Grant to Benefit Radford University's Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic

Thanks to a two-year grant of $86,000 from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, children in the New River Valley will continue to have a place at Radford University where they can enhance their learning and communication skills.

The university's Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic will expand its language- and literacy-based summer services that focus on children who need personalized attention and enhanced skills in areas such as storytelling, discourse, alphabet knowledge, awareness of sounds, story comprehension, spelling, rhyming, reading, written expression or composition, vocabulary and more. The clinic is part of the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders in the Waldron College of Health and Human Services.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Lanter, who wrote the grant proposal, will oversee the two years of funded summer programming, with planning to begin this fall and culminating in summer 2013 with the literacy and learning summer program.

"Language- and literacy-based services will be offered to preschool through adolescent children in the New River Valley who struggle with language-based academic activities," Lanter said. The program will also provide internship experience for RU students in the speech-language pathology program, supervised by Lanter and Corey Herd Cassidy, interim associate dean of the Waldron College and associate professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders.

"Other licensed professions also will provide instructional services to the children. The program's physical location is in Waldron Hall, but its services encourage collaboration with other departments, such as the colleges of Education and Human Development, and Humanities and Behavioral Sciences," Lanter said.

The university has received funding in previous years from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, a national foundation established in 1970 to support educational, religious and charitable endeavors of selected institutions believed to be of significant importance to the late philanthropist Jessie Ball duPont, born in 1884 in Hardings, Va. To date, the foundation has provided funding to more than 300 organizations.

Aug. 16, 2012
University Relations