Sherry Nguyen, Tammy Anderson, Tina Kozneazny
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Responding to Kid's Need to Read
JEP asks 'Spend lunch over a book - Read to a child!'
By Eva Emerson
Staying responsive to the community, both on and off the USC campus,
has been a powerful force in keeping the Joint Educational Project and
its various service learning programs alive and thriving for the more
than 30 years at USC College.
So a few years ago, when local educators and principals asked JEP
Executive Director Tammara Anderson and Tina Koneazny, director of
JEP’s USC ReadersPLUS program, for additional reading tutors, the team
went into action. First they added a student volunteer component to the
main USC ReadersPLUS program, which employs about 100 work-study
students as reading and math tutors to children in neighborhood
schools.
When they began to get requests from university staff members
interested in volunteering, they launched the USC Literacy Project—a
group of faculty, staff, alumni and graduate student volunteers placed
in local schools. In 1998, 25 faculty and staff took part, but over
time dwindling volunteer numbers led Koneazny to suspend the program.
Last year, Koneazny and her team began rebuilding the program,
recruiting 15 graduate student volunteers. This year, in an effort
spearheaded by Sherry Nguyen, the student central coordinator of USC
ReadersPLUS, they have increased recruitment efforts and found new ways
to get their message out. They even have considered using a slogan:
“Spend lunch over a good book—Read to a child.”
“Our community schools have been happy to host our students, whose
literacy assistance truly makes a difference in the children’s reading
abilities,” Koneazny says. The special attention brings results.
According to an assessment done in 2002, 63 percent of children working
with USC tutors showed substantial improvements in reading accuracy.
Recognizing the difficulty for people who work full-time or have busy
schedules, the Literacy Project asks for only one to two hours a week
of volunteers’ time.
Nguyen’s work has already started to pay off, with more than 20 people
signed up for the spring training to learn the basics about working
one-on-one with a struggling reader.
ReadersPLUS is one of the three service learning programs administered
from offices in the rambling JEP House, an older bungalow. The others
are Trojan Health Volunteers and the original Joint Educational
Project, which remains the largest. JEP works with professors to match
students enrolled in one of more than 65 different academic courses
with neighborhood organizations, and requires that students meet weekly
to write about and reflect on how their experiences relate to classroom
theory and readings. Combined, more than 1,000 students take part in
JEP programs each semester.
“The beauty of JEP is that it allows us to respond in a positive way to
serious issues facing the USC neighborhood—that’s the ‘good’ we do. But
what people most often overlook is the educational benefits USC
students get out of their service—the learning piece of what we do,”
Anderson says.
The Children Youth and Family Collaborative recently awarded Anderson
the Terrell Sanders Commitment to Children and Collaboration Award for
her passion and service to Los Angeles children.
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