I'm Ethan and I'm seven. I started with the Kids Reading Program like two years ago. I like reading because it makes me happy. Oh, I think Ethan is a great lad and I think he's going to do very well. He's really smart. I really enjoy doing it and it's great to meet the different children every year. You just encourage them to enjoy reading.

Thank you for helping me read from Matthew and his own writing as well. I see success in the classroom when I see students able to read. If they are able to read the math question, they can do their math. If they can read their science problem, they can do the science. If they can't read, then everything else lags behind.

The Kids Can Succeed Program. It's beneficial to teachers, it's beneficial to students, and to the school in general. Three, two, one. Open your bags. The Kids Can Succeed Reading Tutoring Program is really all about poverty prevention. Children come into this program not wanting to read aloud in the classroom. But when they get one-on-one with a volunteer and they speak to them and their voice gets a little bit louder and a little bit louder until by the end of the program they actually have their own voice because we have empowered them to speak for themselves.

The car can. Go. Right. Very fast. Excellent. I'm very passionate about the program because I see the benefits for the students. You know, my personal story is I spoke English as a second language. So when I entered the school system, Portuguese was my first language. So school was frustrating for me, probably until about the fifth or sixth grade until I was really able to read and comprehend information.

And that's why I know early intervention is so important. I like reading because it teaches me how to learn new words and I really like the pictures in the school reading. The research does demonstrate that if a child is not reading at grade level by the end of grade three, that child will not be reading at grade level at all.

So it's important for the gaps to be closed before that time. The neighbor to neighbor program that we have in our school is targeting primary kids and closing those gaps before the end of grade three. Well, you know, if I had a dream, it would be a dream where children everywhere are able to read, that they're excited about reading.

We've been funding the Kids Can Succeed program since 2003. It started very small and they decided to find supporters like ourselves and we grew it from five kids at the beginning to over 205 now. If you look at the literacy rates of these kids, they're almost all at grade level when they graduate from the Kids Can Succeed program.

So it's been an outstanding success. We would like to be able to expand the program into more schools. Right now we need funding and volunteers to be able to do that. This program is so important because aside from all the technology that we have today, we still need to create a society of literate children. I would recommend volunteering for a number of reasons, not the least of which is noticing how their reading skills improve during the course of the year.

That is so gratifying. If we could get more volunteers, if we could have more students involved, more schools involved, that would be really beneficial. I would encourage everyone to invest in Kids Can Succeed because I think the return on this investment is simply enormous. Kids Can Succeed!