Insight: Only 1 in 5 students below grade level in phonics at the end of 1st grade reach College and Career Ready on the 3rd grade EOG

Laying the Foundation for Impact: Systems Change 2018 - 2019

HELPS FLUENCY TUTORING HOME READING HELPER

In the 2018-2019 school year, Read Charlotte coordinated the introduction of the evidence-based HELPS fluency program in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Partners included Augustine Literacy Project, the United Way, Helps Education Fund and CMS. A total of 155 third grade students in 10 CMS schools received targeted fluency tutoring. Across all students, 43% exceeded expected growth in reading fluency. Students who received 50 or more tutoring sessions made 1.5 years growth in reading fluency. In the 2019-2020 school year, the Helps Education Fund leads coordination of HELPS tutoring for over 250 second and third grade students in 13 CMS schools. Read Charlotte focuses on volunteer recruitment from businesses and community groups. A new innovation is partnership with 5 local colleges and universities to employ Federal Work-Study college students as paid HELPS tutors. We seek to grow this collective effort to serve students in 30-60 schools by 2025.

Read Charlotte launched the Home Reading Helper website in September 2018, a free online resource that provides videos, activities and downloadable materials for families to support children’s reading from Pre-K through third grade. A focused marketing and partnership strategy resulted in 107,341 unique visitors over its first 15 months. Home Reading Helper is now more popular than the Read Charlotte site. In November 2019, there were 4,390 visitors to the Read Charlotte website compared to 13,500 to the Home Reading Helper. We seek to grow Home Reading Helper visitors and will integrate this more into Family Literacy Nights and upcoming work focused on the transition to Kindergarten.

Major Five-Year Accomplishments:

FINANCIAL CONTRIBUTIONS: Financial contributions to Read Charlotte are an important measure of community confidence in our work. Since inception, gifts and commitments to Read Charlotte to date total $13.1 million from 87 unique donors. (Includes contributions received to date for the next five years of our operations.) This does not include other contributions made to local literacy programs or strategic co-investments in supported programs that did not pass through our organization. Moreover, these funds were raised without any public fundraising campaign as we have sought to avoid competing directly with nonprofit service providers.

MULTI-CHANNEL COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM: Over the past five years, Read Charlotte has developed an effective, professional multi-channel communications platform. This includes website, social media (Facebook and Twitter), digital ads, search ads, billboards, radio, print and co-branded bus ads. Over this time period, annual traffic to the Read Charlotte website grew from 1,693 unique visitors in 2015 to 41,849 visitors in 2019. Our Facebook followers grew from about 300 in early 2017 to 5,192 in late 2019. STRATEGIC CO-FUNDING: Read Charlotte has a two-part funding model: a $2.8 million Transformation Fund to fill gaps and invest in new ideas and coordination of strategic co-funding in targeted projects with engaged local donors. Over the past five years, Read Charlotte has successfully collaborated with local funders to co-invest $6.8 million in strategic co-funding in 11 targeted projects. Of this amount, $2.6 million (38.5%) came from Read Charlotte’s Transformation Fund and $4.2 million (61.5%) came from strategic co-funders. These co-investments seeded new ideas (e.g., Active Reading workshops and the Data Collaborative), funded research (e.g., CMS literacy study), brought new models to Charlotte-Mecklenburg (e.g., HELPS fluency tutoring, Tutor Charlotte, Ready4K, Summer Literacy Infusion), expanded existing programs (e.g., Reach Out and Read), and supported pilot and demonstration projects (e.g., Ready To Read and Network for Continuous Improvement project).

NATIONAL PACESETTER AWARDS: Read Charlotte’s accomplishments were recognized by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading with a Pacesetter Award in 2016 and 2017. These awards are given to highlight communities that serve as proof points and represent the “leading edge” of innovation, impact and improvement within the GLR Network, currently comprised of more than 300 communities, representing 44 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Alberta, Canada.