February 2023 Newsletter: Introducing our Literacy Liberators

Join me in congratulating this amazing cohort of Literacy Liberators who graduated from our Fellowship on February 16! They will join almost 190 tutors across 38 TK-2 Oakland Unified School District schools.

Take a moment to watch this 2- minute video, and you’ll hear from our Liberators who are committed to disrupting a status quo that keeps our children from achieving academic excellence.

When it comes to improving the academic outcomes for our babies, no one can do it alone. The old saying “it takes a village” hasn’t lost its meaning. Our partnership with Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) and FluentSeeds highlights the POWER of collective leadership. Together, we provide curriculum training, leadership development, and culture building, and then offer application support to help place our Liberators in the schools within OUSD that need tutors the most.

As I watched each of our Literacy Liberators get their diplomas and stipends and talk about their agency and power, I could not stop thinking of this quote I saw recently: “Legacy is not leaving something for people. It’s leaving something in people. Live & create your legacy daily!”

That idea of legacy is the foundation of our Parent Liberator Fellowships. I’m grateful to Terence Blanchard, an artist who recently became the first Black composer to have an opera performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, for putting that vision into words to live by.

As Black History Month comes to an end, I’m reminded of how the past impacts our present and, unless we break generational curses, history repeats itself. The Oakland REACH’s ultimate mission is to free ourselves from the cycle of being undereducated, underemployed, and underrepresented and then passing the burden down to the next generation.

That’s liberation.

Literacy Liberator Model and Fellowship

We are and must be solution builders. We know this because of our proximity to families — that’s what makes us different. Advocacy is necessary to implement, sustain, and scale but first and foremost we build solutions. That’s what’s needed.

The Liberator Model is a solution that upskills parents and caregivers to be paid tutors and at the same time, provides high-dosage tutoring in some of the lowest-performing schools in our district. The Liberator Model is unique because it integrates both academic aspirations and socio-economic needs:

Literacy Liberators’ four core tenets

Our Literacy Liberator Fellowship was featured in Dr. Kyla Johnson Trammell’s recent Superintendent Report, sharing how we are helping reach the district’s goal, set in the strategic plan, to hire 90 tutors and ensure strong readers by the third grade. This fellowship officially brings the district to this milestone — come June, there will be over 90 literacy tutors serving over 5,500 K-2 students in our schools that need them the most. We have hit this goal in year 2 of the district’s 3-year strategic plan. REACH is a co-chair for the plan’s “Read by 3rd grade” initiative. Collective leadership wins every time!

Next, we are building our model to focus on the performance and retention of this new talent pipeline. And we’re excited to partner with The Center on Reinventing Public Education, which will document lessons from our model for a national audience.

To learn more about how our Fellowship works, check out this video with FluentSeeds Program Director Emily Grunt.

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