Colorado students who have mastered reading by third grade are four times more likely to graduate from high school than those who don't.
Statewide, 16,000 third graders - every year - have not become proficient in reading.
Visiting Southwest Colorado Tuesday to highlight successes in early childhood education, Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia told students at Bayfield Elementary Primary School to read as much as they can.
He also discussed with students what they were reading, and they displayed their end-of-year projects.
"How old are you?" he asked students in Mackenzie Nichols first-grade classroom.
Seven, almost all of the children answered.
"I'm a little older than you," he said.
"You're way older," one boy replied.
Garcia told parents at the school who were registering their children for kindergarten that they are the most important teachers their children have.
He said he grew up in a small town in northern New Mexico where few members of his family went to college.
He did because his mother pushed him to read and expected him to do it well, he added.
Garcia told the gathered parents he said he would like to see Colorado provide full funding for kindergarten programs - the state currently provides half of the per-pupil funding to school districts that it provides for other students.
"We also need to reinvest in higher education," Garcia said, adding the state legislature is starting to fund more post-secondary programs after years of cutbacks.
Promoting early childhood education is a focus for Garcia because he believes it can help alleviate the "Colorado Paradox," where the state has the third-highest number of college graduates in the country, but is 47th in terms of its high school graduation rates.
That's according to Douglas Close, a Durango native who is manager of the Colorado Reading Corps, a program of the Mile High United Way in Denver. Close, a former member of Garcia's staff, was traveling with the lieutenant governor.
"We need more high school graduates," Close said. "They are the pipeline for businesses, for education, for our future state officials."
To encourage literacy, Garcia's office established Colorado Reads, a collaborative effort between schools, businesses and other community members to promote common reading projects. Another program is One Book for Colorado, which provides a free book to every four-year-old in the state.
After visiting several classrooms at the primary school, Garcia was scheduled to stop at the Pine River Library to congratulate staff for being named best small library in the U.S. from Library Journal and the Gates Foundation.
Other stops on Garcia's tour Tuesday were Florida Mesa Elementary School and the Liberty School in Durango.
