SOAR Partners with Pinellas County Rotary Clubs to Create Powerful Literacy Impact
The “Zap the Gap” kids celebrate their reading accomplishments.
St. Pete Rotary Clubs multiply their literacy impact ten times:
$40k of support yields $400k of impact!Starting two years ago, St. Pete Rotary Clubs began partnering with Sing Out and READ to implement the Family Literacy Project (FLiP). It began in the Jordan Park Public Housing Community Apartments and spread to a youth football and cheer organization where struggling readers were able to gain one full year in their reading level in just three months’ time. The St. Pete Midtown and St. Pete Downtown Rotary Clubs have already raised more than $40K to help boost reading for our most vulnerable young children.
80 children gain one full year in reading in three months’ time.At Jordan Park Apartments, Rotary funding enabled 40 families to participate in the FLiP program. Students that met the goal of 900 minutes on the program over the 12-week FLiP session, gained, on average, 1.1 years in their reading comprehension level.
How does the FLiP program multiply literacy impact ten times?The most reliable method for moving a struggling reader up one year in reading, in less than one year’s time, is intensive, 1:1 tutoring. It requires 4 – 5 sessions per week over a 6-month period. It’s expensive. In fact, it costs about $5,000 per child.
SOAR uses the power of singing, integrated into a gamified software program that actually makes reading practice fun. The program is delivered on a specially configured “loaner” tablet. The kids feel they are playing a karaoke-style game. By leveraging this technology, FLiP brings the cost to raise one child’s reading level in one year downfrom $5,000 to just $500. That’s 1/10th of the cost of using reading tutors. And, FLiP gets the job done, in just three months. That’s half the time of the alternative.
St. Pete Midtown Rotary dubbed their cohort “Zap the Reading Gap”
In the Spring of 2021, the St. Pete Midtown Rotary Club raised $5,000.00 to start the ZAP the Reading Gap program. The club not only provided financial resources it brought together its access to foster kids and their families and the power of SOAR’s FLiP program to help kids improve their reading. Foster children frequently experience interruptions in their learning journey which contributes to a high incidence of being significantly behind in reading.
The foster families and kids “hit it out of the park” by consistently logging more than the average weekly minute goal over the 12 week session. And, they out-gained the average reading improvement by 24%!
President of the Midtown Rotary Club, Paulette Jones, talks with SOAR co- founder, Carlo Franzblau at the Cambria hotel celebration.
Rotarians set the bar high with celebration at the Cambria Hotel on Madeira Beach
A very special evening was put together by St. Pete Midtown Rotarians for the Zap the Gap kids who completed the FLiP program. The Cambria Hotel’s manager, also a Rotarian, helped the St. Pete Midtown Club create a special event for the foster families who participated. After pizza and cookies were served and the prize tablets handed out, the families were invited upstairs to the rooftop deck for a pool party! Dexter Mcree wrote about this exciting event in “The Weekly Challenger.” Read the full article here.
Could Literacy become the new Polio for Rotary?
Rotary International has played a lead part in the global fight against the terrible childhood disease, Polio. As a founding partner of the “Global Polio Eradication Initiative,” Rotarians have helped reduce Polio cases worldwide by 99.9%.
Could Rotary do for Literacy what it has done for Polio? And what would be the impact of reducing the percent of at-risk kids who can’t read on grade level from over 70% to something in the single digits?
It would be a whole new world!