At the end of the day at Gutermuth Elementary School in the South End, students file out of the building to the bus circle on one side or the car line on the other.
Within minutes, the hallways nearly empty out, save for about a dozen students gathered in the cafeteria. These students are in different grades, but they have something in common: They need a little extra help with reading.
Brittanie Abell, a teacher at Gutermuth Elementary, is the site director for I Would Rather Be Reading.
“Finish up your snacks,” she told the students on a recent Tuesday afternoon. “You have about four or five minutes.”
Abell lead the kids to a classroom where they sat in a circle on the floor. They start each afternoon with a temperature check.
“I’m feeling like a number two today,” she said. “I’m pretty calm and relaxed. I did get a lot of things done yesterday.”
One by one, the students graded how they felt on a scale of one to five, one being happy and relaxed and five being angry or sad.
One second grader was already thinking about her night.
“I’m a number one, because when I get home I just get to go downstairs and get on my phone and play a game or just lay down,” she says.
The students then did an activity to help them better understand their emotions. They listened to scenarios and thought about how they would make them feel.
The scenario that day was a classic: You want to have candy before dinner, but your parents say no.
One student said they’d be “furious.” Abell prompted them to avoid acting on that negative emotion, and instead think about other ways to react.
“What can you say instead?” she coached. “Maybe, ‘Can I have a piece after dinner?’”
The students work on two core skills: reading and social emotional learning. That means students learn to understand their feelings and appropriate ways to express themselves.
Program cofounder Ashley Deringer said they try to intertwine the two, like learning vocabulary specific to social skills.
“Instead of just letting them read a story, there’s usually some type of art project, craft, something hands-on that relates to the social skill or life skill that they’re practicing,” she said.
Deringer said they also recognize the kids have already been in school all day, so they try to mix it up. They often bring in community partners for drama and agricultural classes or lessons on how to be a DJ and how to screen print t-shirts.
“Once kids can manage and once they can read, what doors can we open for them?” Deringer said. “What opportunities can we open for them? What hobbies can we expose them to?”
Deringer and her cofounder Allison Ogle used to be JCPS teachers. They taught at Jacob Elementary School together and became reading interventionists, too.
“We got to know a lot about kids’ academic success and challenges, as well as their families’ successes and challenges, and it highlighted the need for schools to be wraparound support for students,” Deringer said. “What’s happening in students’ personal lives, they don’t get to just check that at the door.”
The two started I Would Rather Be Reading in 2018 with a single summer camp. Deringer said it was a way to get kids high-quality reading intervention along with social skills and coping strategies that would help them in the classroom.
Now, they run nine after-school programs within JCPS and two others in local community centers.
“A lot of times we talk to our families and they are just happy,” Deringer said. “They're like, ‘Oh, my kid’s been struggling for so long and they don't want to go to school,’ or, ‘I looked up this resource and reading tutoring is more than my mortgage.’”
All of I Would Rather Be Reading’s programs, after-school and in the summer, are free to families.
The nonprofit tries to partner with schools with lower literacy test scores. And they think their mix of reading and social-emotional learning is paying off.
Students in their after-school programs this year saw a 91% increase in their average test scores for phonemic awareness, which is the ability to recognize the sounds that form words. The kids also showed meaningful increases on staff assessments of emotional understanding and self-regulation, according to I Would Rather Be Reading.
Deringer said they had plans to expand their free summer camps this year, but the freeze in some federal funding they get from the schools has forced them to cancel five planned camps. The nonprofit will still run three Summer Success Leagues serving more than 200 kids.
The scaled-back programming should be temporary, Deringer said.
“My hope is that we have people in the community that are interested, that want to step up, that want to get involved,” she said.
Deringer said I Would Rather Be Reading wants to keep helping kids find success through the program, kids like first-grader Kennedy Mitchell.
As the Gutermuth Elementary School students packed up for the day, Kennedy bragged about how much her reading has improved.
“I did a reading test yesterday and I did my best and I got a big score. Today I got an even bigger score,” she said.
Kennedy said she’s noticed the difference in herself and so do her friends.
“I feel smart,” she said. “Like, my friends in my actual class say I’m getting smarter.”
Using the vocabulary she’s learned through her after-school program, Kennedy said that makes her feel happy and proud.
