A handful of east-side elementary schoolers file into a room at the Goodman Community Center on a recent Wednesday afternoon. Fresh from a trip to the gymnasium and with bellies full from a snack, they are in good spirits.

The afterschool program is part of Goodman’s *START Literacy Initiative, nicknamed “Lit Club,” and the vibe — contrary to what you might imagine a tutoring session to be — is electric.

Fifteen students ranging from second to fifth grade are paired with volunteer tutors, often retirees. Before getting into phonics lessons based on the kids’ individual needs, they warm up with a little fun. Tables are strewn with games like Boggle, Splurt! and Sight Word Swat! and the kids are laughing, shouting out word sounds and getting high-fives from their tutors.

Iris Patterson is the literacy specialist at Goodman, and creator of the *START Literacy Initiative. In two-and-a-half years, the program has trained 64 tutors and helped 35 kids. In the first year of the program, 86% of students saw major improvements in reading, according to Patterson.

But it goes beyond better scores.

“We get parents saying how their kids have transformed in their confidence and their willingness to read at home, and wanting to read,” Patterson says.

Jamie Lovely is one of those parents. Her son joined Lit Club in second grade, shortly after transferring to Lowell Elementary from Hawthorne. Lovely says switching schools was hard on him and the one-on-one attention helped bring him out of his shell.

“He really liked his tutors. They took time to get to know him, to know his interests,” Lovely says. “He liked playing games, he liked the incentives and I think ultimately he liked the sense of belonging.”

Now in fourth grade, her son is thriving. And Lovely credits his success to Goodman.

“I think if he hadn’t had the intervention, then you might have seen a different result, like him going in a different direction or getting more frustrated,” she says.

The gravity of Madison’s literacy crisis didn’t come into focus for Patterson until she became a literacy teacher leader with the Madison Metropolitan School District; before that she had been teaching fourth and fifth grade for 15 years.

“You kind of know as a teacher but once you have an admin-type view you start seeing it at a district-wide level and a nationwide level and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh,’” Patterson says. “So that’s when my journey to literacy really began.

“I came [to Goodman] with that in the back of my head, knowing, like, whoa, we need to do something more,” she adds.

After seeing the impact her program has had on its students, Patterson wonders how Goodman — and other programs like it — could be a model for tutoring in the district. And the timing couldn’t be better.

The district’s longstanding AmeriCorps tutoring program is set to end in June, a victim of federal funding cuts. Schools of Hope has coordinated and trained the district’s volunteers since 1998. Over that time, Schools of Hope and the math-centered Achievement Connections program connected close to 23,000 volunteers with more than 113,000 students, according to a news release from the district.

Cindy Green, assistant superintendent of strategy and innovation for the district, says the end of the program means a loss of longstanding relationships.

“What we’ve heard the most about the sunsetting of this is the loss of the staff,” Green says. (AmeriCorps paid for tutor coordinators that were placed in schools and those staff will be losing their jobs.) “The relationship-building and connections, not just adult-to-adult, but adult-to-student has been significant and really powerful.”

What’s next is still in the works. But in the meantime the district plans to leverage its relationship with the Morgridge Center for Public Service to bring tutors into schools. Morgridge will take over coordination efforts — including recruiting students from UW-Madison. College students will get training, online and in person, from both Morgridge and the district on social-emotional learning, mentoring, and the science of reading, though the exact details of that training are still being figured out.

Green says it’ll be a “continuation and a little bit of trying something different so that we have a bridge between the sunsetting of the AmeriCorps partnership.”

The district is also going all in on its Mad for Reading campaign — think Pizza Hut’s BookIt! Program (read books for pizza!) but a citywide effort to celebrate reading. Green describes it as a call to action to the entire community to make reading a priority.

Despite building strong relationships, and its long tenure, it’s unclear how effective Schools of Hope has been in improving reading. Over the course of its two-plus decades, literacy rates in Madison have remained relatively unchanged.

During the 2024-25 school year, 51.2% of the district’s third through fifth graders were not meeting grade level expectations in reading, according to the Forward exam, which is given to all third through fifth graders in the state.

It’s even worse for students of color. That same school year, 83.6% of the district’s Black elementary school students and 73.8% of the district’s Hispanic elementary school students were not meeting literacy expectations. That’s in comparison to 23.6% of the district’s white students. 

A recent evaluation of Schools of Hope by UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative found that volunteer training was often uneven. In 2024, only 58% of Schools of Hope volunteers completed the district’s online literacy tutor training, which takes about 30 minutes. And tutors reported a desire for more training, especially in phonics.

Kathy Young has been volunteering with the district since she retired in 2023. She initially went through Schools of Hope and spent a year at Kennedy Elementary School on Madison’s east side. She looks back on the experience fondly, but says she didn’t get a lot of training and was “kind of on my own.”

Instead of helping kids learn to read, Young was often asked to simply read to kids or help them with things like spelling.

“I’d sit down to do spelling words and realize I’m working with a student who still doesn’t understand letter sounds, so it’s hard to do spelling,” Young says. “So it was rewarding with the kids of course, but not a lot of direction or sense of what I really could be doing.”

Green with the district says that with any large volunteer tutoring program — experiences are bound to vary.

“That said, as our district has deepened its literacy work, including the implementation of Act 20 and our continued focus on the science of reading, we have also recognized the need for tutoring models that are even more closely aligned to our instructional practices and provide greater consistency in training and support,” Green says.

As for the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative report, Green cautions that it’s just a snapshot of the nearly 30 years Schools of Hope operated in Madison’s schools.

“That was also us coming out of COVID and reorganizing and trying to get things back up and running through lots of transition,” Green says.

That transition includes the adoption of a new literacy curriculum based on the science of reading which the district has been using since 2023.

While Schools of Hope may not have moved the needle on the district’s literacy crisis, Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative’s report shows an overwhelming majority of students who participated said they felt valued and liked working with their tutors.

The report also found students involved in the program did show incremental growth in reading assessments. During the 2021-22 school year, 59% of students who received 15 or more tutoring sessions improved on reading assessments, in comparison to 51% of MMSD students overall.

Laurie Frost, longtime reading advocate and a tutor with Goodman, is skeptical that college students can fill the district’s tutoring needs.

Despite a “cool factor for young students,” Frost says most college students will only be able to volunteer for a semester or two, leading to high turnover and a never-ending need for recruitment and training.

“In stark contrast, retirees, parents, grandparents and other community members have made Madison their home. They have a vested interest in the issue, a deep commitment to helping the kids in the community and a homegrown determination to finally address this longstanding problem,” Frost says.

“A greater reliance on community members will allow the district to grow a large and stable corps of trained literacy tutors to help our kids,” she adds.

Frost, Patterson, Young and a growing group of community members are advocating that tutors with better training could be doing more to help Madison’s struggling readers get up to speed. Particularly for the kids who don’t qualify for reading intervention but are below the 50th percentile, a group sometimes called the invisible middle.

To do that, they say the district needs to go all in on high-impact tutoring.

The National Education Association, or NEA, defines high-impact tutoring as frequent, one-on-one or small group tutoring sessions done during the school day by professionally trained tutors with lessons or materials that align with what’s being taught in the classroom. To be successful, tutors should meet with the same students to make sure they’re building relationships and getting the individualized help they need.

More schools across the nation are leaning into this type of tutor training to make up for COVID-era learning loss. In January 2024, the Biden administration announced that high-dosage tutoring was one of the pillars of its Improving Student Achievement Agenda.

But to be successful, this type of tutoring hinges on volunteers who have a lot of time to give. Getting trained in high-impact, or high-dosage tutoring takes weeks. At Goodman, volunteers commit to a 13-week training course aligned with the science of reading.

Patterson says that’s because they really want their tutors to understand how kids learn to read.

“We like to say our tutors are more of a scientist,” she says. “When you get your kid, you can study your kid…you can actually adjust what you’re doing because you understand the process of how the brain is mapping words, and so you become a more effective tutor.”

She says that motivation to improve literacy is a driving force for dedicated tutors.

“When they really feel a part of this movement, and they really understand the literacy crisis…all of those things combined really prove to be an effective tutor,” she says.

Green says the district doesn’t disagree with the power of high-impact tutoring, but not every volunteer can commit to that level of training.

“Some volunteers have an hour to give a week. Some volunteers have 30 minutes to give a week. Some volunteers have every day, all day to give a week,” Green says.

Right now volunteers are also able to choose what school they want to be in, and Green says the district wants to be more intentional about what schools are being “privileged” based on the highest need.

Still, there are dozens of already-trained retired tutors ready to lend their skills to the district. And small examples already in place show it’s possible.

After Young’s first year volunteering at Kennedy she took Goodman’s literacy tutor training. That fall, she volunteered at Lowell through Schools of Hope and though she felt better prepared, something was still missing.

“I felt like the teachers didn’t really know what volunteers could do for them, and volunteers weren’t given a lot of tools or direction of what to do,” she says.

So Young and Patterson did some brainstorming and came up with a way to bring a little bit of Goodman’s *START Literacy Initiative to Lowell. They met with the school’s administrators and created a tutoring program matched to the district’s literacy curriculum.

This semester, seven tutors are working with 23 kids in first through fifth grade.

Young says it took a lot of work on the front-end, but she knows several volunteers who are eager to help the district with similar models — they just need a place to take their skills.

“It’s going to take a little bit of time for us to prove that, really our main purpose is to help these kids with literacy in total support of what the classroom teacher is doing,” Young says.

Green says Madison is lucky to have a resource-rich community and that the district has received an outpouring of “asks to support literacy tutoring.”

At this point she says they’re trying to “figure out what makes the most sense to keep the continuity of our already existing literacy approach, and then the time needed for these [other approaches].”

Tutoring, she adds, is just part of the puzzle, and the district will continue to be “unapologetic” in staying the course on teaching the science of reading and making sure all staff are trained.

“Literacy is a priority for us as a system, so that we as adults can ensure every one of our babies is reading proficiently, and hopefully by third grade,” Green says. “We’re continuing to try things out, and we’ve got to do things differently ... and I think that’s what we’re, at least with the tutoring stuff, we’re trying to do.”