This Summer: School’s Out, Reading’s In

Summer camps this year will double as literacy and math training grounds powered by volunteers, marking the first wave of a $3 million pandemic relief-funded citywide tutoring effort.

Mayor Justin Elicker, New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) leaders, and a team of local organizations announced the launch of the New Haven Tutoring Initiative on Monday afternoon at a press conference in New Haven Reads’ Willow Street offices. 

A group of eight local organizations hope to provide tutoring for 600 students in this first phase of the program, which will take place over the summer — provided that 200 volunteers sign up to keep the program running. 

The nonprofit New Haven Reads will provide the literacy education training, tailoring the one-on-one literacy program it has long implemented in its own out-of-school programs with input from the partnering organizations. LEAP will host workshops for families aiming to further their kids’ reading skills at home, including sessions for families who speak a language other than English. United Way is coordinating the effort. 

In addition to New Haven Reads and LEAP, five organizations will embed tutoring into their summer programs this year: the Boys and Girls Club, Horizons (at the Foote School), Inspired Communities, New Haven Counts, and New Hytes. (New Haven Counts will be focusing on math.) The city is planning to expand the scope of the program after assessing how this first stage goes. Administrative costs will be funded by up to $3 million of the city’s pandemic relief American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding.

The tutoring initiative is one way the city is addressing a reading crisis that has long been festering, but that became more severe during the pandemic. According to last year’s end-of-year records, test scores indicated that just 23 percent of New Haven students were reading on grade level, and just 12 percent reached grade level expectations in math. As Assistant Superintendent Keisha Redd-Hannans noted, New Haven Public Schools have recently adopted a new reading curriculum rooted in a ​“structured literacy,” phonics-centered approach to reading — a shift from the school district’s previous focus on ​“balanced literacy,” which research has largely discredited as a less effective method of teaching kids how to read. The New Haven Reads curriculum is also rooted in phonics education, which prioritizes sounding out words rather than guessing based context clues.

“Together, we can make New Haven the city that reads,” said incoming schools Superintendent Madeline Negrón, who praised a focus on the resources and potential teachers located right in New Haven. ​“We have the talent in the city and in this community.” She added that literacy in any language, not just English, can open up worlds of knowledge for kids.

Kirsten Levinsohn, the executive director of New Haven Reads, observed that one challenge will likely be recruiting enough volunteers to keep the program running. ​“We want to figure this out, because we have to,” she said. 

“It’s so troubling to see how far behind the kids have been,” Levinsohn said. ​“With third graders, it’s like they missed first and second grade.”

Elicker urged local businesses to consider allowing employees to tutor during the work week. He said the city is exploring how to allow and encourage public employees to tutor; Lauren Zucker, Yale’s associate vice president for New Haven affairs, announced that the university is piloting an option for ​“certain employee groups” to tutor during work hours.

“It’s going to take all of us,” Elicker said. ​“Volunteers are critical to the success of this initiative.”

Elicker described the city’s strategy in promoting literacy as an ​“all-of-the-above approach,” targeting not only classrooms but the time that kids spend in after-school programs and at home with their families.

For Kim Harris, the principal of Newhallville’s Harris and Tucker School and founder of one of the partnering youth organizations, Inspired Communities, it was an ​“all-of-the-above approach” that helped her learn how to read.

As a child growing up in the neighborhood where she now teaches, Harris struggled to learn how to read and write. ​“If not for the community leaders who sat me down” and practiced with her for hours outside school, she said, she wouldn’t have become the educator she is today. There were a few teachers who lived in Newhallville when she was a kid, including a Baldwin School teacher named Mrs. Smith, who taught her how to piece together letters and words.

Harris plans to run summer programming for 12 hours a day, as she has in years past. This year, however, her organization will offer a twice-weekly session centered around ​“community enrichment activities” from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., which will include hour-long batches of literacy tutoring for kids of a variety of ages. She’ll reach out to local parents at upcoming events like the Arts and Ideas Newhallville neighborhood festival and the Freddie Fixer parade.

Outside of those tutoring sessions, Harris said, she builds literacy into the day-to-day camp activities. For instance, at her Kids TV program, in which kids collaborate on mini-documentaries that they produce over the course of the summer, Harris teaches the campers how to read and write a script. ​“They learn to take a breath on a comma,” she said.

“What I worry about,” Levinsohn said, are ​“the kids who aren’t in a program” like Inspired Communities this summer.

Levinsohn dreams of a literacy effort that reaches beyond school buildings and tutoring sessions. She imagines books stocked at barbershops and laundromats. Reading practice on city buses. Billboards encouraging children and parents alike to sound out words. She wants to ​“get the whole city excited about this,” about reading.

For now, the city has 200 volunteer positions open. To sign up, visit https://uwgnh.org/tutoring.