A group of teachers at Benefield Elementary School in Lawrenceville, Ga. are offering free reading classes to students this summer, the Huffington Post reports. Led by teacher Karon Stocks, more than 40 teachers are volunteering three hours once a week during the summer months to keep kids’ minds sharp, helping them review what they learned during the academic year. Around 100 families have already shown up for the classes in the three weeks the teachers have been operating.
“I think it’s really important that the [kids] not just be on the computer or watching TV [1],” Stocks told WGCL-TV. The initiative by Stocks and her coworkers comes as Gwinnett County schools is facing an $89 million revenue shortfall. The drop in funding is attributable to environmental changes like declines in tax revenue, loss of federal stimulus funds, increase in health insurance premiums for employees and the need to hire more teachers due to enrollment growth…