Six in Ten Collier Third Graders Read at Grade Level. In Immokalee, One Program Exists to Move the Other Four
The Immokalee Readers program does exactly one thing - reading - in the after-school hours, with the school district and three Collier nonprofits pulling in the same direction.
Immokalee - Nationally, only three in ten fourth graders read proficiently, a share that has been falling since 2019. Collier County does better than that - six in ten of its third graders meet grade level - but as Noemi Y. Perez, president and CEO of The Immokalee Foundation, wrote in a Nov. 1 account of the work, the question is what the other four in ten represents, and in Immokalee the gap often starts earlier and runs deeper.
The foundation's answer is a program built to do one thing and do it well: Immokalee Readers, devoted entirely to reading. It operates as part of the Naples Children Foundation's Out-of-School Time Initiative, in partnership with Collier County Public Schools and the after-school programs of the Guadalupe Center, the Redlands Christian Migrant Association and the Boys & Girls Club of Collier County.
The model puts the reading work where the hours are - after school, in the programs Immokalee children already attend - rather than asking families to find another building, another enrollment and another ride. The foundation describes reading as the foundation skill on which its wider work rests.
That wider work has run for almost 35 years: education, career readiness and workforce development for Immokalee students from kindergarten through postsecondary education. The literacy push is the front end of that pipeline - because a child who leaves third grade reading at grade level is the student the rest of the pipeline was built for.
