Helping Students Read to Succeed

Hi all!  My name is Joe Servia.  I am a Michigan's AmeriCorps member with the Marquette-Alger Regional Educational Service Agency, or MARESA.  My fellow MARESA AmeriCorps members and I serve students in Marquette and Alger counties by providing reading skills assessment and literacy interventions one-on-one or in small groups.  Individually, I serve as a general and literacy tutor at three different educational facilities.  My service sites are Teaching Family Homes, Great Lakes Recovery Center, and the Marquette County Youth Home.  In addition to academic support, we serve our community through volunteer opportunities and monthly service-learning projects.

This has been a very exciting year for the MARESA AmeriCorps group.  Though our program has existed in the past, we are serving under a new grant which supports the MARESA “Get Ready, Get Reading” program.  This new grant gave us access to new resources and the ability to focus our service efforts where they were most beneficial for closing achievement gaps in student populations: reading ability.  Needless to say, all those involved in the program were ecstatic to provide a means to which schools could make evidence-based decisions about students receiving additional academic support to close achievement gaps.

To measure student reading ability, we utilize several different research-based reading intervention programs.  We administer reading benchmark assessments and progress monitoring assessments to students in kindergarten through sixth grade using the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) program developed by the University of Oregon.  Based on the results of these assessments, we select students most likely to benefit from literacy intervention models to explicitly instruct using resources from a variety of sources.  In addition to DIBELS, we also utilize the REWARDS: Multi-syllabic Word Reading Strategies program to build fluency and comprehension. The structure of the “Get Ready, Get Reading” program is designed to provide students with below-average literacy skills with access to highly-trained individuals who can perform short-term literacy interventions so the student may continue to learn at the same pace as his or her peers in a regular classroom setting.   

 

Although the majority of our service takes place in the schools of Marquette and Alger Counties, we also take time once a month to plan and implement a service-learning project elsewhere in the community. These service-learning projects are planned by select MARESA AmeriCorps members and involve community collaboration and inclusion.  In the month of December, we participated in the TV6 Canathon which benefits food pantries in Marquette County by encouraging non-perishable food donations from the community. MARESA AmeriCorps members contributed by sorting food and stocking shelves at the Marquette Salvation Army on the final night of the Canathon.  This year the Canathon gathered more than 145,000 pounds of food.  To learn more about this project, view the news story here. 

My experience serving through AmeriCorps has reinvigorated a belief in the volunteering spirit of my community.  To have the opportunity to bring compassion into one child’s life each day is a gift to all involved.   By using my skills to provide children with a fair chance at success, I feel as though I have an opportunity to repay the community that provided me with an empowering environment to grow in as a child, and also as an adult.   My AmeriCorps experience has changed my outlook on selfless giving in my community and I look forward to sharing those experiences in hopes of incubating positivity through service within the community at a local, state and national level.