Program is seen as being worth the cost
When grant money runs out to pay for the Fast ForWord program, the Juneau School District will begin picking up the bill.
Superintendent Peggy Cowen said there won't be a lab set up at every school, but the program has proven itself, locally and nationally, to be worth the cost.
The Scientific Learning Corp., of Oakland, Calif., sells the program as a company would sell textbooks. The software license comes out to $30,000 a year to operate it at a single school, district Instructional Services Coordinator Charla Wright said.
Riverbend Elementary teacher Phil Loseby, who has been conducting the grant-funded study of the program, said it could cost about twice that for the license to run the software districtwide.
Wright said the district could save on additional costs by making use of existing staff and computers that could have other uses.
Cowen said the district may move the lab from school to school throughout the year to get more use out of a single-school license.
When Loseby first started looking at the program, the district superintendent was Gary Bader, who now works as the chief investment officer in the treasury division of the Alaska Department of Revenue.
Bader recently agreed that it would be an expensive program to plug into the district budget.
"But, boy, it's cheap if it works," he said. "How many kids are spending years in school and now learning how to read?"
He said the program held promise, and the technology that delivered it wasn't a gimmick.
Wright said it would be more expensive to hire speech therapists to do what Fast ForWord does because they would have to work with students one at a time.
Loseby said 209 students received the specialized Fast ForWord training during the 2002-03 school year. A special grant-funded summer lab was set up. This fall, grant money is paying for the lab to continue at Riverbend, with some instruction being offered at Dzantik'i Heeni Middle School and Juneau-Douglas High School.
"If it keeps one kid from going into special education, it could save tens of thousands of dollars," Loseby said.
Wright agreed that Fast ForWord isn't as expensive as might seem.
"If it's a missing link for some students, it's very cost-effective," she said.