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Reading Partners Twin Cities seeks volunteer reading tutors
Reading Partners Twin Cities is seeking 555 volunteers to serve 400 students this school year.
ST PAUL PARK, Minn. — New numbers out in the last week show many Minnesota students are struggling to make gains when it comes to reading scores. Now, as a new school year begins, Reading Partners Twin Cities is calling on community members to volunteer as reading tutors.
After clearing a background check, and before entering schools, volunteers attend a two-hour orientation to learn the foundational skills of literacy. Then, they will work one-on-one with students, staying with the same student the entire school year. Tutors are asked to give just one hour of their time per week.
This will be Thomas Noon’s eighth school year volunteering for Reading Partners Twin Cities, and he plans to return to St. Peter Claver, where he volunteered last year. Noon says he will work with one student twice a week in the mornings before his regular work day begins.
“It’s a great way to start the day,” Noon said. “It’s important for us to be those mentors or role models within the community.”
Like most volunteers, he doesn’t have an education degree or teaching license. Those aren’t required.
“Not at all,” Noon said with a laugh. “My background is in finance. I’m a financial analyst for Blue Cross Blue Shield.”
Reading Partners Twin Cities reports more than 85% of low-income students statewide are reading below grade level. And while the data released by the Minnesota Department of Education last week show reading rates at Anoka-Hennepin and South Washington County Public Schools are above the state average, Minneapolis and St. Paul Public Schools are falling below it.
Now, Reading Partners Twin Cities is seeking at least 555 volunteers to tutor K-5 students in the 2024-2025 school year.
“We’re really working to serve over 400 kids this year,” Executive Director Brooke Rivers said. “We think we need about 600 people in order to do that.”
Back in February, Reading Partners Twin Cities did a similar but smaller campaign to help kids as they neared the end of the school year. Rivers says they used and continue to use a tutoring model proven to improve reading proficiency for students who are reading at least six months below grade level.
“We were looking to try and recruit 50 more tutors at that time, and we had I think over 60 folks sign up to tutor with us in just a very short period of time,” she said. “Eighty-nine percent of those students that we served met their primary literacy growth goal, which is fantastic, and for our youngest readers, kindergarten through second-grade students, 94% of those students were meeting their end-of-year goals by the end of the year.”
Reading Partners Twin Cities is now in several community spaces and 10 local schools and just expanded to Faribault Public Schools. The St. Paul-based organization aims to become Reading Partners Minnesota in the future.
The organizations say many Asian Americans are planning to vote despite lack of candidate outreach.
ST PAUL, Minn. — Most people have been contacted in some way shape or form by a campaign in the last few weeks. And if the polls are right and the race for president is a dead heat, every vote will matter.
That’s why this is a head scratcher:
According to a September 2024 voter survey by Asian American Pacific Islander Data, 27% of Asian-American voters said they hadn’t been contacted by either political party trying to get their vote. Last spring, earlier in the voting season, it was even more – 42%.
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are the fastest growing racial or ethnic group nationwide.
Their voter participation levels are growing too, with 60% of eligible Asian-American voters turning out in 2020. And AAPI Data reports as many as 90% of Asian Americans they surveyed said they plan to vote this cycle.
“Candidates are not reaching out to Asian Americans, which is a huge mistake,” said ThaoMee Xiong, executive and networking director of the Coalition of Asian American Leaders.
She says even though there are more than 200,000 eligible Asian voters in Minnesota, the Asian vote is under-appreciated.
“Neither the Democratic or Republican parties have been reaching out in huge numbers,” Xiong said. “They’re sending general mailers to everyone but … they need it in their native language.”
That’s why CAAL is partnering with two more organizations to keep voter turnout high and reach anyone candidates or advocates missed.
Xor Xiong is from Asian American Organizing Project, which focuses on engaging metro-area teens and young adults.
“Many of our communities are still facing barriers to go to vote,” he said. “There’s been more times than I like to admit in terms of when I was having a conversation over the phones of voters being surprised that they can take time off to go and vote, or they can bring the kids to the polling locations, or they can even bring someone to translate for them.”
“In Ramsey County, because of the large Hmong American population there, the polls in Ramsey County are federally required to provide interpreters and translated materials,” ThaoMee added.
Their nonpartisan campaign, Get Out the Vote for Asian Minnesotans, aims to get people registered and well-informed.
“Throughout Covid, there was a lot of anti-hate around the AAPI community and we are still feeling the impact of that to this day,” said Amanda Xiong, a community organizer with a group known as CAPI USA. “Even if folks are afraid to go to the polls, due to that, we try our best to then educate them around absentee ballots, voting early.”
“And so yes, there is a huge increase in terms of voter turnout, but then why is it still 70% feel as though they don’t belong?”
In 2021, the FBI reported a 168% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes.
In Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center, the groups knocked on at least 700 doors in one session alone while keeping safety top of mind.
“We make sure that there’s a car following all the door knockers,” ThaoMee said. “We put everyone on text chain … and we are putting a lot of precautionary measures in place for the day of voting.”
After the election, the CAAL plans to conduct surveys and send the results to county election officials. They’ve done this before and say it led to policy changes this year at the legislature including measures to ensure people have easier access to interpreters.
Minnesota groups work to encourage Latino voters to get to the polls and dispel misinformation.
MINNESOTA, USA — While the secretary of state publishes polling information in the Spanish Language, experts say there are still challenges when it comes to activating Latino voters. Minnesota groups have been hard at work getting voting information out and challenging misinformation.
Communities Organizing Latine Power and Action (COPAL) says it is still working to inspire Latino voters to the polls days before the election.
Eva Peña is one of the volunteers who spent part of Wednesday at their headquarters on Lake Street, calling Latino voters and making sure questions are answered in either English or Spanish.
“I’ve been able to help people figure out if they’re registered or not to vote,” smiled Peña. “And that part has felt super fulfilling for me.”
About 6% of Minnesota’s population is Latino and COPAL’s organizing director Ryan Perez says language isn’t the only barrier. Fear is a hurdle, too.
“There’s some common myths that folks are still facing,” said Perez. “They think, is it unsafe for me to vote? If I vote, will that put my relative in jeopardy?”
Perez says a myth has spread on social media that if you exercise your right to vote as a citizen, it could put undocumented loved ones at risk of deportation.
The secretary of state’s office reaffirmed Wednesday that all eligible Minnesotans should vote without fear of repercussions.
“As much as we think social media seems deregulated and there’s a lot of false information for English speakers, it’s even more so for non-English speakers,” said Perez.
Annastacia Belladonna-Carrera is the Executive director of Common Cause Minnesota. Her organization runs an election protection program and has volunteers flagging misinformation on social media as part of its efforts.
“If I’m your cousin, or I’m the small business owner where you frequent with your family, and you see me reposting something, you’re gonna be more likely than not to believe that because it’s coming from me, right?” she pointed out.
Belladonna-Carrera says there’s an additional challenge in reaching voters with accurate information in rural areas as well.
“It’s that isolation,” Belladonna-Carrera said. “It’s not just geographic isolation, it’s linguistic isolation.”
But volunteers say it’s not just about showing up, but showing leaders that they need the Latino vote.
“They’ll be thinking about, well, how can I make the how can I make life better for our Latino community?” said Peña.
For more resources in Spanish on how to vote, go to the Secretary of State’s website.
In September 2021, the bodies of four friends were found in a cornfield in western Wisconsin.
MENOMONIE, Wis. — The man accused of helping his son hide the bodies of four people in a western Wisconsin cornfield has been found guilty Wednesday by a jury.
Darren L. Osborne was charged with four counts of hiding a corpse – party to a crime. His son, Antoine Suggs, was convicted of fatally shooting a group of friends in St. Paul.
According to the complaint filed in Ramsey County, on the morning of Sept. 12, 2021, Suggs told Osborne he “snapped and shot a couple of people” in a vehicle on Seventh Street in St. Paul. After Suggs told him what had occurred, Osborne followed Suggs to Wisconsin in a separate vehicle, leaving one of the vehicles with the bodies inside behind. Osborne and Suggs then returned to Minnesota.
The bodies of Nitosha Lee Flug-Presley, Loyace Foreman III, Matthew Isiah Pettus and Jasmine Christine Sturm were discovered inside an SUV left in a cornfield in rural Dunn County. Authorities say they all died from gunshot wounds.
Suggs was sentenced to more than 100 years behind bars for the killings.
In Dunn County court on Wednesday, a jury found Osborne guilty. The state had called Suggs to the stand but court records indicate he was not answering questions.
