A win-win situation in reading

It’s a win-win situation. For quite a few years I had been disappointed with the poor ratings of the Louisiana public school system where we usually are rated between the 47th and 50th worst in the United States.

At a time where education should be more and more important, here in Louisiana we seem to be in favor of destroying the public school system.

However, a few years ago, after I retired, a former co-worker got me involved in volunteer work in the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, and I discovered a win-win situation.

For the last four years I have been lucky enough to be involved with VIPS or Volunteers In Public Schools as a reading friend for students in the first four grades.

Quite a few years ago, I read that a California study showed that the most important thing that we could do to improve the results of students in public schools was to keep the student to teacher ratio at 14 to 1 or less.

Knowing that will not happen here because of budget reasons, the obvious answer is volunteer effort to aid the existing teacher staff. It works.

I have consistently found that helping students learn to read who have been identified by the teachers as needing help has not only been beneficial to the students but has been a win-win situation for me.

I find that I really enjoy the time I spend helping out at the EBR schools, even though I live in Prairieville.

I have consistently seen major improvements in the students that I have worked with. They do better and feel good about it, and I feel good about it.

Last semester I had a third grade student and at the end of the semester he was reading at what I would consider the fourth or fifth grade level and that was just from meeting a half hour a week every week.

It can work for just about anyone. If you’d like to participate, contact VIPS at everybodyreads@ ebrschools.org and give it a try. The rewards are great.

I can almost guarantee a win-win situation.

Ray Schell

retired chemist

Prairieville

Comments

1) Comment by bourbon-soda - 27/10/2012

The apparently educated speculation in the straightdope article was that small class size might be demonstrably efficatious in populations likely to have chaotic classrooms. This would probably correlate highly with free lunch, so which schools to try it in would be easy to determine (to the extent the whole public education system is not a free lunch). The article also suggested that a reduction to low twenties, as tried in California, did not work, but reduction to 14, as in Tennessee, seemed to work. This suggests there is a threshold somewhere between 20 and 14 that remains to be established with exactitude.

2) Comment by tradewinns - 27/10/2012

i'm pretty sure there are studies showing larger classes work just as well as smaller ones. it seems to me that there was a reporting of just this within the last month or so on (of course) TV. parental participation in their childs education is the primary motivation in a child's education.

3) Comment by bourbon-soda - 27/10/2012

Commentary with references on the small class size issue is available at http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3009/are-smaller-elementary- school-class-sizes-better or google [straightdope class size tennessee].