Reading Partners is ramping up innovation in 2023-24 to expand literacy access and educational equity

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

Local nonprofit delivered over 8,000 one-on-one tutoring sessions and nearly 7,000 books to hundreds of students in the San Francisco Bay Area last year

OAKLAND, Calif. – September 18, 2023  — While Reading Partners’ online tutoring platform, Reading Partners Connects, was largely developed to help support students during the pandemic, the national nonprofit organization has teamed with Amazon Web Services and Quantiphi, Inc. to make its online tutoring even more interactive and to broaden the reach of the program to more students through national and community partnerships.

“Reading Partners is a nonprofit organization focused here in the Bay Area,” Executive Director, Hector Salazar, said in a Community Spotlight with Oakland A’s radio broadcaster Vince Cotroneo. “What we do is partner with the community; we partner with schools to provide students ages Kindergarten-4th grade the one-on-one support necessary to become lifelong readers. We want them to develop a passion for reading at a young age. When I think about literacy and what it means, just in the trajectory of life, we talk so much and focus on the academic portion, what it means to be a good student. But you and I know, if you can’t read, you can’t access all of what this society has to offer for you. Next to food insecurity and housing insecurity, literacy is that thing that needs to happen so that kids can maximize their potential.”

Another new initiative Reading Partners has been focused on is writing and publishing original books to be used in its own curriculum. COVER to COVER is a new book series that enables Reading Partners to develop content that is aligned with the science of reading as well as the scope and sequence of the organization’s online and in-person curricula. The stories include representative characters and themes so all students can see themselves reflected in the books they read while also having the opportunity to learn about the world around them through other people’s backgrounds, cultures, and life experiences.

2022-23 results highlight the literacy progress of Reading Partners’ students

In the 2022-23 school year, Reading Partners continued to provide critical literacy support to students, schools, and communities. In fact, the nonprofit provided one-on-one literacy tutoring to more local students in the 2022-23 school year than the prior year. 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 reports for the 2022-23 school year have recently been posted on staging.readingpartners.org and include the following highlights in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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

• 8,031 total tutoring sessions were delivered to those same students

• 25% of sessions were delivered online via Reading Partners Connects

• 442 community tutors supported students

• 6,970 books were distributed to students through the “Take Reading With You” program

• 74% of all Reading Partners students finished the year meeting or exceeding their primary end-of-year literacy growth goals

• 75% of K-2 Reading Partners students were developing mastery of key foundational reading skills needed to read and grade level

• Learn more about Reading Partners’ impact in the San Francisco Bay Area here.

• Learn about Reading Partners’ national impact here.

Volunteer support will help drive student impact in the San Francisco Bay Area

Heading into the new school year, Reading Partners San Francisco Bay Area anticipates needing 850 community volunteers to support students’ literacy development. Please 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 student uses Reading Partners Connects to work one-on-one with a volunteer tutor on a lesson (Photo Credit: Reading Partners)

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About Reading Partners

For nearly 25 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 80,000 community volunteers to provide more than 2.7 million individualized literacy tutoring sessions to more than 75,000 elementary school students in over 500 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 and featured on The TODAY Show and GMA.