Each year, the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) runs READ 180 Programs to monitor and encourage reading among Los Angeles youths. The LACOE maintains a fully accredited high-school on site at the Phoenix House Academy of Los Angeles. Dedicated teachers such as Ms. Florence Avognon, the LACOE reading intensive teacher at the Academy, promote literacy through motivating students to read books, and the subsequent statistics are captured through the Scholastic Reading Counts data. This February, Scholastic Achievement Partners reported that as a team, from June 2011 to January 2012 students at the Phoenix House Academy have collectively read 1,055,022 words!
The Scholastic Reading Counts data reflects the number of books read by students in LACOE’s READ 180 Programs throughout the districts. The whole district can boast a total of 21,452,352 words read by students enrolled in all the educational programs managed by LACOE. A million words at our Academy and twenty-one million words in the County? Ms. Avognon explained how the program works:
“Upon the completion of any book read, the student takes a quiz on the designated book to verify comprehension. Scholastic maintains a database of popular books and the number of words in each book, and each time students take a quiz that data is stored. Reading progress at each site is periodically assessed by a Scholastic Consultant to determine how engaged students are in reading, based on the stored data from quizzes. Phoenix House has a smaller student population than many of the schools participating in the READ 180 Programs, yet has surpassed some of those sites in getting students to read. In so doing, Phoenix students have worked hard and achieved an awesome feat!! Each and every Phoenix Reader contributes to this report. All students read daily in the program, often completing two or three books in a week.”
On behalf of our faculty and staff here at Phoenix House, congratulations to our students for their outstanding work and kudos to our award-winning teacher, Florence Avognon, for her dedication to students and her effectiveness as an educator!
Since opening its doors in 1994, Phoenix House Academy of Los Angeles at Lake View Terrace has distinguished itself as one of the most successful programs for the integrated treatment of youths with substance abuse and co-occurring mental health problems in Los Angeles County. Located on a spacious campus in the Northeast San Fernando Valley, near the San Gabriel Mountains, the Phoenix Academy offers both residential and outpatient treatment through a nationally accredited, strength-based and family-centered treatment model for teens.