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NHTI student Kamili Johnson: "Everywhere you go you have to read."
Reading and math students at Friday field day.
Nine-year-old Kamili Johnson got a green light to start reading — then showed up at East Rock Park to celebrate with a game of “red light/green light.”
Kamili was among the crowd participating in the New Haven Tutoring Initiative’s (NHTI) inaugural field day Friday.
The gathering brought together hundreds of students who get math and reading tutoring around the city with the initiative’s 21 partners. (Click here to learn more about the sites and enrollment.)
The city created the New Haven Tutoring Initiative in 2023 using $3 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act pandemic-relief funding. United Way of Greater New Haven coordinates the program, which recruits local partners to receive funding to provide “high-dosage” academic tutoring at least twice a week. Partners receive curricular materials and training through New Haven Reads and New Haven Counts. The program had been funded through August 2025. For the FY25-26 city budget, Mayor Justin Elicker allocated another $1.5 million toward the program, extending the program through December 2026.
When students arrived Friday they quickly gravitated to the park’s playground. They stretched with New Haven Counts counselors before separating into stations to play games with other students. The groups ended the day in the sunny park with lunch, ice pops, and music.
Stations varied with games like human foosball, relay races, and baseball.
Nine-year-old Kamili gets tutoring in reading at Inspired Communities in Newhallville on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She also participates in morning summer programs with Little Scientists, another NHTI partner.
Kamili said she enjoys spelling a lot more now that she has been developing her reading skills. “I thought it was going to be just boring, but practicing there is actually fun,” she said.
Twice a week Kamili practices her reading on the online science-of-reading-based tool Lexia, then works one-on-one with a tutor to practice her spelling, the area in literacy she said she struggles with most. She said she enjoys finishing her session by playing Uno or Guess Who with her reading tutor.
“Everywhere you go you have to read,” Kamili concluded.
Kamili’s grandmother Sandra Duhaney-Watson brings her to her tutoring sessions each week and often reminds her and other youth that reading is fundamental. From reading street signs to expanding your mental horizons, Duhaney-Watson said, “Reading can take you so many places in your mind and in life.”
Inspired Communities Inc founder and Harris and Tucker School Principal Kim Harris said her tutoring organization has seen significant growth in students’ reading skills as well as improvements in their behavior. “The behavior factor is almost nothing,” she said. “NHTI has been amazing to us.”
Harris’s organization currently has an average of 18 5- to 12-year-olds receiving reading tutoring. The organization has a goal of 25 students for the fall and needs more volunteer tutors. The program offers meals and healthy snacks to students.
Students stretch to warm up for day of fun.
LEAP staffer Summer Choate Lewis told the Independent that the NHTI has hosted family events on Saturdays in recent years, but Friday’s field day was the first hosted to bring together multiple NHTI programs’ participants to celebrate students’ growth this summer with a day of fun.
“We want you to know you’re a part of something way bigger than just your program. We’re all a part of this together. We are one New Haven,” Choate Lewis told the group during the event kick off.
Click here to read the NHTI 2024 annual impact report, which reports that 90 percent or more of participants in reading and math tutoring have increased their skills.
Egg race station.
Red light/green light game.