By Dharshani Dharmawardena
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Seeing that 70 percent of children fell below proficient levels
of reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress,
President Clinton proposed the America Reads Challenge in 1994.
The program aims for children to read adequately by the third
grade.
“For any kind of achievement, people need to learn how to
read before they go through any learning experience,” said
Celia Cudiamat, program director of UCLA BruinCorps.
An umbrella organization for community service on campus,
BruinCorps oversees both UCLA America Reads, UCLA’s response
to President Clinton’s challenge, and Jumpstart Los Angeles,
part of a national literacy program focusing on preschoolers.
Class of 2000 graduate and Jumpstart program coordinator Joyce
Liou worked with BruinCorps for two years, tutoring at Western
Elementary School in South Central Los Angeles.
Having heard about America Reads in her Education 197 class,
Liou decided to apply for a tutoring position because it seemed
both challenging and fun.
“It was an ideal job,” she said. “It provided
a chance to test and build skills and best of all, I’d get to
work with children.”
BruinCorps pays student tutors through funds from AmeriCorps, a
group of national programs addressing various community-based
issues, and through Federal Work Study.
Student tutors also receive educational awards depending on the
amount of hours they serve.
America Reads at UCLA, which began in 1997, initially focused on
tutoring children in kindergarten through third grade.
“Research shows that if you can’t read by the third
grade, you’re already behind,” Cudiamat said.
Sixty students from the UCLA America Reads program served at 12
elementary schools and three community-based organizations in Los
Angeles during its first year.
Today, America Reads helps older children as well. It expanded
to include additional schools, organizations and students during
the 1998-1999 school year.
Unlike America Reads, Jumpstart Los Angeles focuses on younger
children.
It became part of BruinCorps in 1998 because program organizers
wanted to extend the America Reads Challenge to preschoolers.
It attempts to build language development and social skills
needed for a future first-grader to learn how to read, Cudiamat
said.
“Since they are so young, the program is totally different
from K to 3,” Cudiamat said. “In preschool, it is
dealing with the really emergent kinds of skills.”
Both America Reads and Jumpstart members serve disadvantaged
communities, which lack educational services for elementary
school-aged children, Cudiamat said.
Such unfavorable circumstances may eventually hinder their
chances of attending a good college, she added.
“They don’t have those kinds of advantages to
prepare them to be competitive,” she said. “We want to
give them a foundation of skills to build on.”
Tutors working with students one-on-one can help these students
move ahead, Cudiamat said.
From her experience, Liou said many of these children face
difficulties at home in addition to the disadvantages they find at
school.
“Many of the parents don’t know how they can help
their child succeed in school because the areas we work at consist
of a large population of immigrant families, where the parents
don’t necessarily speak English and cannot read or write
it,” she said.
Although many parents may want to participate in their
children’s educations more, circumstances out of their reach
prevent such interaction, Liou said.
“There are parents who never got past a certain level of
education,” she said. “There are parents who work all
the time and when they get home, they look at their children and
realize that their kids are strangers to them and that they
don’t know how to engage their children in conversation.
“And of course, there are parents who are completely with
the program and make sure the child does their homework and really
work with the children,” she continued.
Even though some families experience hardships, Liou said she
found most parents cared deeply about their children’s
futures.
“It’s rare to find a parent who isn’t
appreciative of all your work,” she said.
Through tutoring, BruinCorps members try to help youngsters
overcome many of the disadvantages they face, Liou said. Working
with them, however, requires imagination.
“All my literacy and math activities had to be fun,
because ideally, that’s the best way to learn and spark
interest in learning for the sake of knowledge, not for the sake of
the grade,” she said.
For example, Liou said she used the game Memory to help students
with their spelling. Whenever a child found a matching pair, they
needed to spell the name correctly in order to win.
Despite her attempts to create a fun environment, Liou said some
of the students were uncooperative, forcing her to change her
lesson plan and make things more relaxing for them.
“If a group or individual was having a bad day or was
tired, we took it easier,” she said. “But we always
involved reading in our relaxation days, which is one of the goals
of our program ““ to promote literacy as something
fun.”
The children Liou tutored are not the only ones who learned. She
said she gained a different perspective on life working with her
students.
“You may be stressed about your own grades and tests, but
the moment you walk into the class and you get a hug from your
tutee, you realize your troubles are so minute in the grand scheme
of things,” Liou said.
“You realize how privileged you are to be where
you’re at,” she added.