High-impact tutoring program seeks to improve Brown County reading proficiency rates

BROWN COUNTY – Throughout the 2024-25 school year, nearly 40,000 students received Reading Corps’s support nationally — 6,800 of those students were from Wisconsin.

At the local level, 115 students within Brown County benefited from Reading Corps’s services over the past year.

These 115 local students received 6,312 tutoring sessions, accounting to over 119,000 minutes of invaluable literacy support.
“[These minutes] are a really big deal in being able to provide that additional practice support on those foundational skills of reading,” said Eric Hoffman, executive director of Reading Corps in Wisconsin.
To reach these local students, the Wisconsin Reading Corps deployed six tutors across three elementary schools in Brown County.

“We’ve been reaching out and working to establish Reading Corps’s partnerships within Green Bay. It really was a space where we said we would love to partner, here’s what our program is able to do, here’s what we’re able to provide for students, and it started with Howe community school … We were able to start at Howe and then grow from there to two other schools — King and Kennedy — shortly thereafter in the following year.”

While growing the Reading Corps footprint within Brown County, Hoffman said that it was important to start small and “do it right.”
These small steps are critical in a state like Wisconsin, where only one-third of students read at a proficient level.

Hoffman said that the goal of the Reading Corps — to be a valued addition to the school they partner with through high impact tutoring and additional “people power” — helps give each student receiving support 20 minutes of tutoring per day (100 minutes per week).

This support is guaranteed to be effective, as both the Reading Corps and randomized control trials have reported that, during a single semester, students at the kindergarten level are learning twice as fast as their peers who are not receiving Reading Corps support.

Hoffman also shared that not only are these students improving their literacy rates, they are learning to love reading.

“Our reading tutors say they’ve had students come into their reading space and say, ‘I don’t like reading, I’m not interested, I don’t want to do this.’ And after providing that time with our Reading Corps tutor, a month later that same student will run up and say, ‘Can I be next? Can I come to my tutoring session next? I really want to do this!’”

Educators in schools who partner with the Reading Corps are also benefiting from their services, as students are re-entering their classrooms more engaged and with higher confidence.

But it’s not only educators who can observe and be a part of Reading Corps results.

“Anyone can be a Reading Corps tutor and everyone is able to make a difference in the lives of students through our Reading Corps program … The outcomes kind of speak for themselves and really anyone can be able to do this,” said Hoffman.

Hoffman encourages anyone who has considered a career in education, or perhaps has been positively impacted by a tutor themselves, to look into the Reading Corps.

“We are very lucky to be able to do the work that we do. We are part of a solution for students to get what they need. We partner with incredible educators. We partner with incredible schools and school districts that are doing everything in their power to help students grow and we really want to be an additional people power to reach even more students,” concluded Hoffman.

To learn more, visit www.readingandmath.org.

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