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On a recent road trip, Anisha Hutchinson snapped a photo of her son, a fifth grader at Abernethy Elementary School, reading a Percy Jackson novel in the car. The image brought her relief.
Hutchinson, an avid reader like most of her family, long wondered why her son didn’t enjoy reading. Some clues: His kindergarten year was cut short because of COVID-19, and his first grade year was confined to remote learning. Those are key years, many education experts say, for grasping critical reading skills.
Hutchinson’s son struggled to decode words. But he received help from a teacher who worked with him after school. And, starting in the 2022–23 school year, Abernethy engaged in a partnership with Reading Results, a nonprofit that provides high-impact literacy tutoring to students in several Portland-area school districts.
Three times a week, in 30-minute blocks ahead of the school day, Hutchinson says her son got individualized attention and support. This year, 25 Abernethy students (close to 9% of the school’s enrollment) received Reading Results services, either one on one or in pairs.
“He’s now at above grade level,” Hutchinson says of her son’s reading. “He was literally picking up Percy Jackson books on his own…it was absolutely amazing.”
It’s success stories like these that have led Portland Public Schools to expand its partnership with Reading Results from 18 schools (four from a district partnership, and 14 from partnerships with individual schools) to a districtwide contract serving 30 schools in the upcoming 2025–26 school year. “We’re going big with PPS!” Reading Results executive director Jennifer Samuels wrote in an email to tutors on April 22.
But next year, Reading Results won’t be at Abernethy. That’s because in selecting the 30 schools that would qualify for the programming the organization provides, the district targeted schools with the highest percentages of historically underserved students and the greatest need. Darcy Soto, PPS’s director of learning acceleration, says the district looked at factors such as student performance in literacy by third grade and the number of full-time equivalent interventionists on staff. They also applied an equity focus, particularly for Black and Native students. Soto says this move will maximize the district’s limited resources.
That means four schools Reading Results currently serves—Abernethy, César Chávez K-8, Skyline K-8, and Winterhaven K-8—will not have the program next year. (Samuels tells WW that Winterhaven already planned not to work with Reading Results next year because of low need, and César Chávez students will have access to bilingual support.)
The decision has raised questions about who falls through the cracks when Oregon’s largest school district chooses to direct its limited resources toward schools with the most need. In this case, parents are concerned that some at-need students who attend more affluent schools will lose out on the resources they also require, simply because of their geographic location.
Melissa Dunn, the principal at Abernethy, announced the partnership’s end to families in an April 23 newsletter. In it, she wrote that working with Reading Results had helped students boost their confidence as well as their academic abilities, and had freed up staff like the school’s instructional coach and education assistant to support advanced math and book groups and give additional support to struggling readers.
“While I am very happy…that so many other schools are going to be able to use the Reading Results program to support their students, I am absolutely devastated that it is being taken away from ours,” Dunn wrote. “This is a very big loss for our school and for our students.”
Felice Lamb is one of four tutors who has worked in tandem with Reading Results at Abernethy. She’d left her job to be home with her kids for a number of years, but when they got to Abernethy, she says the tutoring job was ideal because she could take on responsibility while her kids were in school. Since fall 2023, she’s immersed herself in phonics-based instruction, and she has been amazed by its effectiveness. “If we can intervene at the right time, then it can transform that kid’s whole school experience going forward,” Lamb says. “I saw that in action.”
PPS officials say they’re excited to partner with Reading Results, and they’ll provide reading support educational assistants at an additional 15 schools, says Emily Glasgow, senior director of pre-K-5 academics. At a time when the district faces a $40 million budget shortfall, Glasgow says the additional money for early literacy (from an Oregon early literacy grant, the Fund for PPS, and the district’s general fund) reflects Superintendent Dr. Kimberlee Armstrong’s top priority.
“Our big push has been around how do we get really tight and strategic and aligned with our approach to literacy and PPS?” Glasgow says. “That’s everything from core instruction to high-impact tutoring, to intervention, to family engagement around literacy.”
Samuels, the executive director of Reading Results, says the program has always strived to partner with schools to support a specific group of students: those who are behind in reading, but not so far behind that they need even more intervention.
The organization’s goal is to ensure that all students can read by third grade. If students aren’t reading at grade level by the end of third grade, Samuels says, they are four times less likely to graduate from high school than their peers who are on target. For kids from systemically excluded communities, Samuels says the number is even higher: Such kids are 13 times less likely to graduate from high school.
“If a kid can read really well, they can fill out a job application, a college application, they can do all of the reading that’s necessary to get themselves ahead in any way they choose,” Lamb says. “They can dream all of these things. I feel keenly that loss of those students not being served in that way anymore.”
Samuels acknowledged that Reading Results will miss working with Abernethy. “We are so severely underfunded in our state around being able to ensure that all students have all the supports they need,” she says.
But she agrees with how PPS has gone about choosing the 30 schools with the most need. It’s a process that factors in equity, she says, and also considers which schools have the greatest number of students Reading Results can serve.
Parents at Abernethy say they don’t understand why the at-need students at their school should get less than their peers at other schools. More than 50 parents have signed a letter to PPS officials asking them to find options “to preserve this critical support for our students” and to better understand the district’s rationale.
The decision is particularly confusing to some parents because PPS continues to emphasize early literacy as one of its core values. “Reading is the foundational skill for academic success, and as we continue to work through all of the aftereffects of the pandemic, providing kids with every opportunity to read is very much needed,” says Leah Gilbert, whose daughter received Reading Results support at Abernethy.
Hutchinson, for her part, is worried student outcomes may decline and then the school may have to requalify for Reading Results services. “Are you just making another problem in the future for our school by not continuing the program in the way that it exists today?” she asks. She adds that while PPS has hinted Abernethy could be part of an early literacy pilot program, there has been little clarity on what that will look like. (PPS’s Soto says the district has identified programs to pilot, but has not yet gone through contracting.) After press deadlines, PPS officials told WW Abernethy will also be getting a part-time interventionist, equivalent to 0.5 FTE, for reading support next year.
Lamb shares the disappointment and won’t be continuing as a tutor with Reading Results. She says she’ll be finding other ways to support her direct community. This year, she says, Reading Results had to end all tutoring programs two weeks early because of rising costs and a revenue shortfall. After initially saying a “rushed” goodbye to all their students on May 8, Lamb says she and another member of the tutoring team regrouped over the weekend and decided to volunteer their tutoring services to the kids who needed the most help before summer.
The first day Lamb came back to tutoring, she says one of her students came running and dancing down the hallway, singing “Reading Results is back!” “It was so sweet, and she was so happy,” Lamb says. “But then I had to say, ‘Yes, we will be here for you this week and next week.’ And then there was nothing else to say.”