LAUREN FRAYER, HOST:
Tutoring can help students develop their reading skills. But what works even better is when those tutors come from the same community as the students, as one school in Denver found out. Colorado Public Radio's Jenny Brundin reports.
GABRIEL MARTINEZ: Bom-pa-da bom-bom (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Bah-bah (ph).
JENNY BRUNDIN, BYLINE: Tutor Gabriel Martinez holds up word cards with the letter G.
MARTINEZ: Everybody, can you practice the guh (ph) sound with me? Everybody say, guh.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Guh.
MARTINEZ: Guh. Very good.
BRUNDIN: Three first graders are a little wiggly but laser-focused on the big man in front of them.
GABRIEL MARTINEZ AND UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Jig.
MARTINEZ: Oh, hold on. Did you hear you, Esaie (ph)? You had that Jim. It's jig-uh (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Jig-uh.
MARTINEZ: There's something very natural and paternal that I feel towards all of the kids.
BRUNDIN: Martinez is like a big, friendly bear, a stabilizing presence. That's partly because he's someone's dad here too. His own first-grade daughter walks by.
MARTINEZ: She walks by multiple times a day (laughter). She has this uncanny ability to need to visit somebody for some reason.
BRUNDIN: And he has a middle schooler upstairs. Martinez is one of several paid literacy tutors, all of them from Denver's heavily Latino Ruby Hill neighborhood, most of them parents. That idea, parents as tutors, is based on a similar program - the Oakland Liberator Model. It focuses on empowering and investing in the community. The paid tutors help kids who are reading below grade level in small groups.
MARTINEZ: I am so invested in this place succeeding because my own kids are here.
BRUNDIN: Some of the tutors themselves get on a new path to become teachers. Samy Alkaihal, the program's manager here at Rocky Mountain Prep Ruby Hill, says tapping parents to become tutors boiled down to this.
SAMY ALKAIHAL: They knew our kids better than we did.
BRUNDIN: And...
ALKAIHAL: The kiddos knowing that you are their friend's mom or you are their friend's dad gets them a lot more engaged.
BRUNDIN: In January, Rocky Mountain Prep - a network of schools - hired 22 tutors. During a five-week training, the Ruby Hill group - four men, mostly dads - all sat in the back row. People started calling them the Ruby Hill Boyz.
ALKAIHAL: And then now we have Setlali (ph) in the mix, and they're called the Ruby Boyz and Fedy girl.
BRUNDIN: Fedy is short for federal, as in Rocky Mountain Prep Federal, the middle school upstairs where there's a female tutor. But back to the little kids.
CHRISTIAN LOPEZ TORRES: Can you both say the word Ron?
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Ron.
LOPEZ TORRES: Ron.
BRUNDIN: Today, Christian Lopez Torres is working on the letter O with these third-graders. He says he's a better tutor because he really knows his students.
LOPEZ TORRES: I know their backgrounds. I know everything. They're just like me when I was, like, their age.
Er-ah-un (ph).
I didn't know much English, and I always felt excluded from everything. I felt like my teachers didn't pay attention to me.
BRUNDIN: His dad's a welder. Sometimes Lopez Torres will accompany him on jobs at the apartments across the street from the school.
LOPEZ TORRES: And I see many of the kids I tutor there. They live there. So I know the struggle of having immigrant parents and not learning English and feeling like an outsider at some points. And my main goal was to, like, fix that. I want them to have someone - an adult - they feel comfortable around.
BRUNDIN: Even just a greeting in Spanish.
LOPEZ TORRES: Like a relief for them - oh, like, I can speak Spanish with them. You know what I mean?
BRUNDIN: Lopez Torres was in training to be a nurse, but it wasn't the right fit. Today, he shows me the curriculum tutors use, carefully explains each step of learning sounds to reading full sentences.
LOPEZ TORRES: Let's see. K sounds.
BRUNDIN: Christian, as you're going through this, I can tell you're enthusiastic. You really like it.
LOPEZ TORRES: Yeah. I love this. I love this. Every morning, I'm like, oh, my God, I can't wait to get to work.
BRUNDIN: Third-grader Katia Fortonel (ph) appreciates the small group tutoring away from a big classroom.
KATIA FORTONEL: When we have to shout out something, like, we get confused.
BRUNDIN: It's paying off.
KATIA: Now I got to a higher score in my reading things, and now I can read big books.
BRUNDIN: The program is showing results.
MARTINEZ: Everybody, get your markers out. Get ready to underline.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: Underline.
MARTINEZ: Underline.
BRUNDIN: Tutor Gabriel Martinez says one nine-week session yielded a year and a half of reading growth for some students, with the biggest gains at the kindergarten level. A national study shows similar results.
MARTINEZ: OK. Does the first word on the first line - does that follow our short-I pattern?
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: No.
MARTINEZ: Literacy is justice. Everybody deserves to be able to read.
BRUNDIN: The position has changed Martinez in many ways.
MARTINEZ: Working with other people's children in a professional capacity has actually helped me personally, as a parent, grow as a father.
BRUNDIN: It's also inspired him. He's gone back to school. He wants to do what he's passionate about, and that's to become a special education teacher.
For NPR News, I'm Jenny Brundin in Denver. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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