SCENES FROM NCE
supported by the expertise of the volunteers. Most students are reading independently by the end of their time with Reading Power. They leave the program with the capacity to increase their own reading skills independently, with regular practice. The intervention strategies implemented through the Reading Power program are modeled in part after a National Louis University program called Project Prevent. Hender had success supervising paraprofessionals using the reading interventions with first graders in Skokie, a Chicago suburb. After her superintendent reached out to applaud the dramatic success of her work, she was ready to do something a little out of the box. Hender decided she needed to take her work with paraprofessionals and build out a program utilizing volunteers. Armed with her two NLU graduate degrees and some help from another literacy advocate, she built Reading Power. “I didn’t know it was going to work, but it’s been wildly successful,” she said.
Reading Challenges Become Literary Successes By Nicholas A. Love
“Every time the children read, they get a little bit better at it.” This quote from Mary Jane Hender ’92, M.Ed. in Reading and ’05 Ed.D. in Reading and Language, perfectly encapsulates what keeps her motivated. Hender is the co-founder and board member of Reading Power, an early literacy intervention program in North Chicago and Zion, Illinois. The program provides one-to-one tutoring to approximately 200 students a year, with a focus on providing tutoring to first grade students five days a week for 35 minutes a day. The tutoring provides support, in the form of caring adults, to struggling students who need some extra help catching up to their peers. The students do all the reading themselves,
One notable success story involved a first grader in an unstable home who defied all odds and bloomed into a nationwide Scholastic essay contest winner several years later. After the “We help them to catch up. We give them the chance to be successful.”
-MARY JANE HENDER ’92 AND ’03
program’s first year of tutoring in Zion, teaching staff described a total transformation in many of the students who participated. Hender hopes more and more students will be taking home literary awards. Reading Power’s influence is growing. This year the program is adding tutoring for preschool and kindergarten students, and Hender is looking to launch a similar program in South Carolina. Hender believes in her program and its success, and with good reason. After 13 years and more than 2,000 children tutored, it’s understandable why she sees so much potential in young children to excel. She’s watched it happen over and over again. “They just need to have these literacy experiences early enough so they can achieve,” she noted. “If they are successful in the earlier years, they have a chance to be successful readers and great writers.”
Mary Jane Hender ’92 and ’03 is a 2008 Reach Award recipient.
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National Louis University VIEW | Fall 2016
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