A key to Robinson’s success was individual attention and monitoring student progress. “It’s indescribable, really,” Cassaundra Day said of the importance of individual tutoring. Day was a reading buddy at Robinson and is also director of literacy services at the Madison County Literacy Coalition. “It makes an incredible difference.”

Day said that even schools’ reading recovery programs can sometimes fall short because students might receive individual attention for only a limited amount of time during the school day.

She cited as an example one of her Robinson reading buddy students who was repeating first grade and barely knew letters when he transferred to Robinson and started the program. In a matter of months, that child was reading full sentences.

“What they were able to do with those children was phenomenal,” she said.

Clark, who is now personnel director at Anderson Community Schools, said that many of the techniques that were successful at Robinson will transfer to Anderson Elementary school at the K-2 level, and perhaps other ACS schools.

Individual attention is something that parents can do with their children from an early age, said Born Learning site coordinator Kelly Hughes. “You can start reading to your children at birth and they can gain from it.”

Born Learning coordinators have a strategy that they share with parents who read to their children. They call it the PEER sequence:

— Prompt the child with a question about the story;

— Evaluate the child’s response;

— Expand on the child’s response;

— Repeat the initial question to check that the child understands what was learned.

Without that kind of parental participation at a young age, Hughes said children “are losing the story about them.”

But sometimes parents are not equipped to be their child’s first teacher.

“When you have adults who can’t read, that trickles down to the children in many cases,” said Born Learning coordinator Joanne Hadley.

“You have to wonder, are we missing some kids?” Day said. “There’s always going to be gaps. There’s always going to be kids we don’t reach.”