More Than A Football Coach

According to research, it is estimated that the summer slide accounts for as much as 85 percent of the reading achievement gap between lower income students and their middle- and upper-income peers.

To celebrate the launch of “Tigers Read!,” a summer reading intervention program designed to support first graders having extreme difficulty with early reading and writing, Clemson University’s Reading Recovery and Early Literacy Training Center for South Carolina and Eugene T. Moore School of Education, the South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE), and Dabo’s All In Team® Foundation have announced that approximately 300 first grade students will go home this summer with book packs customized by Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company.

The “Tigers Read!” initiative is part of an ongoing effort with the Clemson University Reading Recovery® program to counteract learning or reading skill loss during the summer months—known as the “summer slide”—and instead encourage students to use this time as an opportunity to make a “summer leap” in literacy skills.