LITTLE ROCK -- A virtual, one-to-one, 15-minute-a-day tutoring program in elementary and middle school reading is getting a tryout in a dozen Little Rock School District schools this semester.
Because of "Ignite! Reading," about 1,000 pupils throughout Arkansas' capital city don blue headsets with microphones, open their child-size laptops and interact with their individually assigned tutors such as Ms. Bridget who is located in distant New Jersey.
"Puh, puh, pin," one child in Madison Camp's first-grade classroom at Western Hills Elementary puffs into the headset mic to the delight of her tutor who is visible in one corner of the screen that is mostly filled with a grid of three-letter words. As the tutor moves the cursor from word to word, the child sounds out the letters, blends the sounds and comes up with the word: "bub-buh bun" and "veh, et, vet."
There is a quiet hum in the classroom as Camp worked with a small group of pupils and the rest of the first graders sat at their desks and quietly responded to prompts from the online tutors. The Ignite-trained tutors moved the cursors, paused for a response, moved, paused, and went up and down and across the screens. In one case the floating cursor is in the shape of a unicorn, a nod to a particular child's affinity for the legendary creature.
Not seen on the screens are the literacy specialists who can check in and out of the individual tutoring sessions to supervise and support the tutors.
The daily 15-minute tutoring sessions -- all part of the block of a school's time set aside each morning for literacy -- end with a quick game such as I Spy, or a celebratory show of fireworks.
A presentation last week about "Ignite! Reading" at Western Hills -- featuring company executives, along with a principal, teachers and pupils -- left some participants and audience members optimistic -- and even a little teary -- about the possibility of accelerating achievement for pupils whose reading skills are lagging behind what is appropriate for their grade level.
Little Rock Superintendent Jermall Wright called the morning session -- including the classroom observation -- the most "positively impactful" event in his eight months on the job in the state's capital city.
"I like Ignite because it helps me and other kids get ready for our futures," Kamari Dickerson, 10, a fifth grader, said about the reading initiative.
Western Hills teachers told how their pupils enjoyed the one-on-one attention from their tutors and liked to compare notes on where their tutors live. Teachers also said they are seeing students become more willing to speak up in class after having worked with the tutors.
The Little Rock district is trying out "Ignite! Reading" and other tutoring programs -- Carnegie Learning, Amira Learning, and TutorMe -- at a time when just 30% of the district's third graders scored at proficient or better levels on the state-required ACT Aspire tests in the spring of 2022. Twenty of Little Rock's 32 schools have state-applied letter grades of D or F, based in large part on the overall Aspire scores.
The district is using its federal covid-19 relief money to pay for Ignite and other tutoring programs, Wright said. One of the purposes of the special funding is to counteract the loss of learning that occurred across the country as the result of the covid-19 pandemic that disrupted schools for two years.
The Little Rock district has a discounted rate of about $1,500 per tutoring slot for this half year of Ignite tutoring.The full cost is $2,500 per tutoring slot at a school. Multiple students can fill a slot during the course of a school year.
Jessica Reid Sliwerski of Oakland, Calif., Ignite's co-founder and chief executive officer, told the Little Rock crowd that it was a privilege to bring Ignite to the Little Rock district with its academic needs and its history of racial inequities and trauma around learning. She thanked district leaders for their willingness and commitment to take on the tutoring program in mid-year.
"That's where we want to do work. I am bent on proving a point -- nothing is wrong with our kids," Sliwerski said. "It takes a village. We all need to be playing our parts so they can be literate."
Sliwerski recalled last week how she was a first-year, fifth grade teacher in New York City and didn't know how to help 10- and 11-year old struggling readers -- and didn't learn that skill until a couple years later when she became a first grade teacher at a different school.
She concluded that she was not the only teacher who didn't know how to teach reading -- "This is a science but it's not rocket science" -- and so she set out to help other teachers and their pupils.
"At the end of the day, every child deserves the right to learn to read on time," Sliwerski said. "We define 'on time' by the end of first grade so they begin second grade ready to build on knowledge. If a child learns to read on time, it changes everything else about school and life."
"Ignite! Reading" is a fledgling, high-dosage tutoring company that began operating in schools in 2021-22. The program showed for that first year "an average 2.4 weeks of reading progress for every week in the program," according to the company.
Those first-year results showed that same average growth within subgroups of students -- regardless of race or ethnicity, special education status, low family income, or learning English as a second language -- company leaders said last week.
"Ignite! Reading" this school year is employing 300 tutors to serve 2,300 students in schools in California, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York and Oregon, as well as Arkansas. Almost half of the students -- 1,000 -- are Little Rock pupils who began the district's pilot program this past January.
The company's long range goal, Sliwerski said, is to serve 1 million students with 100,000 tutors.
The 15-minute daily tutoring sessions are based on research about how children learn to read, including the work of Sharon Walpole and Michael McKenna on how to differentiate reading instruction to meet the learning needs of individual students.
Ignite focuses particularly on the foundational skills of word recognition, including phonological awareness, decoding and sight recognition, according to materials about the initiative. All of that is ultimately paired with comprehension skills so that students become "meaning-makers" as well as "code-breakers."
Students are selected for tutoring based on an evaluation of their skills, teacher interest and available time in the school schedule. The program works best for those children with attendance of at least 75%. One of the baseline assessments for participation, for example, is the commonly used Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, assessment.
Ignite pupils are assessed every three weeks to gauge their progress. In the Ignite system, students who pass a progress monitoring assessment -- embedded in the tutoring lessons -- is said to have made at least 25% of expected growth for a school year.
Eighty-eight percent of the 29 Western Hills pupils who have so far been assessed have met that threshold, Sliwerski said, adding that there are still several weeks of the school year left for further achievement. A total of 79 pupils at Western Hills are in different stages of the tutoring program.
The Ignite tutors are typically college students, senior citizens, retired teachers, parents and people who are between other jobs and need income. They receive 60 hours of training as well as real time coaching from literacy specialists.