Last week, we celebrated the momentous occasion of opening the ColoREADo Literacy Clinic. This clinic is the result of years of hard work by so many people, chiefly my mother, Shari Most, and the creator and founder of EBLI, Nora Chahbazi. As we cut the ribbon and welcomed students, educators, and community members into our learning space for the first time, the air was abuzz with excitement, joy, and above all, hope and anticipation: the hope that the students in our community will have access to the instruction they deserve and the anticipation of educators excited to get their hands on the instructional resources and training they have been craving.
This event was a call to action for everyone in our community to advocate for what the children of our city, state, and country need to be successful students, humans, and citizens.
Amidst book giveaways, library card registrations, face painting, crafts, and food, families connected with one another and shared their children’s struggles and successes with one another. Teachers from across the state met each other, asked questions, and built connections. Educators and parents had the chance to meet Nora and share how her work has touched their lives and the lives of their students.
And we are just getting started.
We hope you will visit us, share our work, and consider donating to support affordable access to tutoring for our students as well as provide scholarships to local educators.
You can view my opening remarks here, or read the full transcript below:
“For the first time since becoming a teacher, I am not returning to the classroom. For the first time, I also know with certainty that this year I will have more of an impact on students and will reach more children than I ever have before.
The classroom has been the space I have spent the majority of my life, a space I never thought I would leave so soon. But as the ColoREADo Literacy clinic opens its doors to students and teachers, I know that leaving the schools is the best way for me to make a difference for the students and teachers who are being left behind.
At the ColoREADo Literacy Clinic, a unique educator center in Denver, Colorado, my mother Shari Most and I get to share the gift of linguistic phonics and of Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction (EBLI), with more children and educators than ever before. The ColoREADo Literacy Clinic is destined to become a cornerstone of the fight against illiteracy and sub-literacy in Colorado by providing teachers with scholarship and mentorship opportunities. We will provide tutoring for students of all ages and backgrounds. Our Pay It Forward Model ensures that the ability to pay will never determine student success. We plan for ColoREADo to become the hub that educates teachers, administrators, families and community members on what the science of learning and reading tell us about how to best teach children to read. We will bring together like-minded stake-holders who believe that our children deserve better, and that there is not a second to delay in shifting our instruction in order to give students what they deserve.
Since ColoREADo’s founding, our supporters have helped us grow more rapidly than I believed possible. ColoREADo has gone from a small pilot to a fully realized, brick and mortar hearth of learning, offering multiple tracks towards earning certification from EBLI while simultaneously supporting local readers. ColoREADo continues to iterate, refine, and tweak our models of delivery to best suit our community’s overtaxed and undersupported teachers. Having walked many miles in their shoes, we intimately know the emotional impact of returning to a job daily where you are unable to meet your goal of teaching your beloved students to read. We know the pipeline to burnout perpetuated by teacher preparation programs when they fail to arm pre-service educators with the practical instruction they need to teach reading successfully. We know the frustration and anger of following protocols handed down from schools, districts or states about how to approach instruction when you see every day that the methodology you are provided with does not work for the kids you care about. We understand the fear of losing one’s job for daring to turn away from curriculum or materials that are ineffective. In this minefield, we bring teachers together to learn more, try more, and do better together. We give them the tools they need, the community, and the confidence to speak their mind and share their valuable classroom experiences. We support them when they raise a hand and question the status quo. And above all, we band together to do whatever it takes to get every child in our community reading proficiently.
In schools and on social media, we are constantly inundated with conflicting information; from “the reading wars” to “the phonics wars,” from influencers to district administrators, state officials and everyone in between. Once we drown out all this noise, we are left with the pressure of the time lost with our children now, children waiting in our classrooms today who are missing out on the chance to learn while adults debate the best ways to teach. For those who feel the same, finding our way to one another is a relief and reward. ColoREADo is building a community that will never put real students and their life’s trajectories on the back burner over an ideological debate. For those of us who believe in research and science and want to leverage it to see students make gains and develop confidence, I hope you will join us in carrying the torch in your community, that you will visit our clinic and learn how to get involved. That you will help us reach students who have received a message that they are unteachable. We can’t wait to show you how to use the methodology of linguistic phonics and EBLI to show children that everyone can become a reader, that all are smart and capable of learning, and that the book is not prewritten for them.”