Southwest Dubois teachers earn grants to boost early literacy

Two Southwest Dubois teachers won local grants that will put more reading support directly into preschool and kindergarten classrooms in Holland and Huntingburg, where early literacy can shape everything that follows in school.

Rachel Hopf of Holland Elementary and Hannah Doersam of Huntingburg Elementary received the funding from the Southwest Dubois Education Foundation to expand early literacy opportunities for elementary students. Hopf, who has taught with Southwest Dubois for five years, applied for a grant to bring a new phonics resource into preschool classrooms. Doersam is listed in Huntingburg Elementary’s staff directory as a kindergarten teacher, placing her grant work at the level where children first build the reading habits and decoding skills they will carry into later grades.

The payoff is local and immediate for a district that serves more than 1,900 students across rural southern Indiana. Holland Elementary serves 252 students from preschool through 5th grade, and Huntingburg Elementary includes preschool through 5th grade as well. Huntingburg also has a K-3 literacy coach, Ryan Sparrow, underscoring how much of the school’s instructional focus is centered on the earliest readers.

The Southwest Dubois Education Foundation, formed in December 2024 as a 501(c)(3), says it supports scholarships, classroom innovation grants and district projects for the Southwest Dubois County School Corporation. In this case, the money goes beyond recognition for teachers: it is meant to strengthen day-to-day reading instruction in classrooms where small investments can have an outsized effect on how quickly children learn letter sounds, phonics patterns and basic reading fluency.

That matters because Indiana has treated early literacy as a priority since 2022, when the state Department of Education released Indiana’s Priorities for Early Literacy. The Indiana Reading Evaluation and Determination assessment, or IREAD, measures foundational reading skills through grade 3, and students who fall behind face remediation requirements. State leaders reported in August 2025 that third-grade literacy rates had risen for four straight years and were up nearly five percentage points in the latest results, showing how much attention remains fixed on whether children are reading on time.

For Southwest Dubois, the grants tie that larger accountability push to two individual classrooms. In Holland, the new phonics resource should give preschoolers earlier exposure to the building blocks of reading. In Huntingburg, the grant will support kindergarten literacy work at the grade level where early intervention can do the most to prevent later struggles.