University of North Carolina Wilmington rising senior Rachel Armstrong sits at a small metal desk beside 7-year-old Rasu Montgomery, a worn paperback copy of the novel “Holes” between them. Armstrong reads a few paragraphs while Montgomery leans in, listening. Then she urges Montgomery to read the next page aloud.
A low hum of chatter fills the community center at Hillcrest Housing Development as tutors and children sit in pairs, reading or studying. At a table behind Armstrong and Montgomery, UNCW student Brooke Graham and 8-year-old Jonathon Bottle huddle over a textbook. Graham points to words on the page, asking Bottle to carefully sound them out one by one.
Nearby, 6-year-old Tavion Williams sits on the knee of his tutor, Jaramie Black. Just moments before, Williams was brimming with wiggly energy but now he sits quietly, listening intently as Black reads from a picture book.
After 30 minutes of reading, the children have earned a few moments of recess and games. They run outside, giggling, followed closely by their tutors.
This scene occurs two afternoons per week during UNCW’s fall and spring semesters, UNCW Hillcrest Reading Program head researcher Dr. John Rice said.
Rice started the reading program in 2008 with Dr. Martin Kozloff and Eric Irizarry, he said, as an educational component to UNCW’s newly established partnership with the Wilmington Housing Authority.
After seeing the 2008 results of North Carolina end-of-grade (EOG) testing, Rice, Kozloff and Irizarry decided one of the most urgent educational needs in the Hillcrest community was a learning environment for young children. The EOG composite reading and math scores indicated 70 to 80 percent of African-American students in grades third through eighth were performing below grade-level proficiency.
“And we knew,” Rice said, “if you teach them right, it doesn’t have to be that way.”
Part of the reason the children are underperforming is the public schools they attend are disadvantaged, he said. Schools are funded by property tax, so schools in poorer neighborhoods have fewer resources.
If they are struggling with their homework, he added, often it is because they don’t have parental figures around to help them or encourage them to complete it.
“It’s not because the parents don’t care,” Rice said, “but because maybe the parents didn’t do very well with education themselves, or they’re working two jobs trying to make sure their kids have food to eat and a roof over their heads.”
Many of the children are being raised by single moms, he added. The average household income when they started the program was a little more than $9,000.
Rice and Kozloff decided to turn the program into an educational opportunity for both the Hillcrest children and UNCW students. Unsure of what type of response they would get from the college kids, they quickly spread the word throughout their classes seeking tutors for the program.
“That first year, we had 120 volunteers,” Rice said, “and we had 10 kids. We decided we had to be a little more targeted in our recruiting from then on.”
Improving reading skills was the focus of the program because many of the children struggled in that area. They chose a curriculum based on the methods of Siegfried Engelmann, whose experiments on teaching and learning led him to write dozens of books about educating young people.
Specifically valuable to the Hillcrest program were Engelmann’s efforts in developing scripted lessons to teach disadvantaged or underperforming children. The lessons are compiled in a book called “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons,” a textbook that teaches children to read words by sounding out the individual letter phonemes.
It works, Rice said.
“One of the little girls in here … said she got her report card and she’d gone up four levels in her reading ability,” he said. “But the coolest thing is the relationship between the tutors and the kids.”
Typically, a tutor will work with the same student for an entire semester, Rice said, building a relationship that evolves from teacher to role model. At the end of the year, the tutor will buy a book based on the tutee’s reading level and interests as a gift to the child.
For some pairings, the relationship doesn’t end after one semester. Armstrong said she’s returning to the program in the fall to keep working with 7-year-old Montgomery.
She said while she loves working with kids, volunteering for the Hillcrest Reading Program is not always easy. The children have good days and bad days. It can be discouraging for tutors, especially when a child is having several bad days in a row.
“You’re like, ‘Wow, nothing I do is helping,’” she said. “But I try to walk out of it thinking, ‘OK, I helped a little bit. Even if I don’t see it, I helped a little bit.”
And in between the challenging stretches there are breakthroughs. Armstrong said she knew Montgomery was learning to read at a high level but she didn’t realize he was actually engaging with the storyline too until they reached a significant plot twist.
“He got so excited when we got to the point where you learn Zero is related to Madame Zeroni,” she said. “He was like ‘Oh!’ I don’t think anybody has ever had him read a chapter book before. He was super nervous about it, but then he started getting really into it and now he likes reading it even more than I do.”
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