We supported a strategic partnership between two of our grantees—Springboard Collaborative and Reading Partners—to increase literacy in elementary school students with year-round programming. (Springboard works with students during the summer and Reading Partners works with them only during the school year.)
Springboard Summer is an intensive, five-week literacy program that targets elementary school students who are the farthest behind in reading and implements a literacy curriculum that builds on a school’s existing resources to help close reading achievement gaps in under-resourced communities. Springboard Summer combines daily reading instruction for Pre-K through 3rd graders; weekly workshops that train parents to teach reading at home; a rigorous coaching cycle for teachers; and an incentive structure that awards learning tools in proportion to reading progress. The program not only avoids summer regression but, in one recent summer, replaced it with a 6.2-month gain. In just five weeks, Springboard closed the gap to grade-level performance by 36%.
Reading Partners works with schools only during the school year to identify students who are six months or more behind grade level in reading. They recruit and trains volunteers to provide one-on-one tutoring twice a week for 45 minutes during the school year, following a highly structured curriculum. Eighty three percent of all Reading Partners students met or exceeded their primary end-of-year literacy growth goal and nine percent of K-2 students mastered key foundational reading skills needed to read at grade level.
Reading Partners | Springboard Collaborative | Back to Strategic Partnerships