It's a Thursday afternoon and 8-year-old Saadiq Jones is bringing the drama.
It’s the week after spring break, and he and his mom, Tabia Jones, have arrived at the Children’s Center on UW-Milwaukee’s campus.
Jones has just finished a full day in second grade. And he’s now here to work for 90 minutes on his reading skills. He’ll be working with his master reading instructor, Elnore McKinley-Seward.
As expected, he’s taking a minute to get into the zone.
“Chapter three, what was the most exciting part?" McKinley-Seward asks him.
"Nothing, I didn’t like any of the book," he replies.
McKinley-Seward shoots back, "Every time we write about it you just have all this imagination about it and now you don’t like the mystery?"
Jones replies: "No."
Despite that initial obstinance, Jones later admits that he does like the book he’s reading, called "A to Z Mysteries: The Jaguar's Jewel."
Jones is one of 24 students receiving one-on-one instruction at the newly relaunched Stritch Family Literacy Center at UW-Milwaukee.
In its heyday, this center served 300 students across five campuses. One operated at Cardinal Stritch's campus and four others were located at K-12 school campuses across Milwaukee. The program operated for 80 years, and it was one of the first reading clinics in the U.S.
But in 2023, Cardinal Stritch closed due to declining enrollment and funding. The reading program closed along with it.
Students still feel the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic — it's showing up in their reading
Kristine Lize was a student at Cardinal Stritch when she first worked in the clinic there. Fast forward a few years and she’s the Director of the English Education Program at UW-Milwaukee.
She remembers sitting in a meeting in 2024 trying to think of ways to address the reading crisis in our community.
“I said ‘gosh if I had a bunch of money I would bring back the literacy center from Stritch.’ Having been a doctoral student there and having a great deal of respect for my professors and the work that was happening, I felt that that would be a great contribution to our community," she said while giving a tour of the center earlier this spring. "Many months later, here we are.”
The new center at UWM tapped into funds carried over from the center when it operated at Cardinal Stritch, and Lize says it also receives financial support from its board.
Molly Shiffler is a professor emerita who helps run the center. She explains that even six years after the start of the COVID pandemic, students are still showing signs of missed learning.
“Often when we assess a student, I can tell what years they were missed because of the pandemic by the core of reading skills they’re missing for that year," she says.
"We’re finding students where there are issues in comprehension, even vocabulary, that you can almost identify and say ‘did you miss kindergarten? Did you miss K-4?’ It’s almost diagnostic for us. It’s very evident for us which years they missed because of COVID," she adds.
Milwaukee's reading scores are falling, but efforts to close the gap are getting off the ground
Across the state, more than a third of the youngest readers scored in the bottom quartile on early literacy assessments last school year, according to the Department of Public Instruction. In Milwaukee, 73% of fourth graders are not reading at a basic level.
The amount of improvements in reading scores are also slipping: A national education scorecard released in May shows that the rise in reading scores year-over-year in Wisconsin has declined in the last four years.
Wisconsin now ranks 30th out of 35 states in growth in reading scores between 2022 and 2025.
Second grader Saadiq Jones attends a public school in Fox Point. For him, trouble with reading crept up last year.
“Last year Saadiq was recommended for tier three intervention, so that’s one-on-one support or two-on-one support," his mother, Tabia Jones explains. "He had transferred schools, and so I didn’t realize he was performing below his peers."
But her son is already showing progress with the one-on-one approach, which is layered on top of reading intervention at school. Jones says at a recent parent-teacher conference, she learned Saadiq had moved up a grade in his reading.
Lize, the center’s director, says that students will stay involved in the program until they’re able to “graduate.” That will likely take one or two semesters of instruction.
So far, she’s really happy with how the first semester is going. Next on the horizon is being able to serve more kids.
“We’re hoping to help our community have citizenship that is representative of critical thinkers. And this is the first step towards that," she says.
Editor's note: WUWM is a service of UW-Milwaukee.
Do you have a question about education or how schools work in our area? Submit it here to WUWM education reporter Katherine Kokal.
_
