In the News: SMART is off and running at JAES

The Newberg School District’s second SMART (Start Making a Reader Today) program is off and running at Joan Austin Elementary School.

Currently, six volunteers read for one hour a week to the 24 students of one elementary class, but both the school’s administration and the nonprofit organization would like to expand that number.

The now 20-year-old program has been transitioning from targeting kindergarten through third-grade students selected by their teachers to serving entire grade levels, area manager Diane Wilkinson said. It makes scheduling easier, she added, and reflects SMART’s desire to have every student reading or ready to read by the first grade.

The premise of the program couldn’t be simpler: A student is paired with an adult volunteer for one year and spends 15 minutes per week (30 minutes for older kids) reading or being read to. The students also build a personal library as “every child gets to take home two books a month,” Wilkinson said.

On Monday morning, kindergarten students were meeting with their mentor for the third time this year, said Kimberly Connell-Croston, who coordinates the program at JAES. Connell-Croston applied for the position to remain in a school setting. “I’m one of thousands of teachers who don’t have a job and I wanted to be in a classroom and teaching,” she said.

Wilkinson said she has a nearly 90 percent retention rate for the volunteers in the six counties she oversees (Clatsop, Tillamook, Lincoln, Yamhill, Marion and Polk). Many of them are retired teachers, principals or librarians, people who are already comfortable in a school setting.
Connell-Croston, who heard about the position at JAES on Facebook, said she would like to recruit and train 50 volunteers so that SMART could be offered in all kindergarten classes at the school. Edwards Elementary School, which has a long-running SMART program, has about 70 volunteers.
Wilkinson said that SMART recruits local donors to support their programming, estimating that it costs $30 to provide the books for one child for one year and that the total program cost is $300 per child per year. Last year SMART distributed 144,000 books, she said.

Volunteer Linda Shapiro said she has been volunteering with a SMART program in inner-city Portland, but that since moving to Dundee she’d been looking for a closer one. “I was just taken by it,” said the retired business woman. She still remembers the “buzz” of children and grown-ups reading together on the first day she volunteered. “It’s always a lot of fun to read with the kids.”

For more information, go to www.getsmartoregon.org.
 

Laurent Bonczijk, the Newberg Graphic