Better Basics works with Alabama’s schools to ensure children can succeed

Published On: 11.16.15 |

By: Nick Patterson

Better Basics works with Alabama’s schools to ensure children can succeed

Community garden Better Basics featured

Above: After school programs like the community garden these kids have been working in are also part of the Better Basics service.

If you can read this sentence, be thankful. Significant portions of the population, many of whom live in poverty, could improve their lives if they simply possessed the ability to read. That is what drives the mission of Birmingham-based Better Basics.

Specifically, Better Basics focuses on helping schools teach their students how to read and, just as importantly, how to love reading, which opens up doors of education and future prospects on into adulthood.

Not surprisingly, the folks behind Better Basics, a nonprofit United Way agency that began in 1993, are a committed group, starting with its admittedly hands-on Executive Director Karen Kapp.

Better Basics- Empowering Children, Reducing Illiteracy, and Improving the Community from Better Basics on Vimeo.

Better Basics Executive Director Karen Kapp awards Jailynn Perkins for outstanding reading accomplishments at the group’s annual award dinner.

The mission of Better Basics involves “complementing what the schools are doing. We’re providing extra literacy resources,” Kapp says. The goal is to “ensure that our children — all of our children — are receiving the type of education with their literacy resources that they need, that aren’t always available to particularly our low-income children.”

Kapp and the staff and volunteers of Better Basics trace their commitment all the way back to the group’s founder.

“Better Basics was the vision of Mr. John Glasser, who was a retired attorney here in Birmingham, and in his retirement, he saw the close correlation between poverty and illiteracy and wanted to do something about it,” Kapp says.

“So he began Better Basics with himself and another employee and a handful of volunteers, and they started a little two-room program at Barrett Elementary School in Birmingham City Schools,” she says. “And from those humble beginnings we now have nine different programs that cover the school day, after school and summer, and we reach about 25,000 students every year in Jefferson County, Shelby County, Talladega County, Clay County, Hale County and a lot of the city school systems in Jefferson County such as Birmingham City, Fairfield, Midfield.”

Better Basics supplies “literacy support” to the schools and their students, which includes not only visiting schools to add supplemental reading instruction, but also making sure that kids have books at home, a critical component if they’re going to make reading a lifelong habit.

“We have programs that provide tutoring for children who are struggling in reading. We have a certified teacher program as well as a volunteer program,” Kapp says. “We also have programs that provide a lot of literature to children because we know children need to practice reading, and studies show that children – in low-income areas – do not have a lot of books in their home so they don’t have the opportunity to practice reading. So we infuse literature into children’s homes.”

Kapp says that Better Basics also provides “enrichment experiences for the children – opportunities to be engaged with all kinds of content from math and science to health and fitness and character development and of course the arts and sciences.” The program works to expose children to language “so they will have a robust vocabulary, and thus, they can comprehend more of what they have read,” she says.

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is one of several programs Better Basics offers. This program alone provided more than 30,000 books to pre-school age children last year.

One of Better Basics’ newest programs is the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. Implemented in January 2014, the program provides a new book to children every single month from birth to age 5 in Jefferson County.

Better Basics keeps building on past successful programs. “We’ve had a traditional summer learning program,” Kapp says, but the agency saw a need to do something more in the face of a significant challenge – summer learning loss – kids forgetting between school years what they learned in the previous one.

“The summer learning loss is really prevalent among our low-income children,” Kapp says. “Over the course of the last five years, our community leaders have been very interested in curtailing that summer learning loss, so we have provided a comprehensive summer learning program.”

Better Basics also started a pilot program this past summer at two YMCAs. It’s not as extensive as the summer learning program, but 30-A-Day is aimed at having a meaningful impact on a child’s reading life with a small amount of time each day of summer vacation. The program “is not as extensive as our summer learning program but it still exposes children to reading opportunities every single day during the summer so that they will not experience that summer learning loss,” Kapp says. The program is called 30-A-Day, she says, “because the program can be implemented in 30 minutes a day.”

The success of Better Basics depends on a cooperative relationship between the agency and the schools. “We work very collaboratively with school personnel, and I can’t emphasize that enough. That is the key to success,” Kapp says. “You have to have your school personnel and your Better Basics personnel working together to ensure the needs of a child are met.”

A good example of that is the Better Basics reading intervention program. “We have a certified teacher component, and our certified teachers go in three days a week. They work with small groups of children – one teacher to three students. And it’s a very intentional program,” Kapp says. “It’s aligned with our Alabama course of study; it’s aligned with best practices, aligned with what the schools are doing on a day to day basis, because we don’t want to layer programs on our children.

The volunteers at Better Basics provide more than 7,000 hours of literacy assistance to help students in the community.

“We want everything to complement. So we work in collaboration to identify, first of all, the students who need our services and who will benefit the most from them. And then we work with the school personnel on logistics as far as when those children are with a Better Basics teacher versus when they’re with their classroom teacher, or when a child’s with a Better Basics volunteer.”

Better Basics strives to be good stewards of the funding it receives, providing high quality and effective programs, she says. “We do have the highest rating on Charity Navigator, which is a four-star rating. We also have the highest rating on GuideStar,” a website that calls itself “the world’s largest source of information on nonprofit organizations.”

“We are committed to transparency, fiscal responsibility, as well as excellent quality of program delivery,” Kapp says.

Program delivery requires close contact with kids, and Kapp makes sure she has the opportunity to share in that aspect of Better Basics’ mission. “I have made it a point to be in the schools, be with the children as much as I possibly can,” she says. “I usually take a classroom every year where I will go and visit the children, read to them, give them books, every single week. I’m also very involved in our afterschool program.”

That program includes everything from academics to healthy snacks and physical fitness. “The boys and girls, always, when I walk in, ‘Hey, Mrs. Kapp!’ They know who I am. I visit as often as possible. I think it’s important, not only for the boys and girls but for our staff to see that the leadership of Better Basics supports everything that we do. Plus, it keeps me close to our vision,” she says.

That vision, which she says she emphasizes in every meeting with Better Basics staff, has to do with service. “I always leave that staff meeting saying … ‘Why are we doing this work? We’re doing it for the children.’”

For more information, go to Better Basics.