“Today was Lunar New Year. It was time to celebrate."
"You knew ‘celebrate!’”
That’s Jazmin, a second grader at Discovery Elementary School in Kentwood, reading with interventionist Chris Krive, part of a Reading Corps tutoring program at Kentwood Public Schools.
“We work on reading fluency, so we're working on reading rate, reading accuracy, and reading expression, mostly. So, of course, those are the three areas where you see the growth.”
With state data showing only 25% of Michigan fourth graders reading proficiently, leaders say sustained community investment is critical to maintaining momentum in literacy and math achievement.
Hope Network’s Michigan Education Corps runs the high-impact tutoring program in Kentwood.
MEC Executive Director Dr Holly Windram explains the program was in jeopardy after funding shifts in the state budget.
”We were seeing that there would be hundreds of kids, potentially, that would lose critical reading intervention services, and those intervention services are what are going to help close achievement gaps, so those kids don't go on to struggle with reading in future years and even struggle with graduating on time.”
A $150,000 grant from the Jandernoa Foundation will support the program, sustaining six tutoring positions serving more than 150 Kentwood students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
77% of K–3 students receiving reading intervention have shown improvement, and nearly 90% of students receiving math intervention have demonstrated measurable growth.
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