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Our Vision

By 2014-15, California State University, Bakersfield will be the leading campus in the CSU in terms of:

• Faculty and academic excellence and diversity

• Quality of the student experience

• Community Engagement

Realization of our vision will be advanced by recruitment, development and promotion of an excellent and diverse staff within an organizational culture committed to excellence in all areas.

ChevronTexaco fuels literacy program

ChevronTexaco, in an effort to improve literacy among children in Bakersfield, has donated $600,000 to the “Preschool Literacy Project – Building Blocks to Reading Success,” a joint project of CSUB, the Bakersfield City School District and Houghton Mifflin Co.

"It’s clear that positive early childhood experiences set the stage for life-long success – in the classroom and beyond,” said ChevronTexaco San Joaquin Valley Business Unit Vice President Warner Williams. “We’re proud to support programs like the Preschool Literacy Project that deliver sustained benefits to the Bakersfield community,"

The Preschool Literacy Project is expected to help alleviate a critical problem that has been identified locally. The impact within the district should be demonstrated within one to two years with children entering kindergarten with significantly higher emergent literacy skills.

As part of ongoing community efforts, BCSD, CSUB, and Houghton Mifflin created the Preschool Literacy Program to address the problem at the earliest stage of education – pre-school.

      “This is an enormously important project for our region,” said CSUB President Horace Mitchell. “By targeting children at an early age, we will be able to place them on the track to a lifetime of success.”

As part of the project, CSUB faculty will offer training to BCSD preschool teachers. Literacy coaches will develop model literacy strategies, provide feedback to teachers, and conduct on-going assessments to customize instruction. Additionally, preschool educators and parents will learn techniques on early literacy instruction, assessment methods and how to use in-home resources as teaching tools.

“This project lays the foundation for essential emergent literacy skills,” BCSD Superintendent Jean Fuller said. “Research indicates that children need certain pre-literacy skills from recognizing the front and back of a book to recognizing letters of the alphabet. This project will tap into the existing strong preschool programs and help children be ready to learn how to read on their first day of kindergarten.”

“Through these partnerships we hope to increase the number of students who attend college. Not only will that improve the quality of their lives, but also it will improve the quality of our local economy,” Mitchell said.

CSUB education professor Geri Mohler explained how the program works. “The first five years of a childs life are the most important in a child’s development,” she said. “They are learning so much, that it’s a critical time. But if a child is not getting exposed to the skills needed to learn reading, they are ill prepared when they get to kindergarten. And research shows that if you don’t read by the time you’re in third grade, you will likely be a non-reader.

“So the knowledge and skills of pre-school teachers is critical, the research also shows,” she said. “All pre-kindergarten teachers need knowledge of early literacy development.”

The Pre-school Literacy Program is designed to help children acquire proficiency in four areas, she said:

• Developing oral language skills.

• Knowing how books work.

• Understanding that words are made of sounds.

• Learning alphabet recognition sounds.

“The project will also target prfessional development for 22 preschools teachers, assist family resource centers with training and provide direct assistance to families,” Mohler said.

CSUB faculty will also conduct research and evaluation of the project, with the goal of creating a model that can be replicated throughout the nation, said Curt Guaglianone, dean of CSUB’s School of Education.

Mohler said that even with the grant, the program still needs help. She’s asking local businesses to help purchase the teachers’ guides, picture books and mini-readers necessary for the 11 preschool classes in the program. Material for each classroom is about $1,500.

She’s also asking area residents to donate new or used preschool books to the program for use in the classroom libraries and in the children’s homes. “We’d like as many as we can get,” she said. “There’s no such thing as too many books.”