Functional Literacy + Math Program
Our Strategy
To better serve our community, GO seeks to improve functional literacy and math skills, which helps reduce unemployment and get higher paying jobs. The unemployed tend to not have a high school diploma. In this community, dropouts are relegated to working in hot sugar cane fields for very low-paying wages. With many sugar estates targeted for closure, including the Skeldon Sugar Estate, even those jobs are going away. Our strategy is focused on the jobs of the future which include higher-paying information technology (IT) jobs. Our Functional Literacy and Math Program helps more students to sucessfully graduate from high school.
Ruth realized that if students became more proficient in reading, writing, and math skills in primary school, more would successfully graduate from high school. This would lead to lower unemployment and higher paying jobs.
GO’s Functional Literacy and Math Program for Grades 1 – 6 helps primary students strengthen the building blocks in reading, writing, and math. By strengthening these foundational pillars, more students recieve a high school diploma and can move on to the University of Guyana, which is now tuition free. Those students that drop out can find better paying jobs because of their improved foundational skills and newly aquired, IT-focused job skills.
Measuring Success Objectively
The success of GO’s literacy program is measured objectively. We compare before and after public school grades. When students first enroll, almost all have scores between 20 to 30, which is failing. An ‘F’ is a score below 39 (out of 100). Over the course of a school year, most students improve their public school scores by about 20 points (from a F to a C). We are astonished that some students improve their public school grades by even 3 letter grades! For those who remain in our classes for more than a year, some are excelling by getting Bs and As.
The longer students are enrolled in our after school literacy classes, the higher their public school grades are.
Students that attend our after school classes for more than 1 year show higher public school scores at the beginning of the following academic year than the year before.
Whether it is a student’s 1st year at GO or they return for year 3, the average aggregate score from Term 1 to Term 3 improves by about 21.81 points. The average student who enrolled at GO for 2 years will raise their Term 1 grades by an aggregate average of 22.46 points by the end of Term 3, which can be an increase of 1, 2, or sometimes even 3 letter grades.
Long-Term Goals!
We are looking to more precisely track primary school grades 1-6 and additionally track students through grades 7-12 to evaluate sustained improvement! We are also looking for folks who would be able to help us with data analysis and statistics!
The next step in the Functional Literacy Program is to address primary grades 4 through 6. In the summer of 2025, GO added its Book Club. Some of our goals are to improve public speaking skills, comprehension skills, writing skills, and to learn many lessons of life. Students read, write and discuss how characters in the books address themes of friendship, death, controversy, loss, and many of the challenges that we all face in life. We want kids to develop a love of reading.
