The Helios Education Foundation, the Arizona Community Foundation, and the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust have announced a partnership designed to improve grade-level reading proficiency in Arizona.

The partners will join more than a hundred and fifty cities, counties, and towns across the country that have pledged to tackle the underlying issues preventing children, especially those from low-income families, from reading at grade level through the ten-year Campaign for Grade-Level Reading. As part of the collaboration, the Arizona funders will convene a series of meetings with community stakeholders to develop an integrated statewide system that aims to address school readiness, school absenteeism, and summer learning loss — issues known to prevent students from reading at grade level.

The partners also will work to build on the success of other efforts to boost reading proficiency in the state, including those launched by First Things First, the Arizona Department of Education, and United Way, by promoting strategies and policies that help close reading achievement gaps, raise the bar for reading proficiency so all students are assessed according to global standards, and ensure that all children have equitable opportunities to meet higher standards.

According to recent studies, children who aren't reading at grade level by third grade are four times less likely to graduate from high school than their reading-proficient peers, while poor students are thirteen times more likely to drop out of school if they are struggling to read. "Recognizing these devastating statistics, the Arizona Community Foundation and our partners are coming together to truly move the needle on early literacy," said ACF chief strategy officer Jim Pitofsky. "It is imperative that we address this forcefully and assure that all young children are able to read well by third grade, the necessary point of passage for students to succeed in later grades."