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Springfield Housing Authority Expands Child Literacy Program To Third Location

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WAMC
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     A children’s literacy initiative in the second-largest public housing authority in Massachusetts has been expanded.

    The Talk, Read, Succeed program, which began seven years ago, connects families in Springfield Housing Authority apartments with the neighborhood elementary schools their children attend. 

    Housing Authority Executive Director William Abrashkin describes the program as a prep school for low-income children.

    "To start with the kids from birth and make sure that they get all the advantages that children in more affluent families get as they are coming up," said Abrashkin.

   The Duggan Park Apartments, which is home to 450 children, is the third location added to the program.

   One of the apartments in the complex has been converted into a resource center with space for personal computers and books.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.