Lizzy Donker
Executive Editor
A reading bootcamp in its fourth year at Monteagle Elementary is inspiring Sewanee students volunteering to help, just as it has improved reading skills for Monteagle Elementary’s at-risk fourth graders.
This year’s bootcamp ran from February 2 through March 1, through a partnership between the Monteagle Sewanee Rotary Club and the Monteagle Elementary School. The program was started in 2022 in an effort to help students who were reading below basic proficiency and were at risk of not advancing to the next grade after Tennessee passed its third-grade retention law.
The Tennessee law, T.C.A. 49-6-3115, passed in 2021 mandates that third-grade students cannot be promoted to the next grade level if they are not found proficient in reading.
The reading fluency boot camp is an outgrowth of a Sewanee Rotary Club fundraiser to help the school buy needed supplies during COVID.
After the Tennessee retention law was passed, the Rotary Club members who had helped with the fundraiser offered to recruit volunteers and create the reading boot camp. Kathy Henslee, a Rotarian who helped start the program, then suggested that Sewanee students get involved as an outreach project.
As each session of the boot camp has grown, this year’s turnout was the largest, with approximately 25 university student volunteers and additional volunteers from the Rotary Club and the Sewanee community. Those involved in the program also work closely with the school’s reading interventionist, Kim Partain, and the Monteagle Elementary principal, Veronica Rogers-Horton.
Each winter, the boot camp runs three days a week to prepare students for their state reading tests. Local community members come at least two days a week, and University students come on Fridays.
Martha Krenson, a member of the Monteagle Sewanee Rotary Club who coordinates volunteers for the program, shared more with The Purple on how the program went this year.
“We would spend about 30 minutes with the children. It’s fast, but each volunteer would work usually with two children and would read a passage to them,” Krenson said. “And then they get two opportunities to read it to the volunteer, and they’re scored on how many words they can read during a timed reading. The kids love it. They get competitive and have a graph that they get to fill out showing how many words they got.”
On the last day of the reading boot camp, students receive a certificate marking their successful completion of the boot camp. This year, the Sewanee Greek organizations pooled their resources to purchase the book “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” by Dr. Seuss. Each University volunteer wrote notes of encouragement and signed the books for each Monteagle student.
“These kids were over the moon excited about getting those books,” Krenson said. “They love the students coming to read their book. They were just thrilled to get that book and to get their notes from the students and it was really heartwarming that they were sad that boot camp was ending because that just lets you know that they liked it.”
Both Henslee and Krenson spoke highly of the Sewanee Greek students and volunteers who participated in the boot camp.
“They were hugely loyal. They showed up on time, ready to go every time. Most of the time they were all on the floor. Everybody was laying around on the floor reading and the kids just loved it,” said Krenson. “Those students spend a good amount of time aside from the reading just talking with them, which we really tried to encourage this year to try to develop relationships with them. I heard one little girl on that last day asking the reading intervention specialist if she could send emails to the students she was reading with because she just wasn’t ready to say goodbye, so they really did connect with them.”
Hensley added that the program is one that Rotary hopes to continue with the school, “as long as they have a need.” “It’s just been a beautiful program and it’s gone very smoothly and I honestly could not be more proud of the students and they’ve made such an impact on the elementary school students.”
Overall, Krenson said that although the school does not have the pretesting and post-testing information from the boot camp yet, this year’s reading boot camp has been very successful.
“Some of the children come into this boot camp saying they don’t like to read, and that’s usually because they are not feeling successful at it, and we have seen that change by the end of these camps,” said Krenson.
She ended by sharing one of her favorite quotes about literacy in relation to the boot camp: “By the fourth-grade children are no longer learning to read but from now on are reading to learn….reading is the foundation for future learning for these kids, so this is a really critical point in their education for them to make that transition.”
Krenson said that the Greek organizations involved in the program have also said they want to continue some sort of partnership with Monteagle Elementary beyond the boot camp because they’ve been inspired to do more. “They weren’t ready for it to be over either.”
Hensley said she’s not surprised at the desire among Sewanee students to keep volunteering. One student even shared with Hensley that “she has done it all four sessions and it’s her favorite service project she does at Sewanee. She just really connected well with students.”
Wishing the students were named. Well done students.