Dear NHR Family,
The Coronavirus is impacting our lives in ways that we could never have imagined a few weeks ago. I hope that you and your families are managing well. Because of the current circumstances, we cannot deliver our regular program as we would like, but our mission “to share the joy and power of reading” remains and our 550+ students continue to be our priority.
As you know, all of 500+ students come to our program reading below grade level. They cannot afford to go weeks without literacy support, let alone months. They thrive at New Haven Reads thanks to the incredible support of our dedicated corps of volunteers and our highly structured and successful program.
It is critical that our students receive literacy support even though they are not in school. Our team is currently calling all of our families and talking to them about what they need and how we can help. We plan to set up online, one-on-one tutoring for our students in the very near future and we will be contacting our tutors to ask them to help us with that. Our talented team is working to tweak our program to make it successful online to ensure we maximize this time for our students. In this way, we will continue to support our students and their families as we adapt our learning model.
We look forward to the day when we open our doors and hear students and tutors laughing over a good book, see our book bank filled with field trip classes again, and smile with delight as our kindergartners are sounding out their first words.
As one of our tutors once told us, “New Haven Reads is our community at its best!” We look forward to bringing together our community online during this crisis and supporting our wonderful students and their families. In the meantime, we know that we can count on you, our treasured supporters, to be with us every step of this journey as we work towards that day!
With love and affection,
Kirsten Levinsohn
Executive Director
Kirsten@test.newhavenreads.org
