Our Background
After a community needs assessment focusing on the immigrant Hispanic community of Redwood City, we developed this project to address the most critical needs—literacy and acculturation. The project began in November 2003, with two tutors and ten students meeting in the reading lab at MIT during school hours.
In March 2004, we expanded the program to include all twenty-eight students enrolled in MIT’s Structured English Immersion Program (SEI), and we added two additional tutors. The students were each tutored for one hour each week.
In fall 2004, we started with thirty-six students, including twenty-two students in the SEI program and fourteen students who are low readers from the general school population.
By the end of the academic year in June 2005, the students had all shown remarkable improvement in their reading skills as revealed in tests performed by the school. In the near future, we anticipate we will continue to expand the program both in number of students and tutors.