On December 22, Rocky View School Division received a $5000 grant for The Educational Partnership Foundation.

The grant will benefit the "Reading... Give It A Shot" program, a children's literacy initiative aimed at getting kindergarten to grade six students reading in partnership with the Calgary Flames. Rocky View has 4000 student registered in the program, which TEPF CEO Din Ladak explained incentivizes reading by giving students a different Calgary Flames bookmark for logging certain amounts of reading.

"Those students can look forward to an exciting few months ahead, with hockey cards that are distributed every hundred minutes of reading."

Ladak explained that since hockey players are heros and role models to local students, they value the bookmarks and work hard to earn them. As a result, they become more proficient at reading.

"I'm going to quickly give you an example of this. One girl, I won't name her name, but she was diagnosed with a learning disability, and after three months of working with the incentive of hockey cards, her reading level went up by two and a half grades. So we were very excited about that story, and her mom was as well, and of course the girl herself."

Ladak says Rocky View School Division was selected because of preexisting relationships with TEPF.

"We work with six partner school divisions, and Rocky View is one of them, and it is a fairly common thing for us to provide grants. In this case, we provided a larger grant so we could reach a higher number of students."

 

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