This month, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin officially kicked off Oneida Reads: a new literacy campaign with the goal to get every Oneida student reading at a proficient level by 3rd grade. Tribal leaders, Brown County education officials, and Reading Corps representatives were all in attendance for the kickoff event on August 1st.
“Up to 3rd grade, you learn to read; after 3rd grade, you read to learn,” said Jennifer Webster, an Oneida Nation Councilwoman, at the launch. She stressed the need for strong reading skills as a foundation for later success. “We want this to help with self-sufficiency for our children.”
Oneida Reads is a collective impact initiative in collaboration with several local partners including Reading Corps in Wisconsin, several school districts, Cooperative Educational Service Agency 7, Childcare Resources of Northeast Wisconsin, and more. Reading Corps has a long track record of supporting education in the state, having helped more than 18,000 Wisconsin students improve their reading skills since 2015. We are honored to deepen that commitment by being a part of the initiative.
Closing the Gap
Oneida Reads was created to address several daunting discrepancies between Native students and white students in the state, first of which is basic reading skills. Native students have the lowest reading proficiency rates among any demographic group in Brown County, lagging a full 38 points behind white students. A variety of factors contribute to the disparity and one the initiative seeks to tackle is absenteeism. 44% of Native students in the county miss at least 10% of school days, whereas only 7% of white students do.
With this in mind, the first step in Oneida Reads’ plan is to promote higher school attendance through raising awareness and addressing barriers preventing students from getting to class. Further steps include plans to improve the collection of educational data and to implement evidence-based reading instruction for all classrooms. Oneida Reads’ central aim of 100% reading proficiency will take years of hard work, and Reading Corps is proud to play a part in helping students become stronger readers.
Doing Our Part
“It is an honor to support Oneida Reads. There is a lot of work to be done, but we believe our high-impact, consistent tutoring can help to close educational gaps,” says Itzel Galindo, Executive Director of Reading Corps in Wisconsin. “This fall, we will have tutors serving at three elementary schools here in Brown County, helping students read better and setting them up for more success down the road.”
In the nine years since the program began in Wisconsin, Reading Corps has trained over 900 tutors to serve at over 180 different schools across the state. Last school year alone, Reading Corps spent nearly 10,000,000 minutes delivering tutoring that has been proven to help students of all racial and socio-economic backgrounds.
“As a dad and a grandfather, I know it’s important to help kids have a great start in school,” says Chairman Tehassi Hill. “We want every Oneida child to have the opportunities that reading creates.”
If you want to help support student learning and help create opportunities for children in your community, visit join.readingandmath.org. To learn more about Oneida Reads and the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, go to Oneida-NSN.gov.