Federal Workers Speak

Kathleen Spitzer Reading Partners, AmeriCorps

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In April, 2025, the Trump administration abruptly canceled AmeriCorps funding, eliminating 1,000 programs nationally and putting 32,000 people out of work. Among the many who lost work were volunteers assisting with disaster recovery and community building through the National Civilian Community Corps and Federal Emergency Management Agency Corps. As a result of a lawsuit brought by a coalition of states, the cut funding was restored in September, 2025, although full administrative staffing was not. The future of AmeriCorps remains uncertain. Reading Partners is one of the programs affected by the cuts. Founded in 1999 in California, Reading Partners pairs volunteer tutors with public school students one on one to help them improve their reading skills. Funded in part through AmeriCorps, Reading Partners has worked with more than 80,000 students nationwide and facilitated more than three million tutoring sessions. Kathleen Spitzer, a volunteer with the program in Seattle, told us about what led her to do this work and how the loss of the program in the Seattle public school system has been felt.

I had my own retail business, and after I sold it and retired, I was interested in volunteering in schools. I heard about Reading Partners through a program at my synagogue that provided information about volunteering in the school system. Reading has always been a big part of my life. I’ve done a lot of volunteering over the years, and helping children learn to read was something I had wanted to do for a long time.

I signed up initially during the pandemic, in 2020, to tutor online. I went into the schools shortly after in 2021 when we could be in person. I tutored elementary school students of various ages and went to public schools all over the greater Seattle area. I worked with kids who ranged from emerging readers to second and third graders who had some reading skills but needed extra help.

I’m not originally trained as a teacher, and the training that Reading Partners offered was very useful. It was structured and rigorous because we were working in the schools; the tutoring was part of the children’s school day. When I was at a school, there often would be up to five tutors, and the Reading Partners program offered tutoring several times a week. I needed to arrive ahead of each tutoring session to review the packet for that lesson. The packet contained a detailed agenda of steps to follow to hopefully achieve that lesson's goal. It was an immersive training in teaching children how to read with letter recognition, word pronunciation, and then comprehension of words and paragraphs that could help a child understand the overall theme of the book. The curriculum was scientifically based and specific. I had to prepare each day’s agenda carefully, and I had to do certain things in a certain order, following the detailed instructional packets. There is a science to teaching reading!

At the end of each tutoring session, I had to evaluate how the student did on a list of questions. Some were behavioral, such as whether they were motivated. Other questions were related to the specific content of the book and the student’s reading level—did they understand what they had read. The program kept a detailed record of how each child was doing, and all the children were tested at the start and end of each year to track their progress.

Looking back, I can see that my first year of tutoring was a bit of a scramble. Luckily, that was the year I worked with a very young student so it didn’t matter as much that I was still learning my way through the more advanced materials. During my time with Reading Partners, I worked with a big diversity of personalities and ages, including students for whom English was a second language. The children I worked with were not necessarily outgoing or enthusiastic, but they were wonderful. They also showed up consistently. If we got through a certain number of steps in a lesson, we could play a game at the end or read a book just for fun. It was really heartwarming.

I made a year-long commitment each year that I tutored with Reading Partners. I would meet with students either once or twice a week, depending on my schedule. Each school had a designated hour that students would be pulled out of class and put in our tutoring class. Sometimes I saw the same student twice a week, and sometimes I saw two different students in a week. The program was very organized, and they found substitutes when I was unavailable. One year, I substituted for other tutors and went to at least six different schools. Some of them were Seattle Public Schools, including in West Seattle, and some were further south. It was very interesting to see the program operating in such a wide range of schools.

This year I have not done any tutoring. The Reading Partners funding in Seattle was canceled, and I couldn't find a similar program where I could be equally helpful. This is such a big loss. Reading Partners was very well run. Each school had its own coordinator, and they did their jobs carefully and well, keeping track of where and when we needed to come in. I gave it my all, with the time I had available.

I have a lot of memories of the children I worked with. I remember how some of them would get excited when I read a book to them. There was one little boy I was teaching to use a dictionary. I went over how you find a word, how you start with the first letter and then go to the second letter. He was keen on learning how to use the dictionary. Another student loved playing games that required physically putting things in place. Although reading wasn’t easy for him, he was very good at making spatial arrangements, which uses a different area of the brain. I remember thinking, “Wow, I couldn't do what he just did.”  

The last time I volunteered was at the end of the second semester in 2025. There was talk that Reading Partners might be cut and there was concern, but we still had hope that something would fall into place. But as the end of the school year neared, I was told that that would be the end of the program. The staff who coordinated the program no longer had the funding to run it, and the schools were no longer given AmeriCorps grants.

It was such a travesty. We're seeing coverage now about how reading abilities are plummeting. I wish I could get back into the schools and continue helping. There are still some after-school tutoring programs available, but I could not find one that fit my schedule, so I am no longer tutoring. It has been really disappointing and sad.

Tutoring was challenging because each child had specific personality traits and needs. I worked with one young boy who was a twin. English was his second language. His twin was being tutored by someone else at the same time. Every now and then, they would talk to each other in Spanish, and we'd have to say: “We’re learning English now.” He was a very nice fellow, but he was so far behind. I thought, “Where is he going to go? How is he going to progress? What will happen when he no longer gets this tutoring?” Because he clearly needed it.

It's just such a shame that I can't be in the schools doing this work again. At the end of each semester when the students took the reading test, the coordinator would tell me that the children I worked with had definitely improved. Even if I couldn't see it immediately in an individual session, they could see the improvement through the testing.

Reading Partners is an excellent program. They offered superior training, they were highly organized, and they followed up. It was a wonderful experience. I hope a future administration will give it full funding again, and I hope Reading Partners can come back to our school system in some form. There are so many people who would be doing this type of volunteering if the opportunity were available, and there are children who definitely need the tutoring.

This interview was conducted by Judith Hertog.  

Judith Hertog is an essayist, journalist, and teacher who is currently finishing an essay collection on identity, place, and how not to lose hope. She grew up in Amsterdam, moved to Israel as a teenager, and now lives in Vermont. Her work can be found at www.judithhertog.com.