Reading Partners DC reaches 47% more students, empowering children and communities to thrive

For Immediate Release

Contact:

Devika Strother

Communications Manager, Reading Partners DC

(240) 388-8167 | devika.strother@staging.readingpartners.org

Local nonprofit’s 2021-22 impact results show critical support for students, schools, and communities

WASHINGTON, DC – Sept. 15, 2022  — Despite COVID-19 variants creating ongoing disruptions in schools, Reading Partners continued to provide critical literacy support to students, schools, and communities. In fact, the nonprofit provided literacy tutoring to 47% more local students in the 2021-22 school year than the year before.

“We take early literacy and educational equity very seriously at Reading Partners,” executive director Shukurat Adamoh-Faniyan said. “We exist to help close the opportunity gap for students who historically come from marginalized communities. It’s important to reach as many students as we can in our communities to ensure they are mastering fundamental reading skills in order to empower them so that they can choose the life that they want.”

2021-22 results show that Reading Partners continued to positively impact students

Each year, Reading Partners publishes reports highlighting student performance for the national organization and for each of its 12 respective regions across the country. The Impact & Innovation reports for the 2021-22 school year have recently been posted on staging.readingpartners.org and include the following highlights in Washington, DC.

• 616 students received 12+ sessions of one-on-one tutoring

• 12,273 total tutoring sessions were delivered to those same students

• 44% of sessions were delivered online via Reading Partners Connects

• 465 community tutors supported students

• Learn more about Reading Partners’ impact in DC here.

• Learn about Reading Partners’ national impact here.

In addition to reaching a lot of students, Reading Partners DC achieved impressive student performance. In 2021-22, 76% of all Reading Partners students finished the year meeting or exceeding their primary end-of-year literacy growth goals, while 83% of K-2 Reading Partners students were developing mastery of key foundational reading skills needed to read and grade level.

“Our achievements have much to do with the high-dosage, one-to-one tutoring support that Reading Partners provides, and we are looking forward to more innovative approaches to our work to position our students to be successful in the future,” Adamoh-Faniyan added.

Heading into the new school year, Reading Partners DC anticipates needing more than 1,500 community volunteers to support students’ literacy development. Follow this link if you’re interested in investing one hour a week to help empower a student through reading.

Reading Partners also gets help from AmeriCorps members to train and provide ongoing support to literacy volunteers. Please follow this link if you’re interested in becoming an AmeriCorps member at Reading Partners.

A volunteer tutor and a student in a reading center engaging in Reading Partners’ traditional tutoring program (Photo Credit: Reading Partners)

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About Reading Partners

For over 20 years, Reading Partners has helped empower students to succeed in school and beyond by engaging community volunteers to provide proven, one-on-one literacy tutoring. Since its founding, the national nonprofit organization has mobilized over 75,000 community volunteers to provide more than 2.5 million individualized literacy tutoring sessions to more than 70,000 elementary school students in nearly 470 under-resourced schools across ten states and the District of Columbia. Visit staging.readingpartners.org to learn more about our program impact and our Reading Partners Connects online program innovation, or connect with us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Reading Partners is a proud AmeriCorps service partner and has been endorsed by The New York Times.