The Sunrise Rotary Club of Mobile devoted its March 4, 2009, meeting to a subject that rarely makes headlines and quietly shapes nearly everything else: whether the adults in a community can read. For a club that gathers in the early morning over coffee, the program was an unusually sober one — a discussion of the invisible population of adults who get through each day masking a difficulty most people assume belongs only to childhood.
The speaker was Lydia Gaudet, volunteer coordinator for Goodwill Easter Seals, where she managed an adult literacy program serving the Mobile area. Her work was, in the main, a matter of recruiting and training tutors for neighbors who do not read well and who have decided, often after years of getting by, to do something about it. Goodwill Easter Seals, formed from the merger of two service organizations with long histories in the region, works with populations whose needs are easy to overlook, and adult literacy sits near the top of that list precisely because the people it affects work so hard to keep it hidden.
Starting below a third-grade level
The figure Gaudet’s program worked with was sobering. Most of her students began reading below a third-grade level — which is to say, below the point at which a person can reliably read a prescription label, a lease, a job application or a note sent home from a child’s school. An adult functioning below that threshold navigates a world of memorized shapes, trusted helpers and careful concealment: the menu items they always order, the forms they ask a spouse or a coworker to handle, the meetings they avoid because paper will be involved.
The figure she was able to report alongside it was the reason the program existed. Over the previous year, her students on average doubled their skill level. That is a striking return for a volunteer-driven effort, and it depends almost entirely on the tutors. Doubling a reading level in a year does not happen through curriculum alone; it happens when one person sits across a table from another, week after week, and refuses to let the work stall.
An adult literacy program has no captive audience and no compulsory attendance. Students arrive by choice, often after work, and often after summoning a considerable amount of nerve. The tutor’s job is to make the second visit as likely as the first. Adults who return to learning carry old wounds — classrooms where they fell behind, jobs where the secret nearly came out, years of being told they were not bright. The tutor who earns their trust in the first weeks is doing the work that makes all the later lessons possible.
The economics of the problem reach far beyond the classroom. An adult who cannot read cannot fill out the applications that lead to better-paying work, cannot follow written safety instructions on a job site, cannot read the mortgage papers that determine whether a family keeps its home. The cost lands on employers who cannot promote capable workers, on hospitals whose patients cannot read their discharge instructions, and on children whose parents cannot help with homework. Adult literacy is one of those investments whose return shows up everywhere except the ledger of the program that made it.
The month’s theme
Gaudet’s talk opened a March program calendar that the club had built deliberately around a single subject. Rotary International designates March as Literacy Month, and program chairman Billy McLean had arranged a sequence of speakers connecting literacy to poverty. The lineup that followed included Rose Johnson of the Department of Human Resources, who would address poverty and its relationship to illiteracy, and Jeremiah Newell of the Mobile Area Education Foundation, who had overseen the foundation’s School Dropout Summit and would speak on his findings.
The Mobile Area Education Foundation had made the dropout problem its signature issue, convening summits that brought educators, employers and community leaders face to face with the numbers of students leaving Mobile County schools without diplomas. Newell’s work placed the dropout crisis in its community context — poverty, mobility, the pressures that pull teenagers out of school — which is the same territory Gaudet’s adult students had already crossed. The foundation’s summits treated the problem as something the whole city owns, not a matter for the school system alone.
The month was to close with a panel forum drawing together poverty, the dropout problem and workforce development, featuring club members including Dr. Judy Stout, Carolyn Akers and Sam Covert. Each panelist brought a different vantage point — education, civic engagement and the employer’s view of the workforce — and the format acknowledged the reality that none of these problems can be fixed by a single institution.
The through-line was not accidental. A community that cannot fill skilled jobs, a school system losing students before graduation, and an adult population reading below a third-grade level are not three separate problems. They are one problem observed at three different ages. The student who drops out in the tenth grade becomes, a few years later, the adult who cannot pass a hiring exam; the adult who cannot read becomes the parent who cannot reinforce what the school is trying to teach; and the cycle presents itself to each new generation as if it were new.
Building a month of programs around that connection was a deliberate act of education for the club’s own members. Rotary’s Literacy Month observances tend toward the celebratory; a sequence linking adult illiteracy to poverty and workforce demands asked the club’s members to sit with the harder version of the subject — the one that implicates hiring practices, wages and the quiet assumptions businesses make about the applications on their desks.
A career built around people others overlook
Gaudet’s path to adult literacy work ran through a series of roles with a common thread. She had taught parenting classes. She had trained child care workers in techniques for working with children with special needs. She had helped families raising a disabled child. Each of those jobs involves meeting families at a moment of difficulty and treating them as capable rather than deficient — a stance that translates directly into a literacy classroom, where the student’s dignity is the first lesson the tutor must protect.
She and her husband, Steve, are the parents of eight children. The youngest, Peter, has Down syndrome. It is not difficult to see how that experience prepared her for a classroom of adults who have spent much of their lives being quietly written off. The skill required in both cases is much the same: the patience to meet a person exactly where they are, and the conviction that where they are is not where they will stay. Raising a child with Down syndrome in a world that underestimates him is its own education in how much a person can do when someone expects it of them.
Why a Rotary club was the right room
The Sunrise Rotary Club meets in the early morning and draws its membership from Mobile’s business and professional ranks. That made it a useful audience for Gaudet’s message, and not only because Rotarians are reliable volunteers. The employers in the room were the same people who would later that month hear a panel of their own members describe how illiteracy and poverty complicate hiring. The adults Gaudet was teaching to read were, in many cases, the same adults those employers were struggling to hire.
The connection is easy to miss from behind a hiring desk. A job applicant who leaves the education line blank, stumbles through a written form or fails a simple reading test is usually scored as unqualified — not as a person who, with a trained tutor and a year of steady work, could double the very skill the test measured. Gaudet’s presentation asked the club’s members to hold both facts at once: the applicant in front of them today, and the student her program could produce a year from now.
Service clubs occupy a particular place in civic work like this. A Rotary club can raise money, but its more durable contribution is the network: the members who become tutors, the employers who adjust a hiring process, the board members who connect a nonprofit to the institutions it needs. An audience of business and professional leaders, addressed directly about the adults they employ and fail to employ, is worth more to a program like Gaudet’s than a check.
Her program’s central claim was modest and, on the evidence she brought, defensible: give a willing adult a trained tutor and a year, and the reading level can double. What a community does with that finding is a separate question, and it was the one she left in the room. The students were doing their part — arriving after work, swallowing their pride, sitting down with the phonics and the practice passages. The question the Sunrise Rotarians took back to their offices was whether the rest of Mobile would do its part: hiring the graduates, recruiting the tutors, and seeing the adults behind the statistic.
For a club that meets before most of the city is awake, the March program calendar was a reminder that the problems worth solving do not observe business hours. They show up in the applications, the classrooms and the households of the community every day — and, as Gaudet’s students were proving one lesson at a time, they can be changed, a tutor and a year at a time.