Our Beginnings: In Sept. of 2001, Special Education teacher Christina Clark established a volunteer tutor program at Valley View elementary school in Pleasanton, CA. Known as the PUSD Barton Reading Program, this intervention model matched carefully identified at risk students to well-trained and supported volunteer tutors, who generously provided three hours per week of one-on-one tutoring in the Barton System of Reading and Spelling.
Typically students who are behind, don’t catch up, but ten years of standardized reading data (Gray Oral Reading Test-4) demonstrated unprecendented success! Elementary students in our program DID catch up, gaining an average of 34 percentile points after only five months of tutoring! Middle school and high school students improved an average of two grade levels in five months!
Over the years, the program expanded from one to seven schools, and by the spring of 2012, it was successfully serving over 150 students grades 1-12.
Unfortunately in the Spring of 2012, during a time of budget woes and district-wide reorganization, the future of the program was jeopardized. In the Fall of 2012 the program was modified in such a way as to serve only a small fraction of the many students it had once helped.
In the Spring of 2013, the four facilitators of the school program, now eliminated, came together to create access to this very effective instruction via a private business model. Foundations Tutoring was born.