The most voracious readers at participating schools joined Lawrence Amaturo, of the Amaturo Family Foundation, on stage this June at Country Summer to accept $1,000 scholarship awards.
Read On, Sonoma incentivizes reading by encouraging students to meet reading goals—determined by an individual’s results from the state STAR diagnostic assessment— and allotting them tokens they can then put toward rewards. “Anything from a soccer ball, a trip to Epicenter [entertainment center in Santa Rosa], to an educational scholarship fund,” Leisen says. “We had 127 students who earned a Chromebook this year. It’s been amazing.” They host assemblies where students are encouraged to read and acknowledged for meeting their reading goals. “We go into the school sites, we bring a team and all of our rewards,” Leisen says. “Kids want to be at school because they want to take
their quizzes,” Leisen says, referring to comprehension assessments they take after reading a book. “Kids want to be at school because they’re working toward a goal, and we’re able to give that little bit of extrinsic motivation to everyone.” Leisen says the key is incentivizing individual student goals. “So there’s no difference between students, all of our kids are seeing success because it’s based on their need.” Read On, Sonoma serves second through sixth graders at six schools: Kenwood Elementary, Alexander Valley Elementary, Madrone Elementary in Rincon Valley and all three elementary schools in the Mark West school district. Leisen says they’ve also just finished a successful pilot program at Roseland Elementary. Participating schools are asked to dedicate 20 minutes a day to reading. Teachers are helping make that happen by allotting classroom time for reading and assigning quizzes based on what’s been read. Students earn points toward their individual reading goal with the quizzes. Leisen says she believes the work is timely because of the many challenges school sites are facing due to post- pandemic issues. “Across the board schools are facing an increased level of truancy and chronic absenteeism,” she says. “Our reading scores and math scores have not recovered across our whole state of California. Our students who are working toward fluency in English, obviously lost ground.” Schools participating in Read On, Sonoma are seeing improvements. “What we’ve seen across the board is reading levels that are accelerating in all measures,” Leisen says. “Not only in the state scores at our school sites, but
The colored lines show end-of-year reading-grade-level results of fourth-grade students from prior to starting Read On, Sonoma (blue) to increased exposure to the program (red, yellow, green).
42 NorthBaybiz
August 2024
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