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Reading All-Stars Program Marks a Decade of Service
By Sarah Valerio
On Saturday mornings, when many children are at home watching cartoons and taking the weekend off, their peers at Harriet Tubman Elementary School eagerly return to school, along with parents and volunteers, to spend time reading.
The children gather at the school located in the Columbia Heights neighborhood in Washington, DC, on Saturdays as part of the Reading All-Stars (RAS) program. This year, RAS celebrates its milestone 10th anniversary.
RAS hosts one-on-one reading sessions for approximately 75 elementary school-aged children with the goal of helping students read at grade level. RAS is part of the umbrella of literacy-promoting programs of 826DC. Although teachers can recommend that students attend RAS, joining the program is entirely voluntary. RAS pairs students from Tubman with volunteer tutors, many of whom come from the Junior League of Washington (JLW). Many participants in RAS tutoring sessions are English-language learners or speak English as a second language; all receive free or reduced lunch at school.
JLW partners with 826DC on its Reading All-Stars program, providing volunteer resources. JLW RAS Chair Barbara Mickits says the “program serves a real need and its mission is so well aligned with our focus on literacy.”
One JLW volunteer, Lauren Iannolo (RAS Vice Chair), cites RAS as “actually the main reason I joined JLW.” She adds, “I knew I wanted to volunteer in the Washington, DC, community in an ESL capacity after graduating, but wasn’t quite sure how to get involved.”
As a student at Georgetown University, Iannolo had volunteered reading with students at Tubman through a different program. She discovered JLW while she was searching online for similar opportunities. “I chose RAS as my mini placement and the rest is history,” says Iannolo, now in her third year with RAS.
Andrew Gilligan and Kalli Krumpos are co-leaders for RAS, organizing its programming, managing operations, and coordinating on-site activities, all of which they do on a voluntary basis.
“We are so grateful for the partnership and support provided by the Junior League,” says Krumpos. “All of our volunteers are incredible people, but I think the JLW volunteers are especially impressive role models and mentors for our students. It’s so powerful for our students to learn from and interact with impressive, professional women, which helps encourage them to set big goals for their own lives.”
Of the students, Krumpos says they are “so impressive, funny, creative and smart. They show up to school, on a Saturday, after being in class all week and bring lots of energy and enthusiasm.”
Along with Krumpos, Gilligan has been with RAS since 2012. He has had the opportunity to watch kids grow up through the program. “We had our first official Reading All-Stars of the year, and there were multiple kids there who had gone through the program and now are in middle school and high school, excitedly signing up their younger siblings for RAS.”
He adds that it has been “great to see specific pairs—a volunteer and student—read together for years and develop a really close relationship where the volunteer becomes like family to the kid and their family.”
Krumpos says “[t]hat the program has managed to run for 10 continuous years demonstrates the power of the model and is a tribute to our volunteers and partnerships.”
RAS began when a group of volunteers who had been campaigning for Barack Obama during the 2008 election found themselves with extra time on their hands following the election. They had been bitten by the civic engagement bug, and now sought a new cause into which to pour their time, talents, and efforts. RAS’s founders lived in Columbia Heights and visited local principals asking if and how they could offer support. Leaders from Harriet Tubman Elementary School took them up on their offer. The principal said that the students could use reading support, and RAS was born. In the 10 years since, the program has flourished.
“We are now consistently serving more students,” says Gilligan. “We have also learned never to underestimate students and how capable they are. We have also built our partnership with JLW to the point [that] they are by far the biggest contributor of volunteers and a key reason the program continues to thrive.”
Those involved with RAS all seem to have touching personal stories to share about moments in volunteering that were particularly memorable and impactful.
Krumpos elaborated on the story of Allison, a high school junior, who had come up through RAS to become one of its many success stories. “Allison has attended RAS every Saturday for the last eight years. She joined as a first grader. The school had recommended she participate to gain some extra reading practice. She was paired with an amazing volunteer, Becky; they worked together for years, until Allison graduated from Tubman Elementary. During their time together, Allison and Becky built a strong relationship, and Allison’s reading skills improved. By the time she graduated, she was reading above grade level. Even after she graduated, Allison kept coming back to RAS. She now helps to run the library for us on Saturdays, assisting students in selecting engaging books and in checking out materials for them to read at home. Allison’s story is what RAS is all about: through the support of a caring mentor, students can learn to love reading, building on their reading skills, and develop a mentoring relationship with a community member.”
Ann Robinson is a JLW Sustainer and former RAS Chair (from the 2016–2017 JLW year). She began volunteering with RAS in the fall of 2014, the first year it was offered as a placement with the League. Because she enjoyed the program so much, she continues to volunteer as a community member.
When Robinson began, she partnered with a new kindergarten student with whom she is still paired today, five years later. She fondly recalls getting a “big running hug” from her student partner when she arrived, and him excitedly pulling her over to the table where he was seated to show her a stack of four books he had arrived early to pick out from the library for the two of them to read together. “It demonstrated that he understood the incredible power that comes from being able to read and access the world of information and imagination that resides in books, and he wanted more.”
Robinson adds that over the years, she has seen her student partner’s reading level advance and that “[h]e has an incredible memory and the inquisitive mind of a scientist. He loves nonfiction books about animals, storms, wars, and natural and supernatural phenomena. He loves maps and thinking about why the world is organized as it is. He understands that if he wants the answer to a question, the best way to get that answer is to find a book on the topic and start to read. He has grown immensely, and I am immensely proud of him.”
Iannolo shared, “It’s just so awesome to see a student have a breakthrough and really enjoy a book, especially when they may have been less enthusiastic about reading in the past. This happened with my buddy, who was in fifth grade and hadn’t necessarily loved reading the most when we started together. However, one week we started reading about a young girl growing up in ancient Egypt. In the book, the girl’s sister is 12 and her parents are discussing how she will get married soon. My buddy, being 11, thought this was absolutely outrageous—as it totally is in the modern day—and she could not stop talking about it and telling everyone reading near us how this used to be common practice. It was entertaining to see how the book got her so fired up about the injustice of it, but also on another level, gratifying for me to watch her connect the book, even over a somewhat minor detail, and see how she connected it back to her own life experiences and felt compassion for the character. To me, the most important thing reading teaches us is compassion for others who live lives we will never live, so to see her getting this out of the book was very meaningful.”
Iannolo hopes that those considering volunteering with RAS will not let a lack of formal training stand in their way. “The single most important thing a volunteer can do for their child is to show up. The kids in the program are voluntarily spending their Saturdays reading with you, and simply by showing up and having a good attitude, you are already fostering a love for reading by example.”
Iannolo adds, “I have found the program incredibly rewarding and have probably learned just as much from my students about compassion, patience and resilience as they have about reading from me. Not only are you helping someone, but you are expanding your own world view. To me, programs like RAS help to make everyone involved better citizens than they were before.” •
