Philadelphia City Council Majority Leader Katherine Gilmore Richardson (At-Large) joined Joyful Readers for Ready, Set…Serve!, an event celebrating the start of service for 73 AmeriCorps tutors in Philadelphia schools following their completion of seven weeks of training in the science of reading. Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson delivered the keynote address during the event, which was held at Temple University’s Center City campus.
“Joyful Readers is a truly incredible program that I hope to see expand to all schools citywide,” said Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson. “As someone whose child has benefitted greatly from Joyful Readers, it was an honor to celebrate this milestone with them and speak with them directly about the impact they will have on our young people. Not only are they helping them read, but they are helping them build confidence, develop skills that will serve them for their entire lives, and open doors to possibilities they may not even be able to imagine yet. That is absolutely critical for their futures.”
This week, the tutors will begin their service in 27 Philadelphia district and charter schools. During the nine-month program, they will provide small-group literacy tutoring to 1,450 students in kindergarten through third grade, working in pairs five days a week. Now in its fifth year, the cohort is Joyful Readers’ largest to date and brings the number of children served since its founding to more than 5,000.
“As Joyful Readers enters our 5th year, we’re grateful to our passionate and talented tutors, like Senior Tutor Kana Robinson, who lead this work in schools across the city every day, and we’re grateful to Majority Leader Gilmore Richardson for her support,” said David Weinstein, Founder and Executive Director of Joyful Readers. “It’s incredibly meaningful for our tutors to hear from someone who is both a leader in our city and a parent of one of the students we support. Her words echo what we know to be true, that if a young person is struggling to read, they should have a caring, knowledgeable tutor in their corner who can help them every day.”
With only 35% of third graders currently read on grade level in Philadelphia, Joyful Readers’ approach combines two strategies recently highlighted by a New York Times panel of 37 education researchers: small-group tutoring and instruction based on the science of reading. An independent evaluation by Research for Action found that Joyful Readers students gained an average of eight percentile points on nationally normed reading assessments in each of two evaluated years, outpacing typical growth despite most starting well below grade level.
“When we think about equality, equity, justice, and fairness, we often think about community efforts and collective work. Reading and literacy are life skills that are needed to thrive in the world we live in, and kids should not have to limit their dreams because they didn’t have the tools to chase them,” said Kana Robinson, Senior AmeriCorps Tutor for Joyful Readers.
The event also included a procession of tutor teams from 27 schools that each spoke about why they chose to serve and participate in this program.
