ATHENS, Ga. — A local brewery is turning its passion for beer into a love for books.
Creature Comforts, now the official craft beer of UGA Athletics, started an initiative hoping to improve literacy in Athens-Clarke County.
The mission started when they asked the community where they should put their time and money to affect real change.
Through a community-based advisory council, they landed on literacy.
“There's a very unfortunate correlation between third graders who are not reading on level and high school dropout,” Matt Stevens said, Senior Director of Community Impact at Creature Comforts Brewing Company. “This community can either spend a few hundred thousand dollars here at this point or we as a community can spend millions of dollars 10 years from now feeding or maybe even jailing, taking care of these folks.”
The charitable arm of the brewing company, called Get Comfortable, partnered with Athens-based non-profit Books for Keeps to create a literacy mentor program.
They narrowed their mission to one laser-focused goal: increase reading proficiency from 20% to 60% in 2nd and 3rd graders by 2027.
“It’s a big ask. It’s a big move but based on all the people we have at the table, the experts, all the folks from Clarke County School District, it feels possible,” said Justin Bray, Executive Director of Books for Keeps.
Books for Keeps creates the curriculum and trains the mentors. Creature Comforts funds the project and offers staff as volunteers.
Each week during the school year, a mentor sits down with a student at their pilot school for 30 minutes to play literacy games like “sight word bingo” to help improve their reading.
“These are the COVID babies. These are the ones that were learning to read through a Zoom screen with masks,” Stevens said. “So, it is a high dosage, one-on-one push in literacy mentorship project.”
Third grade is a hinge point in a student’s educational journey. Reading well can launch them on a path full of opportunity, but students who struggle to read tend to fall farther and farther behind.
“It’s when they transition from learning to read to reading to learn. If they're not reading on grade level at that point, all of their subject matter is starting to advance in a way that they can't often keep up. That's where the gaps statistically start to grow,” Stevens said.
The mentorship program tackles that problem head-on.
“Making it fun and rewriting negative experiences they may or may not have had with reading or learning in school is sort of the key to moving that needle,” Bray said.
They’re in the second year of a pilot program at Howard B. Stroud Elementary School. Early results show it’s working better than they expected.
Stevens says they tapped a third-party research analyst to work with the school district and measure progress. The data found that students in the literacy mentor program are seeing 3.4 times the progress of unmatched students in two control schools.
“There were literally gasps and tears,” Stevens said. “That was one of my best days here.”
Clarke County Schools Superintendent Dr. Robbie Hooker admits the “initiative has far exceeded our expectations. Not only has student performance in reading improved significantly . . . but students truly look forward to their mentor meetings.”
There are currently 60 students in the mentor program. If they see the same results at the end of this school year, Stevens said the plan is to expand it to three schools and hopefully more in the future.