By Melissa Wagoner
Learning to read is one of the most important skills a child can master, according to Mark Twain Elementary School principal Katie Beckett.
“It’s the gateway to equity,” she said.
But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy, especially for those students who spent their kindergarten year learning online during the COVID pandemic. For those students, lower than average reading scores have continued to show that they are still struggling despite the best efforts of teachers and administrators. Former SFSD Superintendent Scott Drue presented the topic to Silverton Rotarian Dixon Bledsoe over coffee in February 2023.
“He was talking about how hammered the kindergarteners got,” Dixon recalled. “It was their first introduction to school, and they had to do it online. They lost a lot of opportunities for social interaction and reading and math. It’s a national trend. The reading scores are horrible.”
Alarmed, Dixon began searching for a way to help.
“I’m always looking for a project,” he laughed. “So, I said, ‘Scott, why don’t we have Rotary tackle it?’ It’s the best club I’ve ever been involved with, and a lot of Rotarians are retired… work from home or are in town.”
Intrigued, Drue introduced Dixon to Beckett, who – with 26 years of experience as a reading specialist – he knew would be qualified to design the educational portion of a pilot reading program.
“I jumped on it as an opportunity,” Beckett said. “We wanted to take kids who were on the borderline of grade level, but wouldn’t necessarily get intervention otherwise, and give them extra instruction in phonics and fluency.”
With 16 second grade students identified in the “borderline” category, Dixon easily recruited eight volunteers and the team set to work.
“We went right down to the nitty gritty of how to make the sounds and blend them together fluently,” Beckett said of the training, which was delivered by the school’s intervention specialist, Cyndi Hagey, over the course of an hour and a half. “Now our tutors really do have skills.”
And they put those skills to use, spending a half an hour each week reading with and getting to know the students.
“It’s the power of building those relationships with the students which is special and motivating,” Beckett explained. So motivating that, when the students were evaluated in late spring, the reading scores for 14 of the 16 students showed “accelerated growth.”
That’s when word of Rotary Readers began getting around.
“Kirstin Jorgenson [principal at Scotts Mills Elementary School], called and said, ‘Dixon, when are you going to get out here?’” he said. “But I’m terrified to go district wide.”
Terrified or not, Dixon decided to do exactly that this spring, recruiting a whopping 50 volunteers in just three days.
“At a time when resources are lacking, it’s the whole community coming together,” Beckett said. “And the cost is tiny – just prep time for the training and copying the materials.”
Hailing from organizations including the Zenith Women’s Club and the Kiwanis Club, each volunteer was once again trained by Hagey before being paired with two students – this time from one of six elementary schools in the district – who they meet with once a week from March 5 to May 24.
“Thirty minutes of concentrated reading doesn’t seem like a lot,” Dixon said. “But for some of these kids, that’s the only time anyone reads with them.”
And, as last year’s Rotary Readers program already showed, even 30 minutes can make a marked difference, one that Beckett hopes will continue throughout the district for years to come.
“My hope for the future is just… that people come back and already know how to do what we taught them to do,” Beckett said. “Because I want every student reading at grade level.”
