American Reading Company Announces Record Sales
Up 35% Over Last Year
King of Prussia, Pa.—At a time when many businesses are furloughing workers, reducing work weeks, and freezing salaries, a King of Prussia-based business is busy hiring new employees after a record-breaking 35 percent increase in sales over last year, for the 10-month fiscal year-to-date period ending April 30th. American Reading Company attributes the sales increase to the popularity of its Action 100 Response to Intervention (RtI) solution, which meets school funding requirements under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA).
“The federal stimulus program has injected new funds into the education market that are dedicated to improving teacher quality, and this where we are seeing the most growth in our business,” said Jane Hileman, Founder and CEO of American Reading Company. “Our training programs make sure that teacher quality is the constant, not the variable, using research-based best practices in reading instruction.”
To meet the growing demands for its products and services, American Reading Company has also hired 22 new employees, increasing its workforce by 33% from a year ago. According to President Al Struzinski, “We have aggressive hiring plans in place to meet our continued projected growth into 2011.”
Action 100 is a 12-step professional development and expert coaching model that includes 30 days of “elbow-to-elbow” teacher training throughout the school year. The program is aligned to the new Common Core Standards and also utilizes extensive data-tracking systems to track the rate of student reading growth in real time.
In Camden, New Jersey, Assistant Superintendent Andrea Gonzalez-Kirwin explained, “With extensive training from American Reading Company, our teachers are becoming experts in reading instruction.” In the rural district of Oxford, Pennsylvania, Assistant Superintendent Dr. Cathy Taschner echoes the value of ongoing training, “We’ve committed to professional development in a way that is atypical for schools. Instead of one-shot professional development, we’ve created a system that has been pervasive—meaning it has affected all of our teachers—and persistent.”
About American Reading Company
American Reading Company transforms school cultures to create sustainable academic achievement through training, management, and monitoring. The company was founded in 1998 and is based in King of Prussia, PA. Today, more than a million students in 2,100 schools across 420 districts in 41 states participate in the company’s programs, which include ACTION 100, 100 BOOK CHALLENGE and RESEARCH LABS.