Bernie Flynn, CEO, Mercer Street Friends: Helping Young Students Read at Grade Level
The Big Idea:
● To tackle the unprecedented reading achievement crisis caused by the pandemic, Bernie Flynn, a volunteer who leads the community nonprofit Mercer Street Friends, launched a reading enrichment program at Gregory Elementary in Trenton.
● Through the program, Mercer Street Friends sends dedicated reading intervention specialists to meet with small groups of Gregory Elementary students four times per week for 30 minutes. The program started with virtual intervention and evolved into classroom lessons.
Background:
● The pandemic led to dramatic drops in academic achievement across the country, including reading test scores.
● More than 50% of the students at Gregory were reading below grade level at the start of the reading intervention program in 2021. Through Gregory Elementary’s Reading Enrichment Program, reading specialists from Mercer Street Friends work with students to help identify weaknesses with phonics (sounds) and reading comprehension, then create strategies to help students improve.
● Under Bernie’s leadership, Mercer Street Friends launched its Community Schools Reading Intervention program in two other Trenton-based community schools during the pandemic to help students as they learned to read: Luis Muñoz-Rivera Elementary School and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School.
Fun Fact:
In 2023, more than 60 students at Gregory Elementary earned awards for growth and achievement in reading – a huge success for the reading intervention program!
Their Take:
“It is so critical for our children to be able to learn to read well, so that after that they can read to learn. Reading is a fundamental skill, and it is critical in our view to provide this kind of support early in a student’s experience.”
