A $9.9 million federal grant is about to change how dozens of rural Alabama schools handle their most stubborn reading struggles. The University of Alabama is launching Project LIFT, a five-year effort that will train teachers in 75 primarily rural elementary schools to use an intensive literacy intervention called Friends on the Block, aimed at young students who keep falling behind even after getting the standard instruction and interventions available at school.
The project is funded by a $9.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, according to University of Alabama News. Over the next five years, the money will pay to train teachers across those 75 schools in Friends on the Block, with at least half of the participating schools located in rural districts. Greg Benner, the project's principal investigator and a University of Alabama professor of special education, said the University is also contributing faculty time as a cost-share, which brings the total project value to about $11.2 million, as reported by ABC3340.
According to AL.com, the grant is the largest ever awarded to the University of Alabama's College of Education, per Benner. He said rural Alabama families often face barriers to specialized reading support, including limited program access and long travel distances, and that Project LIFT is meant to reach students whose reading needs remain intensive even after core instruction and intervention. Benner also said some students simply have not responded to the interventions already provided to them.
Who Gets Help, and How
Project LIFT initially targets students in kindergarten through second grade, with intervention lasting as long as two years, per the ABC3340 report. The initiative is designed to supplement, not replace, the reading instruction and interventions Alabama schools already use, and it targets young students who continue to struggle after that instruction, including students with disabilities and intensive literacy needs. Benner said children with significant disabilities need the right program in order to achieve.
Lessons will run three to four days a week, delivered either one-on-one or in groups of up to three students at similar reading levels, per AL.com. The station's report describes a slightly different schedule, saying lessons typically last 25 to 30 minutes, while the university's own account states the program takes 25 minutes delivered three times a week; the two accounts do not agree on the exact length and frequency. Each lesson has three parts: a warm-up focused on reading skills, book reading, and a game that lets students practice what they have learned, according to the same ABC3340 account. The sessions focus on breaking words into sounds, blending those sounds together, reading fluently, and building comprehension, and they include games, books, repeated practice, and educator monitoring of student progress.
Choctaw, Conecuh, Lowndes and Marengo Counties Among Partners
Choctaw County Schools, Conecuh County School District, Lowndes County Public Schools, and Marengo County School District are named as rural school-system consortium partners in Project LIFT, per AL.com. Researchers plan to randomly assign schools, rather than individual students, to one of three groups as part of the evaluation. One group will use a train-the-trainer model, in which school personnel learn to train other Friends on the Block interventionists; a second group will receive professional training and support to implement the program directly; and a comparison group will continue its usual reading instruction.
The evaluation is expected to include roughly 450 to 1,125 struggling readers in kindergarten through third grade, and the Oregon Research Institute will independently evaluate student outcomes, implementation, sustainability, and cost, according to AL.com. Project LIFT will also train school personnel to support additional interventionists, with the goal of creating a system schools can keep using after the five-year federal grant ends. Benner said the program is being built with rural schools specifically so that knowledge, tools, and confidence remain in place once the grant runs out.
Built on Earlier Research
Project LIFT builds on previous research involving Friends on the Block and elementary students with disabilities and intensive literacy needs. An earlier randomized controlled trial included 62 students, according to AL.com, while a separate trial described by ABC3340 included 132 elementary students. In that earlier work, researchers reported stronger gains in decoding, word reading, reading fluency, and reading comprehension among students who received the intervention compared with those who received usual school instruction, and a follow-up study conducted one year later found that students had kept the gains they made during the program, per University of Alabama News. Researchers now aim to determine whether those results can be replicated at a larger scale in rural Alabama schools.
The Backdrop: Alabama's Mixed Reading Progress
The rollout comes as Alabama's statewide reading data shows both real gains and a persistent gap tied to poverty. The state has made the science of reading a foundation of its K-3 literacy efforts through the Alabama Literacy Act and the Alabama Reading Initiative, and the Literacy Act requires educators to use teaching methods grounded in the science of how children learn to read, according to Alabama Daily News. The share of third graders reaching the reading sufficiency benchmark rose from 83% in 2023 to 91% in spring 2024, and third-grade ELA proficiency climbed from 53% to 62% over the same period, according to PARCA.
More recent numbers show that progress leveling off even as gaps persist. In 2025-26, 88.2% of Alabama third graders reached the reading benchmark, essentially unchanged from 88.4% the year before, Alabama Daily News reports. In schools where 80% to 100% of students were economically disadvantaged, about 22% of third graders scored below the benchmark that year, compared with roughly 2% in schools where fewer than 20% of students were economically disadvantaged. For the second year in a row, the biggest gains in third-grade reading benchmark rates occurred predominantly in rural Black Belt school systems, PARCA notes, with Marengo County's rate climbing 7.3 percentage points to reach 97%.
