New Haven Reads For 20 Years & Counting

In 2003 Josh Barber was a ninth grader living in a homeless shelter. He had eight younger siblings, a dad in prison, and a mom gravely ill with cancer; he was having serious trouble reading. 

His mom met Chris Alexander, the founder of New Haven Reads (NHR), which was then still only a book bank, and she helped secure him a tutor — and provided endless books on fish, which the budding ichthyologist loved. 

Roll the clock ahead 20 years later and the location to Bear’s Barbecue Smokehouse at District at 470 James St. in Fair Haven. Barber today is the senior manager of aquatic and reptilian life at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center, and he was back in New Haven, NHR’s very first tutee, to help mark the organization’s ​“One for the Books” 20^th anniversary celebration

That was the scene Wednesday evening, when 200 tutors, supporters, and friends, filled the festive outdoor plaza by the smokestack. In an atmosphere of joy akin to a kind of graduation and surrounded by book-laden tables, they were on hand to celebrate the 7,000 kids since Barber whose lives have been transformed — and even saved — through the structured, science-based one-on-one tutoring programs dedicated to equity in providing reading resources to all.

The organization now has four sites, the latest being at Bishop Woods School, where NHR tutors are in the front lines of deploying phonics training (and fun) to help city kids’ learning, badly thrown off by the pandemic, to catch up and to succeed.

In all 370 kids, 80 percent from New Haven, are currently being served by 400 tutors at the sites, and the need continues to be great, said NHR Executive Director Kirsten Levinsohn; the waiting list for a tutor is 150 kids, and growing. 

Go here to the NHR site and click on ​“volunteer” if you’re interested in the kind of enriching interpersonal experiences that were being discussed, very much one-on-one, Wednesday night among the festivities: A burst of joy when a kid lights up from having finally ​“decoded” a reading technique; or the slow opening up of kid to adult, and the kind of confidence that results and carries over to achievements at school and in family life.

Here are a few brief portraits:

Shemar Williams was an extremely shy middle-schooler when he connected to NHR four years ago. He was tutored in reading and in writing, he said, and now is a successful high school student, one of nine in this year’s group of NHR’s newer programs, Readers to Leaders. They are former tutees who are now being hired by NHR to be paid tutors themselves (all the adult tutors are volunteers) of kids who are very much like them, and sometimes not much younger. 

“The Readers to Leaders are also mentors,” said the program’s director Asia Allen.

“I had a lot less confidence then. And trouble talking to other people,” Shemar reported as he stood at the gate of the restaurant plaza to distribute programs for the evening. ​“Then I opened up with my tutor, and then to others.”

Stacy Spell, long time and now retired New Haven Police Department detective and founding director of Project Longevity, was hailed in Levinsohn’s presentation to the throng as the longest-continuously serving tutor.

“It began like this,” Spell recalled. ​“I brought my son in [to NHR and Chris Alexander)] for help.” He noticed that Alexander, juggling the beginning growth pangs of the organization, looked frazzled. ​“What can I do for you?” he asked her. ​“You can sign up as a tutor,” she answered.

And he did. 

That was in 2006 and he has been tutoring ever since, two kids, an hour each a week, for the past 16 years. And Spell’s son is now a tutor, and his daughter as well.

Although tutors, as part of their training, are advised to be involved with the kids only on the academic side, that is, through the hour of tutoring, it seems often to happen that the relationships become a kind of family affair through reading and its challenges.

Spell said among his gratifications has been witnessing several of the ​“black and brown boys” he worked with gain confidence. They often have talent, but they don’t know it, he said. Through the tutoring he helps them acknowledge that.

There was one child, age nine or ten, whom Spell recalled he tutored for a year. ​“He was physically as big as me. He had dark skin, many people found him threatening. They didn’t realize he was a little boy.” 

When the kids, he said, thank him for the hour of tutoring, he says, ​“No, thank you.”

Josh Barber said he could not recall the surname of his tutor (keeping records especially in the early days, said Levinsohn, was not NHR’s strong suit), but he was deeply moved when his tutor, Sam , attended his mother’s funeral. ​“You may not know what happens to those you tutor,” he said, ​“but you do have a lasting impact.”

Patricia Thurston is in her sixth year with NHR and she tutors a ​“very young and very fun” first and second grader at NHR’s Science Park site on Winchester Avenue. It’s across the street from where she works managing a unit of people who provide technical services to fellow Yale librarians, like purchasing and cataloging, works in non-Latin scripts, like Hebrew and Cyrillic. ​“If you can’t read it, we do it,” is how she describes the mission.

Yet once a week, at 5:00 p.m., she scampers, to use her verb, across the street to the site to meet with her kids. ​“I love that moment when they see it, they get it.”

A science-oriented coder kind of person, Thurston said she likes the careful way each hour is set up. The first 15 minutes is computer-based exercises with the kids, she explained. The second quarter hour is phonics work on paper and ​“we get to talking.” In the third segment ​“they read aloud to us and with us.”

And the fourth is what she said is ​“choice time.” That’s 15 minutes of whatever the child wants to do. ​“My kid loves the magna tiles.”

When this reporter asked her what prompted her to begin tutoring six years ago, Thurston paused. On the one hand, when her Yale offices were moved from Sterling Memorial Library to the new Science Park location, across from the NHR site, there was convenience. But there was something else, with perhaps a touch of karma, at play.

“I think I had wanted to do this for a long time. My grandmother was a first grade teacher and I may be channeling her.”

Her husband Torin also cooks especially good meals for her when she’s through working with the kids. ​“I volunteer to get dinner,” she joked.

And then there’s this: ​“I really love it when at times I run into kids (whom I’ve tutored in the past) in (for example) the store. It really is something when a kid recognizes you out of context and runs over and hugs you. I’ve (also) learned so much (especially) about phonics. It’s brought me a lot of joy.”

Click here to see a video made for the 20^th NHR anniversary, which features Josh Barber and others. And here for the volunteer site to become more involved.

NHR’s Director of Communication and Engagement Fiona Bradford said the evening’s event and fundraising around it raised approximately $58,000.