Famed child advocate Marian Wright Edelman on Monday helped celebrate a Charlotte literacy program for low-income children whose success has been validated by a new UNC Charlotte study.

Freedom School Partners, founded in 1999 by Seigle Avenue Presbyterian Church, provides summer and after-school programs developed by the Children's Defense Fund, which Edelman founded.

A study by UNICCO's Center for Adolescent Literacy found that about 90 percent of Freedom School students last summer maintained or improved their reading abilities. That's a crucial finding, because low-income children often lose two to three months' progress over the summer.

"Kids who live in poverty are more at risk because they don't have things to engage their minds over the summer, so they fall back," said Bruce Taylor, the center's director. Negative factors include a lack of exposure to books, such as the inability of parents to take them to a library, he said.

The nonprofit Freedom School Partners served 550 students for six to seven weeks last summer. They ranged from kindergarteners to eighth graders.

All age groups gained, the UNCC study found. On average, students in kindergarten through second grade gained half a year in reading ability. Students in the third through eighth grades gained more than a year.

The Charlotte program worked at 10 sites last summer, at a cost of $1,000 per child or $50,000 a site - a bargain, advocates say, compared to the social costs of school dropouts, teen pregnancies and imprisonment.

Taylor reported similar results in Bennettsville, S.C., Edelman's hometown.

Edelman rose from her small-town roots with the support of her parents, who she said instilled in her a sense of self-worth and a hunger for education. After graduating Yale Law School, she served as counsel for the Poor People's Campaign that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began organizing before his death.

But Americans' election of their first African American president in Barack Obama, she said Monday, doesn't diminish growing poverty, unemployment and violence for millions of black Americans.

"The big, big group of us is going backward, and the entire premise of the civil rights movement was to make our lives better for our children," she told a gathering at Seigle Point townhomes.

College students tutor Freedom School Partners' students; Edelman said she hopes at least 5,000 young minority leaders can be trained nationally over the next three years.

"They don't need to see all these celebrities on TV," she said of today's inner-city children. "They need to see people who have been through real-life challenges and have come back."

The Freedom School results come as policymakers look at paring such programs from overextended government budgets. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, for example, is considering cutting $10.4 million from the Bright Beginnings pre-kindergarten program. That would cut its number of low-income students from 3,200 to 1,178.

Mayor Anthony Foxx told the gathering Monday he would urge Charlotte City Council members to expand their support for such programs. "This is a critical time for our children," he said, "and it's not a time for us to sit this out."

New sponsors are stepping up to expand the number of Freedom School Partners sites and serve 1,000 students this year, said executive director Mary Nell McPherson. Donations from foundations, corporations, faith communities and individuals support the group.

C.N. Jenkins Presbyterian and Friendship Missionary Baptist are raising money toward becoming the first two sites supported by African American churches. Beacon Partners will become its first corporate site partner. Two neighboring churches, Selwyn Avenue Presbyterian and St. Andrew's United Methodist, will jointly support a site.