Tutors give gift of literacy

OREM — On the second floor of the Provo City Library at Academy Square, volunteers are opening up a world with Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank and Helen Keller to adults who haven't had much exposure to them.

The adults cannot read beyond a seventh-grade level. They have not experienced beautiful works of poetry or even been able to fully understand an apartment rental contract.

But Project Read, a nonprofit with offices at the library, is reaching out to the estimated 21,000 adults in Utah County who cannot read well and tutors them to a ninth-grade level, when the students can participate in Provo School District's Center for High School Studies.

Throughout the last week, the Barnes and Noble bookstore on University Parkway in Orem has helped raise funds for Project Read. The fund-raiser culminated Saturday with storytelling performances, games and an Easter egg hunt at the bookstore.

It was the first fund-raiser at Barnes and Noble for Project Read, said Tisha Phillips, bookstore customer relations manager.

A second fund-raiser at Barnes and Noble is scheduled for September.

"We've had an OK response," Phillips said. "A lot more could be done."

Phillips said she hadn't tallied the amount of sales earmarked for Project Read by Saturday afternoon, but the goal was about $2,000.

The nonprofit will receive 10 percent of book sales of the first $2,000 in books sold to customers who indicated they wanted profits to go to Project Read.

If more than $2,000 books were sold for the cause, then Project Read could get 15 percent of profits, Phillips said.

Project Read's office manager Anthony Trujillo said most of the money will be used to purchase books for the students — books of an appropriate reading level, without being juvenile or demeaning to an adult student.

Students in Project Read include immigrants who speak English as a second language, adults who were unable to attend school as children because of work or family obligations, and adults who attended school as children but never learned to read beyond a seventh-grade level because of a learning disability.

Project Read also tutors reading in Spanish to Mexican nationals as part of a program through the Mexican Consulate to provide adults certificates for primary and secondary school, roughly equivalent to elementary and junior high in the United States.