When Catherine Payne first took over as Principal of 2500-student Farrington High School in Honolulu, only 44% of the students in the school qualified for free or reduced lunches. This meant that Farrington didn’t qualify for any Title I funds.  If every student who qualified would fill out the necessary paper work, Ms. Payne knew she would qualify for the funds. (She had come face-to-face with the perennial problem encountered by many secondary school administrators: frequently, older students will not sign up for free or reduced lunches due to fear of embarrassment.)  Ms. Payne wanted those funds to provide extra services to her students - including Read Right^®, a reading intervention program designed to eliminate struggling students’ reading problems.

Pizza Anyone?  The Problem: How to overcome the reluctance of students to fill out the paperwork necessary to qualify for free or reduced lunches? The Solution: A Pizza Party contest - a contest that everyone could win!  Here’s how it worked.  Any first period class that had 100% of students turn in the paperwork within a two-week period of time would earn a pizza party. Even students who would not qualify for free or reduced had to bring back the completed paperwork for their class to win.  A daily running total was kept on a computer spreadsheet in the office by class, and each morning each first period teacher would get a new report on which students in the class hadn’t yet turned in their paperwork.  The information was shared with the class.

The contest worked wonderfully.  The friendly peer pressure exerted on the “laggards” to get their paperwork in turned the trick. Principal Payne reports that one year she sponsored over 60 Pizza parties.  “The best investment I ever made,” she said.  And she convinced her Farrington alumni to chip in to cover the costs of the Pizza Parties.  Since the first contest they have used other incentives: one year they used theatre tickets. 

Seven years after sponsoring that first Pizza Party Contest, Ms. Payne reports that Farrington has 61% of its students qualifying for free and reduced lunches, and she is collecting over $1,300,000 each year in Title I funds.

One key program she was able to fund as a result of her increased Title I funding is Read Right. Each day seven tutors work with 150 students to help them improve their reading abilities. Since 2000 her Read Right tutoring staff has helped 1,196 students gain over 2,298 grades in reading.  There is a profound impact.  Teachers report student self-confidence has risen, their participation and success in other classes has improved markedly, discipline problems have decreased, and the dropout rate has decreased. English language learners (30% of the total) gain in their reading skills at virtually the same rate of progress as native English speakers - 9.6 hours of tutoring per grade advanced. All told, Pizza Parties have helped create a win-win situation for the school and for the students!

Learn More about Read Right:

Read Right is a small-group tutoring method that empowers certified teachers, and instructional assistants to help students improve reading and acquire English. “We have six or seven different major languages coming into our school,” said Sandy Ramiscal, Farrington High School’s Read Right Trainer.  By design, the method facilitates language acquisition as it promotes the higher-level literacy required to be successful in school and in life.

Read Right methodology was developed by former classroom reading specialist Dee Tadlock, Ph.D. It is grounded in Piaget’s understanding of how brains learn and emerging knowledge of how brains perform processes and construct declarative and procedural knowledge. Dr. Tadlock’s interactive constructivist view of reading and reading development is explained in detail in her book written for parents, Read Right! Coaching Your Child to Excellence in Reading, published in 2005 by McGraw-Hill and available at www.amazon.com.

A school information packet explaining theory, methodology and implementation can be obtained by contacting Tamie Brown at Read Right Systems.  Phone: (360) 427-9440 or Email: TamieB@readright.com.

Articles about Read Right implementations are available at www.readright.com.

Finally, for those that enjoy reading about theory and research, Dr. Tadlock’s monograph, Interactive Constructivism and Reading: The Nature of Neural Networks Challenges the Phonological Processing Hypothesis may be downloaded from the Read Right web site (www.readright.com)

Please feel free to pass this e-mail along to any of your staff seeking information on effective approaches to reading development.