Did you know that 71 percent of South Carolina fourth graders are not proficient in reading, meaning they’re more likely to drop out of school and have a lower earning potential as adults?
Did you know that 80 percent of U.S. middle schoolers can’t tell the difference between sponsored content and news articles?
The College of Information and Communications is on a mission to promote reading and teach children to think critically about the media around them. Project Literacy will support these efforts in two ways.
First, gifts will support Cocky’s Reading Express, our childhood literacy initiative, which sends UofSC’s mascot into underserved schools across the state to teach children that reading is fun.
It will also enable us to launch a news literacy initiative. Our J-school faculty hope to create a children’s book about news literacy for South Carolina’s elementary schoolchildren because the discussion about being discerning media consumers can never begin too early.
