History
Started in 2004 at the request of the Coachella Valley Unified School District Superintendent of Schools, Roberta and Clay Klein started a fund at the Desert Community Foundation and asked the pastor of their church for his assistance in recruiting volunteers. Father Howard Lincoln of Sacred Heart Church readily agreed. The District had been using English speaking volunteers to the extent, they could get them to go into the schools in the district that had no English speaking people in the community. Roberta asked the Superintendent if he would provide buses if they could recruit volunteers who were fluent in English through churches and other organizations.
Read With Me was born and now brings volunteers from seven churches to five different schools. The schools are all in areas of high poverty with a majority of the parents untrained in academic English. They love their children but cannot help them with English.
In 2013, Read With Me received a Golden Bell Award for English Acquisition from the California School Board Association. We believe the program is totally replicable in other areas that face similar challenges in providing tutoring and mentoring for disadvantaged children in a classroom setting.
What we do
In the classroom, the teacher assigns individual volunteers to selected students to listen to them read, assisting them with pronunciation and comprehension. The mentor/tutors are typically retired part-time Coachella Valley residents, some with special skills who help specific students go beyond the basic.
Read With Me
Honored with the Golden Bell award for English Acquisition by the California School Board Association and the 2022 GuideStar Silver Seal of Transparency
Volunteer Programs
Annual Read With Me
Volunteer Meeting and Recognition Luncheon
Read With Me played host to our Annual Volunteer Meeting and Appreciation Luncheon on February 15th 2019. Over 350 volunteers who participate in the Read With Me program attended along with the Principal and staff from each school . Also in attendance were our "Angles' and key members of our Board and community. Area churches and Country Clubs help sponsor the program and recruit volunteers to go to 13 schools in the Coachella Valley.
Each year the principals and volunteer coordinators chose a " Volunteer of the Year" from each school and honor these outstanding volunteers for their dedication and devotion to the children in our Valley.
This year our luncheon sponsor is the H.N. & Frances C. Berger Foundation and we would like to thank them for making this special event possible.
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The volunteers act as mentors and tutors in individual classrooms helping children from non-English speaking families learn to become fluent in English. The volunteers are English speaking role models who commit to 1/2 a day a week to work under the direction of a classroom teacher listening to children read to them and helping with comprehension and pronunciation.
There are now 700 volunteers participating in the program. Over 300 ride a bus to their designated school. The other 400 drive themselves to the schools.
Read With Me shares the cost of the bus transportation with the cvusd school district.
Read With Me also provides school supplies, and field trips for the students in the schools we serve. Roberta Klein, Founder of the program, told the assembled group that they had contributed over 10,000 hours in the classroom from November 1 to February 15th and expects another 11,000 hours in the classroom by the end of the school year.
Read With Me as a program of the Coachella Valley Unified School District was awarded a Golden Bell by the California School Board Association for their outstanding accomplishments in the English Language Acquistion category.
Volunteers uniformly express their delight in participating in the program saying
"We get as much or more out of it than the kids"
and
"The day I go to school to read with the children is the highlight of the week."