A child’s education is our legacy.

District focused on improving reading scores Foundation receives Reading Literacy grant

When it was time to read, Forrest skipped the bean bag he’d picked out and hopped into Parker Vater’s lap, a fall book about pumpkins in hand. Forrest, a BLAST student, chose to read it himself, and Parker, a Beatrice High School junior, helped him sound out the hard words.

“I love getting to spend time with Parker,” Forrest said. “He tells me that I can read any book.”

Their sessions are part of a new reading partnership funded by a $25,000 Catalyst Literacy Pathway grant the Beatrice Educational Foundation received from Beyond School Bells, a program of Nebraska Children and Families Foundation. The grant supports Beatrice Learning After School Time (BLAST), the Foundation’s afterschool program for kindergarten through fifth grade.

The partnership reflects “The Power of Us,” this year’s Beatrice Public Schools theme. The Foundation secured and oversees the grant. A district reading interventionist trained the high school readers and is helping connect afterschool reading to the school day. Beatrice High School students give their time to read with younger students.

“The Foundation is excited to partner with the school district to help students gain much-needed reading skills. We are also excited about pairing BLAST students with high school students. It truly shows ‘The Power of Us,’” said Jami Vater, the Foundation’s executive director, who oversees the grant.

BLAST Site Supervisor Erin Plessel carries out the grant day to day. The grant supports Nebraska’s statewide goal of raising third-grade reading proficiency from about 59 percent to 75 percent by 2030, a goal Beatrice Public Schools shares. BLAST served 129 students last year. About two-thirds of them qualify for free and reduced-price meals, and most are in kindergarten through third grade, the years when foundational reading skills take shape.

Reading partners, reader’s choice

Each elementary student chooses a book and decides how to read it. The high school partner can read it aloud first and then listen as the child reads it back, or the child can read it on their own with the partner’s help. Students also choose where to sit, from bean bags to other favorite chairs.

Parker said the young readers have impressed him by working through big words like trillionaire, experiment and scientific. Their enthusiasm has surprised him. “Sometimes I will have kids begging me to pick them to read with them, even on days when they are not on my schedule,” he said.

The approach is backed by research. Two well-established ways to build reading fluency are hearing a fluent reader model a book and then rereading it, and reading aloud to a partner who offers support and feedback. Studies of cross-age reading programs have found that younger students improve in fluency and basic reading skills, and the older partners often grow as readers too.

Research also shows these programs work best when the older students are trained. Before meeting their elementary partners, the high school students attended a statewide workshop and a local training session led by Beatrice Public Schools Reading Interventionist Mary Jo Bures.

More than one project

The partner reading program is one part of a broader BLAST literacy initiative. Other pieces include:

The Reading Loft, a new reading space on the upper level of the Innovation Center. It has comfortable seating, mobile book carts and books students can borrow and take home. Students who reach reading milestones will celebrate with a trip down the school’s celebration slide.
Student Book Match, which gives every child at least one book to keep, chosen for their interests and reading level.
Literacy Take-Home Backpacks with books and family reading activities.
Community partnerships that connect reading with real experiences: books about pioneers before programs with Homestead National Historical Park, books about health and medical careers alongside Beatrice Community Hospital, and monthly visits from Children’s Librarian Morgan Fox of the Beatrice Public Library.

Bures is also working with BLAST so afterschool reading complements the district’s Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum instead of repeating it.

For Parker, the partnership has turned out to be rewarding on his end too. “I was surprised about how much I like getting to listen to them read,” he said, “and I like being able to help them work through the things they struggle on.”