CedarBridge Academy is looking for someone to manage its new reading programme.

The Reading Programme Manager post, not included in the school's budget, is a direct result of the success of a pilot scheme which began earlier this year.

"Its success is well beyond what we expected,'' principal Ernest Payette said in an interview following the school term.

"It has been so successful we're going to need some help coordinating all the volunteers.'' Commenting on the new post advertised in The Royal Gazette and the Official Gazette this week, Mr. Payette said: "The reason we're looking at this request at this time is that we have, in conjunction with our Read to Success project, a volunteer reading programme. And the response from the community has been overwhelming. "We put 30 people through training last year and we've had over 100 people indicate they would like to be a part of the programme.

"But the issue comes down to management. We don't want our volunteers to come up and be told that a student is absent or run into other problems.'' Not only have students' improved their level of reading as a result of the volunteer reading programme, Mr. Payette said. Contact with the volunteers was also having a positive impact on the youngsters.

"We're creating the post to ensure that the programme is beneficial and meets the needs of our students,'' he explained.

"We only had one reading specialist, Margie Jarvis. She was spending more of her time managing the programme. What we found is that we cannot continue to use Margie in that way so we have been lobbying for a person to play a managerial role.'' The volunteer programme could also be expanded into Mathematics and other areas.

"We want to take what has been successful and we want it to continue to succeed,'' Mr. Payette said.

"We're lobbying for support. We're trying to build this into a budget. But for the current school year, 1998/99, we are looking for sponsorship. We feel there is definitely a need to go ahead with it.

"One of the mandates of restructuring was to look at literacy. Eventually I would hope that we will be able to phase it (the reading programme) out of the senior school completely and we will focus on these kind of programmes and strategies at the primary school level.''