|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In a typical third-grade classroom in the Ravenswood City School District, just one in every eight students is able to read proficiently for their grade level.
Ravenswood Classroom Partners is working to change that. The nonprofit, which is one of the recipients of Embarcadero Media Foundation’s 2025 Holiday Fund program, trains dozens of community volunteers to tutor Ravenswood students in reading and math.
Angie Holman has been Executive Director of RCP for more than six years and is one of only two paid employees at the nonprofit.
“We try to reach kids in the youngest grade, because the district’s big goal is to get as many students as they can reading proficiently by third grade,” Holman said. “We also do some math support, less so because the district’s primary academic goal focuses on literacy.”
The more than 140 volunteers take up shifts once a week, some from as far away as Woodside, Portola Valley and even San Francisco, for a designated hour of “intervention time” during the school day. Holman explained that students are grouped by grade level and academic need, and volunteers work with small groups at a time. Each school in the district has a designated interventionist teacher who provides curriculum, guides the sessions and adjusts the groups as students advance.
“There’s quite a bit of training needed to make sure our volunteers are doing the absolute best they can to meet students’ needs,” Holman said. “Our relationship with the district is paramount. It’s so important, and we’re lucky … They are wonderful partners for us.”
For the youngest students who are four or five years old, the focus is mainly on letter-sound association, Holman said. The oldest students that receive help from RCP are sixth graders who work on fluency and more advanced reading. Some of the sixth graders form book clubs, Holman said, and discuss titles such as Fantastic Mr. Fox and Esperanza Rising.
With the 2025 grant funding, Holman said RCP focused on expanding its programming and volunteer base.
“Every time we add a new curriculum, it requires more training, more reading materials and books and curriculum stuff,” she said. “The funding really helped us with expanding our reach.”
RCP wasn’t always as intensive academically. It used to primarily function as a reading program, where volunteers would join students one-on-one and read books together at the student’s reading level. Holman described the program as “really sweet,” but it did not make the strides in proficiency that they hoped for.
Under Holman’s leadership, RCP changed its strategy in the past few years to improve reading and math proficiency for students — to great results. Holman said the district’s goal is to have at least 30% of third graders reading at or above grade level. While only 12% meet that threshold currently, test scores have been trending upward in recent years.
RCP and the school district are also contending with a potential huge influx of students for the next academic year. That’s due to the closure of The Primary School in East Palo Alto, which was founded by Priscilla Chan with support from her husband Mark Zuckerberg. Ravenswood anticipates as many as 350 additional students will need to transfer to the district — a 25% increase in enrollment.
Not only will the district need to expand teaching and classroom capacity, but so will RCP need to increase its volunteer base to meet demand.
But Holman is encouraged by the progress the nonprofit has already made in the last three years by transitioning to a more curriculum-heavy tutoring program.
“It’s just another dose of the curriculum students need to become fluent readers,” Holman said. “The students in the district are amazing, and they’re eager to learn, but many of them come from home environments that are difficult to navigate.”
Woman arrested at Meta headquarters after demanding to speak with ZuckerbergJanuary 7, 2026 11:58 am
Startup founder jailed in ‘wild scene’ at winery allowed to exercise $1M in stock optionsJanuary 6, 2026 10:53 am
Dr. Thomas J. Fogarty, inventor of the balloon catheter, dies at 91 in Portola ValleyJanuary 7, 2026 10:25 am