition might help organize one of the “dialogue tents” on the Green in 2008. Numerous related elements of the June 14 – 28 Arts and Ideas festival are listed on its Web site. A Big Read launch event is planned for May 1.
Cheryl Manciero and Curtis Hill of the Literacy Coalition board briefly spoke about the Coalition’s public awareness campaign, which includes her monthly series of columns in the New Haven Register as well as articles like this one.
Three colleagues from the New Haven Free Public Library – Carol Brown, Tom Costa, and Sunnie Lovelace – participated. East Haven, West Haven, and Hamden as well as New Haven were represented.
Other participants came from organizations including the following:
‚Ä¢ Concepts for Adaptive Learning, which equips and trains New Haven parents to use computers in the cause of their and their children’s learning;
• Literacy Volunteers of Greater New Haven
• New Haven Adult Education ;
‚Ä¢ New Haven Reads and its Book Bank — which offers free books and tutoring;
• the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, a partnership between Yale and the New Haven Public Schools that offers professional development to district teachers in a collegial setting and whose resulting curricular resources are available online at no charge.
The Greater New Haven Literacy Coalition is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to serve as a clearinghouse to promote, support and advance literacy for people of all ages in our region. Contact.