22/Jul/2008
An Editorial
You Need to Become a Reading Friend
You Need to Become a
By: Bob Mathews
Very few people teach themselves how to read, but young children see others around them reading and it can foster a desire to learn. Teaching someone to read is a job almost anybody can do. You really do not need any formal training and reading specialists, who you might think would help, have a tendency to talk over average people’s heads.
We learn to read in the first, second and third grades.
Those are the grades targeted by volunteers
in the Everybody Reads program of Volunteers in Public Schools (VIPS).
The program does everything it can to make it
comfortable and easy for volunteers to give time to the program.
Last year, 635 students at 30 schools in the East Baton Rouge School System were helped. Unfortunately the need was much greater; teachers actually requested assistance for 1,250 students last year. Forty percent of the students in the first three grades in the public school system test below grade level and 80 percent of those students are from homes with incomes that are below the poverty line. Many of these students change schools frequently and have little or no educational support at home. This is why they need a reading “friend” in order to succeed in school.
The staff at Everybody Reads provides an hour of training for volunteers at different times and different locations in an effort to make it as workable for volunteers as possible. They are looking for people who care, because a child who is falling behind each year in his reading level is a student who will drop out. The fact is that someone who can’t read is wasting his or her time in school by 8th grade because if you can’t read, you can’t learn.
So, if you are someone who cares about the future of
To start on this important journey call Jennifer Williams at 225-226-4706 or visit www.vips.ebrschools.org. It just might be the best thing you do this year.
