Read-to-kids program rehabbed for fall, now is seeking volunteers

By Carol Reeves

Gazette-Times reporter

A revamped and renamed Start Making a Reader Today program is returning to two Corvallis schools in the fall. The program began in the Portland area in 1992 and paired students with adult volunteers, who read to them in a supervised classroom environment. Although its 10 years at Garfield and Lincoln schools brought praise for sparking interest in reading among young students, it abruptly was cut last year for lack of space.

However, the program is back, with some changes. It will be offered in a revised form to kindergartners only (rather than first- through third-graders as well), initially only at Lincoln School. Once the kinks are worked out of the new program, now known as KSMART, school officials hope the strategy will expand to return the program to Garfield as well.

Mountain View Elementary School was able to keep its SMART program this school year, although a lack of coordinator funding announced in April threatened to end SMART there as well. However, a volunteer has stepped forward to keep it going. If all goes well, the program even may be expanded to reading sessions between 7:30 and 8 a.m., said Victoria Fridley, SMART’s regional manager.

Corvallis School Superintendent Dawn Tarzian said discontinuing the SMART program at Lincoln and Garfield schools was one of the most painful and frustrating experiences she’s gone through in the district. “I know it was painful for the teachers and SMART volunteers as well,” she said.

The new KSMART program uses a different approach that doesn’t take up extra space or require students to leave class. It will involve every student in Lincoln’s three kindergarten classes. The children will spend 20 minutes each with a KSMART volunteer, a literacy coach and their classroom teacher during an hour set aside especially for reading every Monday or Wednesday. Each KSMART volunteer will get to know three children during the year, instead of two, as in years past.

Because Lincoln offers an all-day kindergarten program including two dual-immersion classes, Fridley hopes to recruit enough volunteers to offer the program twice on each KSMART day. Students who speak both Spanish and English will read from Spanish books in the morning and English books in the afternoon.

SMART volunteers used to spend an hour each week with children in kindergarten through third grade who needed or wanted special help with reading. Two days a week, the children were excused from class to spend 30 minutes reading a book of their choice with a SMART volunteer.

What will not change, organizers hope, is the outcome from the reading sessions. The program has a proven record of helping children develop better reading and language skills. It also increases a child’s attention span and ability to participate in class, as well as bolstering self-confidence and a love of books.

“Kids involved in SMART are 60 percent more likely to reach reading benchmarks than those who aren’t,” Fridley said. But help is needed to make all of this possible.

Each KSMART session will need seven to eight volunteers per class to read with all 76 children in the kindergarten program at Lincoln, Fridley said. If each volunteer signs up for just one session a week, a total of about 48 English-reading volunteers and 32 Spanish-reading volunteers are needed in all. Two bilingual students in the education department at Oregon State University have stepped up to coordinate the program.

Fridley stressed that volunteers don’t need to know how to teach a child to read, only how to read well.

“What they’re doing is sharing themselves and their love of reading,” she said.

For more information about becoming a KSMART volunteer, send e-mail to srichards@getsmartoregon.org.