HOMEWORDS Program, Los Angeles Times
Chatsworth, Calif.
Represented by Susan Karcher
Audience
The Los Angeles Times has 983,727 daily and 1,392,672 Sunday subscribers* in our five-county market, including Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. Our readership reflects the tremendous diversity that characterizes the population in Southern California.
Times in Education reaches out to more than 114,000 middle and high school teachers to bring the HOMEWORDS program to students in grades 7-12.
The Times also provides the HOMEWORDS program to five other newspaper markets in California, including The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Fresno Bee, The Sacramento Bee and The San Jose Mercury News market areas. The Times administers the program statewide to provide a turnkey program for the California Association of REALTORS® which sponsors the program in the six newspaper markets.
Description of Coverage
The HOMEWORDS Program is an eight-week, newspaper-based program focusing on homeownership concepts and issues for teachers of grades 7-12 in the six newspaper markets mentioned above. Each market serves a diverse population.
Each newspaper promotes the program to teachers through in-paper advertising (see attached), through direct mail and teacher receptions and workshops. Promotion efforts also include back-to-school brochures and HOMEWORD program description and enrollment information on each newspaper's Web site.
Teachers enroll and receive the HOMEWORDS curriculum guide which contains language arts, newspaper-based lessons and a classroom set of the newspaper once a week for eight weeks.
The HOMEWORDS program also contains an essay contest component -- the American Dream Essay Contest -- which is conducted through local REALTORS® associations that express interest in doing a contest in a particular market.
Research
Through the SRAOR's innovative homebuyers seminars (sponsored by The Times), I learned that educating working adults -- who wanted to own a home but didn't know how to make it happen -- created homeowners out of many of the attendees. During the awards ceremony, I was struck by how many people said, "I wish I'd known this sooner."
I began studying demographics of homeowners and learned how many people in Southern California were homeowners. I read every story I could find in The Times about who was buying homes and who was excluded because of income, home prices, lack of knowledge or other reasons. I decided that if students could begin thinking about homeownership issues earlier in their lives, then they would have a better chance to make the right decisions to achieve their dreams. That's when I went to Wendy Furth and a language-arts based program with a real estate theme called HOMEWORDS was born.
Reaction
The in paper advertising for the HOMEWORDS program in the six newspaper markets
drew 4,113 teachers during the 2003-04 school year. Those teachers represented
6,170 classrooms and approximately 215,775 students were introduced to homeownership concepts.
The HOMEWORDS curriculum guides sent to the 4,113 teachers included local REALTOR(R) association logos to communicate support for this program on the local level as well as the state association level. A total of 73 local REALTOR(R) associations were represented in the six newspapers' curriculum guides.
There were 10 total contests supported by local REALTORS(R) associations in the six newspaper markets during the 2003-04 program year. 300+ students submitted essays and 60 REALTORS(R) were actively involved in judging essays and/or organizing and hosting the awards presentation receptions for the winning students.
This year (04-05 program), we have 19 contests confirmed to-date.
It has been very exciting for The Times, for the other Newspaper in Education managers and for me personally to see this program sponsored by CAR grow in acceptance and size. We are all gratified that the real estate community in California is making this level of commitment to the education of middle and high school students. Their support helps teachers reinforces reading, writing and critical thinking skills while opening wide the door of possibilities of homeownership for every student who participates in the HOMEWORDS program.