It is high noon, and sophomore Laura Patterson is sitting in the sun on the Campus Center patio with a cash box and a large sign that keeps falling over in the wind. "Buy a button," she shouts to passersby. "Help a child read."
For the past decade, students like Patterson have been working with Tufts Literacy Corps (TLC) to do just that. The program, which began in 1997 as a part of the national "America Reads" program, has grown exponentially in its 10-year existence.
Its most recent initiative - a button sale to purchase books in Somerville and Medford classrooms - is one of many new programs TLC has introduced to help improve literacy and education in local schools.
"Our vision is quite broad and ambitious," said Cynthia Krug, the program's coordinator, in an e-mail. "We want all children in our host communities to succeed in school and become lifelong learners. In addition to helping children master the skills and knowledge they need to excel in their schoolwork, we run projects that will get them fired up about - anything really - that fosters literacy learning ... or math."
The program uses work-study grants to hire students to visit Medford and Somerville schools and tutor children there in reading, writing and literacy.
"We go to the schools, and we help them in as many ways as we can," Patterson said. "I love little kids. It's an opportunity to share what I've learned, because I know a lot of kids don't have the same opportunities that I had while growing up."
According to Krug, the program has expanded greatly since its inception, relying on a variety of grants to fund new projects.
"In 1997, we had only 16 reading tutors and me ... We now have three core tutoring programs - reading, writing and math - in which children work one-on-one with a TLC tutor; [we also have] after school homework help at a low income family development in Medford and several student created and run projects," she said. "The expansion is driven by both community needs and requests and student interests."
As it expands, TLC has taken on a wide variety of projects in addition to tutoring, which are tied together by their focus on individual learning and literacy. They include a program to teach students about the history of American slavery, a reading program in the Davis Square Starbucks and a poetry-writing workshop, among others.
"We're always adding new projects," said sophomore Caitlin Felsman, a member of TLC who coordinated the program's button sale. "We do 'story corps' on weekends, where we read at Starbucks, and we also have a new program called BookMatch, which is a book competition where kids in Medford have to get on teams and read a certain number of books, and we run it like a game show."
"It's sort of working on incorporating reading and writing into fun activities, and really expanding it," she added.
Members of the group said the work is both fun and rewarding. "I really like working with the kids - they're amazing," freshman and TLC member April Rosas said. "You get attached to each and every one of them, and you can really see the progress. At the beginning of the school year they had trouble reading, and now they've come so far."
Rosas is a TLC classroom assistant at a local school. There, she works with a teacher to help give more individualized attention to the students.
"They're at different [literacy] levels, so it's pretty hard," Rosas said. "It's especially difficult for the teacher, because she has to manage a classroom of 20 kids by herself."
According to Patterson, that problem is not uncommon in cities like Somerville and Medford, where school systems lack resources. "A lot of kids are being taught to tests, so that they can get to the next grade level," Patterson said. "They don't necessarily have to know how to read well to get to the next grade level - they just need to be able to answer a few basic questions ... A lot of kids are way behind grade level. ... And they're just being passed though these schools as if they know what they're doing."
Even outside of school, some students don't get the attention they need, Patterson said. Because many local residents have lower-income jobs, some parents struggle to spend enough time with their children.
"A lot of those kids don't necessarily have one-on-one time with their parents either, because their parents are working multiple jobs, or the come from single parent families, or things like that," Patterson said. "It's really helpful to take time - especially one-on-one time - with a kid, to help them in whichever way they need, and get to know them."
The TLC button sale, which is taking place this week, is one way TLC is looking to help. The sale will provide books to students for their homes and their classrooms to encourage them to do some reading on their own or with family.
"A lot of the kids we work with don't have books at home to read, so we get kids who watch TV to fill up all of their spare time," Felsman said. "I'm a writing tutor, and I grew up with books everywhere in my house, so to know that a kid isn't reading because they don't have the option to read is really sad."
TLC members created the buttons themselves. "We spent hours making tons of them," Rosas said. "For every button we sell, that money goes to buy a book for the kids."
Felsman said her work with TLC gives her a chance to do much-needed work for her local community.
"I joined because I feel like we have this great school with so many resources at Tufts, but we have very little interaction with the surrounding communities, which don't have the same kind of resources we do," she said. "As a student, I got in here and I know I have the skills to teach writing and reading and things like that. I wanted to give back to a community that I take a lot out of."
