Mentors’ Aid Helps Schools Bounce Back: Reading Volunteers Lend a Hand in Leipsic

By Jennifer Feehan, The Blade, Toledo, Ohio

May 8–LEIPSIC, Ohio – Once a week, Brenda Kuhlman leaves her office job at the local Iams Co. plant, drives the short distance to Leipsic Elementary, and spends a half-hour working with a kindergartner on reading skills.

“It’s a nice break,” Ms. Kuhlman said. “It reminds me there’s more than work.” She is one of 143 community members who volunteered nearly 3,800 hours in Leipsic this school year for Project MORE, which stands for Mentoring in Ohio for Reading Excellence. It’s a statewide program aimed at at-risk readers that took root in this rural Putnam County school district in 1999 and has had substantial impact.

Now-retired Leipsic Superintendent Ron Bash said new programs tend to come and go in education, but the reading mentoring program has stayed in Leipsic because it works so well.

The district had hit an academic low in 2001 when it was placed on academic watch by the Ohio Department of Education. A year later, it was rated an effective school district, and by 2003, it was on the list of excellent districts.

In 2004-05, the first year Ohio’s third-graders took achievement tests, Leipsic was one of only two schools in the state whose third-graders had 100 percent passage rates in reading.

“We bounced way back,” Mr. Bash said, adding that the reading mentoring program “was a key factor because it brought so many people together from the community.”

Mr. Bash and Pam Wilhelm, Leipsic’s Title I coordinator, are among the presenters at a conference today at Bowling Green State University that is focused on keeping reading mentoring programs going. Amy Freeman, Project MORE director, expects more than 150 educators from across the state to attend.

Leipsic and 14 other schools piloted the reading mentoring program in 1999. This year, 55 schools are involved, including 15 in the Cleveland School District, the first urban district to get involved, Ms. Freeman said.

In northwest Ohio, schools in Allen, Defiance, Fulton, Hancock, Henry, Sandusky, Seneca, Williams, and Wood are among those offering one-to-one reading tutoring for children with learning disabilities in kindergarten through fourth grade.

“It makes sense to people,” Ms. Freeman said. “They like the idea of mentoring. They like it being structured. They like the support they get from our office.”

From her office at the Putnam County Educational Service Center in Ottawa, Ms. Freeman oversees the program which was funded this year with $650,000 in federal funds.

Ms. Wilhelm said before Project MORE started as an outgrowth of Gov. Bob Taft’s Ohio Reads initiative, she worked with groups of six to eight students who qualified for Title I reading assistance.

“I felt like I was just maintaining the kids,” she said, explaining that the one-to-one tutoring has proved far more effective.

Rich Wilson, a professor in the school of intervention services at BGSU, knows that it is. He has been tracking the program for the past six years as an independent evaluator.

In comparing groups of students of identical abilities who receive the mentoring to those who do not, he has found that 30 percent to 40 percent of those receiving tutoring outperform the other students.

“In the rest of the comparisons – in the other 60 to 70 percent — the gains favored the kids in the Project MORE group, but didn’t reach the level of statistical significance,” he said. “In no cases, though, did kids in the comparison group statistically outperform the students in the Project MORE group.”

The most successful reading mentoring programs had students getting tutored four or five times a week and provided that tutoring in addition to the normal classroom instruction rather than in place of it.

“I’m convinced personally that what they’re doing is making a difference,” he said.

Mr. Wilson said he believes such programs could be key to the future of special education because they are effective and affordable.

Recruiting volunteers is a vital part of the program’s success. Many schools have gotten high school and college students involved as well as grandparents and other community members.

In Leipsic, Iams, Pro-Tec Coating, and Leipsic Retirement Village all allow employees to leave work to listen to the children read, work on spelling words, and play word games, Ms. Wilhelm said.

“The mentors get a lot of hugs,” she said. “It’s really neat to see the smiles. The kids’ idea is they’re playing.

“They don’t realize they’re getting a lot of extra skill review.”

Contact Jennifer Feehan at: jfeehan@theblade.com or 419-353-5972.

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