By Janet Perry
There’s a new program in Sonoma County that is helping pull local students out of the reading slump that occurred during the pandemic. Students are showing great progress through the incentives brought to their personal reading goals by Read On, Sonoma.
Michelle Leisen is the director of Read On, Sonoma and says with the help of the Amaturo Family Foundation and the Guy Fieri Foundation the program was piloted in local schools during the 2021-22 school year. Santa Rosa resident Lawrence Amaturo—publisher of NorthBay biz—was inspired by his family’s success with a similar program they supported in Florida, where the foundation is based. “We’re all just so excited to see the measurable and material gains of our student participants,” says Amaturo.
Leisen says she loves working with Read On, Sonoma and believes the work to be hugely important to the success of local students. “I am a longtime Sonoma County educator,” Leisen says. “I was a teacher at Roseland [Elementary School]. I was the principal at Roseland. I’m now the director of learning support. As we know, literacy drastically affects the trajectory of children’s outcomes in education and in career.”
Read On, Sonoma incentivizes reading by encouraging students to meet reading goals—determined by an individual’s results from the state STAR diagnostic assessment—and allotting them tokens they can then put toward rewards. “Anything from a soccer ball, a trip to Epicenter [entertainment center in Santa Rosa], to an educational scholarship fund,” Leisen says. “We had 127 students who earned a Chromebook this year. It’s been amazing.”
They host assemblies where students are encouraged to read and acknowledged for meeting their reading goals. “We go into the school sites, we bring a team and all of our rewards,” Leisen says.
“Kids want to be at school because they want to take their quizzes,” Leisen says, referring to comprehension assessments they take after reading a book. “Kids want to be at school because they’re working toward a goal, and we’re able to give that little bit of extrinsic motivation to everyone.”
Leisen says the key is incentivizing individual student goals. “So there’s no difference between students, all of our kids are seeing success because it’s based on their need.”
Read On, Sonoma serves second through sixth graders at six schools: Kenwood Elementary, Alexander Valley Elementary, Madrone Elementary in Lincoln Valley and all three elementary schools in the Mark West school district. Leisen says they’ve also just finished a successful pilot program at Roseland Elementary.
Participating schools are asked to dedicate 20 minutes a day to reading. Teachers are helping make that happen by allotting classroom time for reading and taking quizzes based on what’s been read. Students earn points toward their individual reading goal with the quizzes.
Leisen says she believes the work is timely because of the many challenges school sites are facing due to post-pandemic issues. “Across the board schools are facing an increased level of truancy and chronic absenteeism,” she says. “Our reading scores and math scores have not recovered across our whole state of California. Our students who are working toward fluency in English, obviously lost ground.”
Schools participating in Read On, Sonoma are seeing improvements. “What we’ve seen across the board is reading levels that are accelerating in all measures,” Leisen says. “Not only in the state scores at our school sites, but with their internal measures, their phonics assessments and their instructional reading level assessments.”
The Million-Word Club
Read On, Sonoma celebrated million-word readers at the end of the school term. “We had 126 students read over a million words this year,” Leisen says. “And 30 of them were multi-million-word readers, which blows my mind.”
Leisen describes a very successful end-of-year awards assembly with a touching surprise from the students.
“We were at Riebli Elementary, where 95% of the students met their reading goal during the last trimester, which was just phenomenal,” she says. “We’ve got our team there, we’ve got our Chromebooks up there and we’re celebrating our million-word readers.”
“There’s a kiddo named Conner who read 5,264,663 words,” Leisen says. “We announced his name and his name was up on the projector screen and impromptu, the entire student body started chanting Conner, Conner!”
“One of the things we say is we want to celebrate reading like the game-winning touchdown and, I’m getting goosebumps when I say this, because it organically happened like that,” Leisen says.
“He came just prancing down the aisle to get his letter while his name was being chanted by the entire student body as the champion of reading,” Leisen says. “That’s the why of it, really—that’s why I love this work.”
Conner Melligan, 11, was in Andrea Farrell’s fifth-grade class at Riebli Elementary this past year and she says the impromptu chanting of his name at the awards assembly was a motivating experience for his peers as well.
“He’s an avid reader and this year he had already hit the million-word mark by the first trimester,” Farrell says. “Seeing the whole school cheer for him and the smile he had on his face, it was just amazing. And then that was also super motivating to the rest of the class—they wanted to be up there with Conner and get in that million-word club.”
Farrell points out that one of the biggest gaps they’ve noticed from the pandemic is in reading and writing. “They are so closely intertwined,” she says. “The more exposure they get to reading, the better their own writing becomes. Anything we can do to encourage reading is just really impactful.”
She says that Read On, Sonoma has had a big impact on her entire class. “We definitely have seen an increase in students’ motivation to read,” she says. “Not just like when they’re instructed to read, but reading on their own as well.”
When we spoke with Conner he had just spent a long day outside riding his bike and playing tag with his neighbors. He says that besides reading, he really likes riding his bike, playing soccer and practicing Taekwondo.
Conner says the thing he likes most about reading is how he gets absorbed in a story. He says he likes stories with action in them and reading fantasy science fiction and historical fiction.
“I’ve always enjoyed reading,” he says. “It’s so fun.”
Right now he’s reading a series of books by Brandon Sanderson called The Stormlight Archive. “It’s about this guy, in a world named Roshar,” Conner says. “This is way back, like knights-and-kings times.” He says his dad is reading it along with him.
Throughout last year, Conner won a certificate, an Epicenter gift card, a plaque and Copperfield’s gift cards at Read On, Sonoma assemblies. We asked if he was surprised when his fellow students began chanting his name. “Yeah, a little,” he said. “I felt a little embarrassed, but it felt very good to be recognized.”
He plans to continue reading through the summer and is taking part in the Summer Reading Challenge at the Windsor branch of the Sonoma County Library. “I log every 20 minutes I read and can get a reward at the end of the summer,” Conner says.
Read On, Sonoma partnered with Simpson Sheet Metal and Redwood Credit Union to present a Most Inspiring Reader Award to one student at each of the participating schools. Those students were then honored on stage at the Country Summer music festival in June and given a $1,000 scholarship toward their educational future.
“They were brought up on stage and given one of those adorable big checks,” Leisen says. “These kiddos made huge growth, and the program really lit a fire, getting them going with their love of reading.”
“Yeah, I was really happy,” she says. “I felt like I really accomplished something.”
When we spoke, the 9-year-old was enjoying her summer break and had just gotten back from camp. Lily says she had fun at camp, likes to hang out with her family and go on trips.
When asked if she has always liked reading, Lily quickly responds with, “No, I always really like to do art.”
“I tried my hardest to double my goal in Read On, Sonoma,” Lily says. “My reading teacher kind of helped me out with that, and I just started reading a lot.”
“I like to read the Magic Tree House books,” Lily says about Mary Pope Osborne’s series about siblings whose back yard tree house transports them to various times in history. “I really like that they go out on so many different adventures and they learn about so many different facts about the world and about different places.”
“The program is perfect for those students who haven’t found the intrinsic love of reading yet,” says Emily Todd, principal of Riebli Elementary School. “It provides that extrinsic motivation to help students want to read, especially those struggling students where you would do everything you could to get them to enjoy a book.”
Todd says that because of earning points and prizes, now those students are wanting to read. “They’re at the point where they’re surpassing what they need to do because they’re enjoying it,” she says.
Amanda Johnson teaches fourth grade at Riebli and sees the program from the point of view of a teacher, but also with a sharp eye on the data. Johnson is the coordinator for Read On, Sonoma at Riebli. “I input the data, track the progress throughout the year and help distribute the prizes,” Johnson says.
“If kids are really close, I’ll send little emails like, ‘Hey, so and so is close to meeting their goal, please encourage them to read another book before the end of the trimester or take a [quiz],’” she says.
From looking at the data throughout the school year Johnson says the program’s success seems to depend upon the grade level. “I think maybe for primary [grades] it requires a little bit more monitoring, for the second graders especially,” she says.
Overall, Johnson says she is impressed with the effectiveness of the program. “Close to 80% of the school met their goal,” she says. “I did see a huge increase of students participating from trimester one. By trimester three almost all the students were participating.”
“In my personal experience it made my job easier, because the program is so user friendly that kids can just log on and see where they’re at,” Johnson says. “There’s a cute little rocket ship that shows them how close they are to reaching their goals. So the interface itself is very user friendly.”
Johnson describes two of her students who benefited a lot from the encouragement of Read On, Sonoma. “One student who is an [English learner] this year, it took her a while,” Johnson says. “But once she met her goal, she found some books that really spoke to her and she became much more of an avid reader.”
Another student was reading below grade level but worked so hard he jumped up the equivalent of two grade levels. “He wanted to earn a computer all year, and worked so hard,” Johnson says. “By the end of the year, he was reading Harry Potter books.”
Todd has been witnessing a change in the school’s culture around reading as they finished out their second year with Read On, Sonoma.
“I’m seeing kids coming out to the play yard with their book, kids talking about books that they’re reading, having conversations with staff members about books,” Todd says. “They’re wanting to find a new series or a new book that they may enjoy.”
As 9-year-old Lily puts it: “I think everybody should learn to read—I think they might enjoy reading.
“Yeah, I think they will.”
Read On, by the numbers
Read On, Sonoma brings the glitz and the pizazz to reading with their incentive program. They reward students reaching their goals with fun prizes and this has lit a fire in the hearts of readers across Sonoma County.
The 2023-24 school year was the third year that Read On, Sonoma had partnered with local schools. They grow more and more encouraged by the success of local readers. The best part, once students begin reading, they get hooked and books start becoming more a part of the school culture.
While it is widely recognized that the pandemic played havoc on students’ academic endeavors and successes, programs like Read On, Sonoma are helping to inspire students to read with impressive results.
Words Read
This past school year, Read On, Sonoma students read 533,223,046 words.
This is a significant increase from the previous years’ totals:
2022-23: 381,493,605 total words read
2021-22: 184,057,148 total words read
Books Read
Participating students on average read 43 books this year
The previous year saw an average pf 35 books read per student.
Million-word readers:
This year 126 students read over a million words.
Thirty of those students are multi-million-word readers. Over the past two years, the Instructional Reading Level of the Read On, Sonoma 3rd graders has increased from an average of 1st grade, 8th month to 3rd grade, 9th month.
At the end of the 2023-24 third trimester 1,737 rewards were distributed to 975 students.
The folks with Read On, Sonoma and the school staff we spoke with all praised the efforts of the local businesses that are providing prizes. Go to readonsonoma.org to learn more or to find out how to get involved.
