Hareena Houston

Reading Assist provides year-round high-impact literacy tutoring services to at-risk children in kindergarten through third grade with significant reading challenges. We partner with schools across Delaware, in Chester, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., offering our core school-year program as well as after-school and summer tutoring. Our mission is to provide intensive services for young, at-risk children with the most significant reading challenges to help them achieve progress and proficiency. For Reading Assist’s core school-year program, we recruit, train, and deploy AmeriCorps members, known as Reading Assist Fellows, who deliver daily reading instruction in one-on-one or small group settings. We focus on schools serving high proportions of students of color, those with disabilities, and multilingual learners. Our approach targets students in the lowest 25% of their peers in reading proficiency. Students served by Reading Assist Fellows receive 30-40 minutes of instruction three to five days a week throughout the school year. High-impact tutoring is one of the most effective methods to foster reading growth, especially among low-income students and students of color. Fellows help students progress from minimal proficiency to mastery of key reading benchmarks within one academic year. Additionally, Reading Assist offers two programs to support students beyond the school day: an after-school tutoring program, launched in the 2022-2023 school year, and a summer tutoring program, now in its fourth year. These programs extend the support for our students throughout the year. Each year, at least 85% of our students reach grade-level benchmarks. We are thrilled that data from the 2023-24 school year shows 90% of students reached benchmark levels in at least one foundational reading skill, with 75% of kindergarteners meeting grade-level benchmarks.