“Ralph Smith, who leads the national Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, recently noted to a national audience that Georgia has the strongest infrastructure in the country of public/private partnership and philanthropic support to create a movement for universal literacy and to achieve true transformational change by the end of the decade. At the Speech School, we find being part of this movement with our colleagues on behalf of each of our children to be our greatest privilege.”
Comer Yates, Executive Director
The Atlanta Speech School has evolved over its 78-year history into the nation’s most comprehensive center for language and literacy. The Rollins Center for Language and Literacy is deeply committed to advancing the Campaign’s four pillars in partnership with public and private leaders across the state to create transformational language and literacy outcomes for children across Georgia and beyond. Founded on principles of social justice and equity, the Speech School embraces the Campaign’s focus on access and has never turned away a child in need of services based on his or her family’s financial circumstances.
The Rollins Center promotes teacher preparation and effectiveness in a way that builds the capacity of educators of children, ages birth through third grade, to provide the instruction and rich language and deep social and emotional engagement required for the construction of the “reading brain” for every child. The Rollins Center’s staff draws upon the nation’s leading research to deliver teacher training to statewide partners and educators to break the cycle of illiteracy and resulting poverty in which hundreds of thousands of families in Georgia—and tens of millions across the United States—are trapped.
To take its work to scale, the Rollins Center has developed the Cox Campus, a free, universally accessible, interactive online community designed to provide a platform for translating its highly successful live training model into an equally successful online format. Currently, more than 11,000 teachers and others (including educators from all 50 states and other countries) are registered on the Cox Campus, which provides coaching and training to every educator and related constituencies throughout the state at no cost to accomplish this outcome.
As a founding partner in the Talk With Me Baby (TWMB) collaborative, the Speech School is also actively working to engage parents across the state to become conversational partners in providing Language Nutrition to their infants and young children. TWMB is developing curricula for infant-toddler educators, nurses, WIC nutritionists, social workers, and foster parents to prepare them to act as TWMB Coaches during their interactions with new and expectant parents.
To learn more about Rollins Center for Language and Literacy, visit their website.