Districts across the state are scrambling to raise literacy levels, and as hopes are placed in new science of reading techniques, some like St. Paul are enlisting community members to help the cause.

At East African Elementary Magnet School last week, retirees huddled with students for a second consecutive year to offer one-on-one tutoring on the letters of the alphabet — then it was time to read aloud with books like “Pete the Cat and the Perfect Pizza Party.”

The tutors come courtesy of East Side Learning Center, a nonprofit based in St. Paul that uses a national model, AARP Foundation Experience Corps, to train people over 50 to tutor kids in grades K-3 to become better readers, and uses materials and books supplied by the AARP program.

Initially, it’d been hoped that the state’s second-largest district could again help fund the volunteer literacy effort, but budget pressures associated with the expiration of federal pandemic relief funds killed that idea.

Still, the East Side Learning Center volunteers returned this fall to the Frogtown school, and when a visitor said it seemed gracious of them, director Karmit Bulman surveyed the scene of tutors engaging with kids and said: “Just look at this room. Why wouldn’t you?”

Anne Towner, a tutor who also worked with the students there a year ago, too, said: “It feels like home.”

East African Elementary debuted in 2023-24, and at that time, seven out of 10 students were English language learners. The scores on state standardized tests administered last spring found just 17 % of the school’s students were proficient in reading.

But, as educators often say, test results are just a part of the achievement story.

East Side Learning Center reports that every kindergartner in every school it placed tutors in 2023-24 met benchmarks for letter names and sound identification; 58% or more of first- through third-graders showed growth in fluency and-or reading accuracy; and 85% of grades K-3 students demonstrated social-emotional growth — with the latter also being a goal of the AARP program.

Scott Hiedeman, a volunteer who tutored a year ago at Dayton’s Bluff Elementary on the East Side, said he’s had a student who will hug him every time he heads back to class and others who are wild.

“You sense that something else is going on at home,” he said this week. “But unless the kid brings it up, you can’t draw it out of them.”

This year, the federal COVID relief funds that St. Paul Public Schools provided to the learning center a year ago — a total of $57,500 during the school year and into the summer — have dried up, and East Side Learning Center’s had to step up its fundraising while also drawing down its reserves.

“We think it’s so important — so we’re there whether they pay or not,” Bulman said Wednesday. Tutors also are stationed at Frost Lake Elementary and Saint Paul Music Academy.

The center has hopes of expanding to other schools in St. Paul, and perhaps to Minneapolis, as well.

St. Paul Public Schools used pandemic funds to support struggling students through interventions grounded in the phonics-based science of reading, and now the district is spending $7 million of its own money to pay teachers like Heidi Nakatini of East African Elementary, who helps select students for one-on-one tutoring.

Last year, the learning center piloted a program there with six students; this year, it will have 35 taking part in the four-day-a-week, half-hour sessions, onsite coordinator Paula Mielke said.

Said Towner, “When you are one-on-one, the students have to perform. We’re worth a lot to them — that’s my feeling. And it’s joyful. The kids are delightful.”

She is a former first-grade teacher who taught in Taiwan, England, Scotland and St. Louis, before retiring in 2020 from the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan School District. She enjoys working as a team and is impressed with tutors like Hiedeman, a retired mechanical engineer, who didn’t teach as a career.

He’s a longtime tutor, however, having volunteered for 10 years at a church near downtown Kansas City, an hour’s drive from the power plant where he worked, “keeping the equipment working well,” he said.

As to what keeps him going, Hiedeman cites a struggling third-grader at Dayton’s Bluff Elementary, who after all of the skills building — the letter recognition and the flash cards plus the ABC’s song and games to help keep her engaged — suddenly one day proclaimed: “I can read!”

“It makes you feel good when you get there,” Hiedeman said.