Two years ago the congregation of Second Baptist Church began looking for a way to make a difference in downtown Little Rock, where the church has been for almost 130 years.
They considered several areas of need, including hunger and homelessness, but decided that partnering with a school to help pupils fit well with the church’s long history of social and racial activism.
“Education connects to our church,” said Chris Ellis, minister of missions and outreach. “In the 1950s the church pastor said this about integration: ‘Not only do schools need to integrate, this church needs to integrate.’ So when [Gov. Orval] Faubus canceled school, we had an integrated school here in the church.”
The church decided to focus on literacy and put together a task force of educators and community leaders to plan a program.
“We settled on the third-grade reading level because studies show that if they can’t read by then, it affects dropout rates,” Ellis said.
The church reached out to Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, where church members were already involved, and formed MLK Reads to target pupils in kindergarten through third grade.
This isn’t after-school tutoring or simply encouraging kids to read. Volunteers from the church, Arkansas Children’s Hospital and the community were trained by the school to help students improve their reading skills enough so that they are reading at grade level.
“It’s intervention. We’re not just going to read to the kids,” said Trevor Stephen, coordinator of MLK Reads. “We’re utilizing evidence-based curriculum that the school is using to actually help these kids get onto grade level.”
Volunteers will work one on-one with a child for 30 minutes twice a week during the school day.
The goal is to see documented improvement, Ellis said, noting that about 170 pupils at the school are not reading at grade level. They are tested at the start of the school year and those results show which pupils need help improving their reading. The volunteers will use the school’s literacy curriculum and the children will be tested periodically to see if there is improvement.
“We want to measure everything. We want to know we’re really making a difference,” Ellis said. “The hope is they will eventually move out of MLK Reads.”
Karen Carter, principal at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary, said even pupils just shy of reaching their reading level were included in the program.
“My goal is to help get every child on grade level because you can’t expand into anything else if you don’t have the reading,” Carter said.
The tutors are given a format to follow and some pupils can be paired with more than one tutor if they need extra instruction.
“They’ll get two different lessons to boost them along,” Carter said.
For this semester, the program only includes those in first through third grades. Kindergartens will be added later in the school year.
The MLK Reads program kicked off during a school assembly Sept. 16 and tutors got acquainted with their students the next day.
The program was funded in part by a grant from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation and by the congregation. Members donated$75,000.
“They are really excited about this,” Ellis said. “We knew unless someone could devote lots of time it would be hard [to succeed] so we hired a coordinator and we also have funds from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation to have longevity.”
The response from the congregation and community has been overwhelming, said Ellis, who hoped to attract 40 or 50 volunteers from the church and through a partnership with Arkansas Children’s Hospital. As of this week, the program has about 70 volunteers. Before working with pupils, volunteers must pass a background check and be trained by the school and program leaders.
Carter said the extra volunteers will allow even more pupils to be involved.
“It will allow us to reach more students and to me that’s the big key,” she said. “We don’t have to say we’ve got to choose between student A and student B. That’s the really good part.”
Ellis said the program is part of the church’s overall increased emphasis on children, including those in their own congregation. They are renovating the children’s area at the church and putting in anew playground.
“We wanted to focus more on children both inside and outside the building,” he said.
The church also plans to expand on MLK Reads by offering two one-week summer reading camps.
“These camps will be designed to help them retain what they learned during the school year, to stop the summer slide,” Ellis said. “Ideally we’ll be focusing on the same kids we tutor in the MLK Reads program.”
Ellis said the church will also help provide school supplies and Christmas gifts to children in the program.
“Our goal is to really surround these kids in the program and their parents and help where we can,” he said. “If a child is hungry, they have a hard time learning, or if they are homeless. Our hope is we can get involved in their life circumstances to help them.”
Stephen, who also serves as children’s minister at the church, said the congregation hopes to expand the program to other schools and that other churches will get involved with schools in their own neighborhoods.
“We’re very excited and we welcome others on the journey,” he said.
Religion, Pages 12 on 09/21/2013