Porter Reads: Early-Literacy Tutoring in Small Rural Classrooms

The question

Small rural elementary schools have the same reading problem as large ones and fewer ways to address it. A school with one kindergarten class and one reading specialist shared with another building cannot easily give 15 struggling readers 30 minutes of small-group practice every day. When the Porter Falls Area School District and the Cedar Bluff School District compared fall reading screenings in 2024, about a third of their kindergarten through second-grade students in the smallest buildings were below benchmark.

Dr. Kendra Reinholt, associate professor of teacher education, proposed a trade: the districts give Porter education majors real classroom hours with young readers, and Porter gives the schools trained tutors three mornings a week. Porter Reads is the result, and the research question is whether it works well enough to keep.

The approach

The model is simple on purpose:

• Children flagged by the districts’ own fall screening are invited, with parent permission, into groups of two or three.
• Porter tutors lead 30-minute sessions three mornings a week, following a structured sequence of phonics, decoding and reading of short decodable books, with a classroom teacher in the room.
• Tutors are trained over two Saturdays before they start, then observed and coached every other week by Reinholt and two retired reading specialists.
• Progress is measured with the districts’ existing fall, winter and spring screenings, so schools add no new testing.

Results are compared with the same schools’ previous cohort and reviewed under the university’s Institutional Review Board, which covers working with minors. The project is housed in the Institute for Teaching & Learning Research.

Students on the team

Forty-two Porter students tutored in 2025–26, most of them elementary education majors completing field hours for EDUC 3100 Literacy Across the Curriculum. Four paid research assistants keep the project running:

• Emma Gunderud, senior, elementary education — tutor coordinator and scheduler for all six schools.
• Isaiah Tollefson, junior, special education — builds the decodable-book kits and tracks which books each group has read.
• Maya Chee, junior, psychology — data entry and analysis of the screening results.
• Brooke Hanrahan, sophomore, elementary education — parent communication and permission forms.

Tutors drive or carpool to schools up to 25 minutes from campus; the project pays mileage, which turned out to matter more for recruiting than anyone expected. Each tutor works with the same two or three children all semester, so schedules are built around the tutors’ class timetables in August and protected for the rest of the term. Tutors keep a short log after every session — which sounds and words were solid, which were not — and the classroom teacher reads it the same day. Teachers say the logs are the part of the program they would keep even if everything else went away.

What they found so far

After the first full school year, with 186 children across six schools:

• 58 percent of tutored children reached the spring benchmark, compared with 37 percent of similarly flagged children in the same schools the year before.
• Gains were largest in kindergarten and smallest in second grade, where children who were still behind often needed more than three sessions a week.
• Attendance was the biggest practical obstacle: sessions scheduled before 8:30 a.m. lost children whose buses arrived late, so all sessions moved later in the morning in January.
• Every school was short of decodable books at the right level. The project now lends rotating kits assembled with help from the Porter Falls Public Library.

“Three mornings a week is not magic. It is just enough practice, done consistently, by someone who knows exactly which sound a child is stuck on. Our students learn that faster here than in any methods course.”

— Dr. Kendra Reinholt, associate professor of teacher education

What’s next and who’s involved

This year Porter Reads adds a fourth weekly session for second graders furthest behind, a video-tutoring trial for the two most distant schools, and a four-week summer program at the Porter Falls Public Library to slow the usual summer slide. Several tutors are continuing into EDUC 4100 Methods and Clinical Practice placements in the same buildings.

Partners: the Porter Falls Area School District, the Cedar Bluff School District and the Porter Falls Public Library. Funding is a three-year, $210,000 grant from the Porter Valley Community Foundation. Districts also host Porter students through the existing schools partnership.