Today, READ USA is honored to feature our 2023 Peace in the Pages READ to Remember Award Honoree, Dr. Floyd Willis, a renowned physician at Mayo Clinic!

Dr. Willis grew up in Forsyth, Georgia, and remembers all too well how racial discrimination shaped the lives of his family members and community.

In the 1970’s, ambulance services were conducted by funeral homes, and his father, who owned and ran the local funeral home, discovered that only Caucasian funeral directors were getting paid for that service. He approached the county about this blatant discrimination, only to be told “we didn’t think you boys could take the test and pass it” to be a licensed medical technician. With Dr. Willis’s help, his father studied for the test, and gathered other black funeral directors to do the same, and they became licensed medical technicians. The medical aspects of the test and his experiences with his father inspired Dr. Willis to become a doctor himself. After running his own family medicine practice in Georgia, he went on to become the only African American doctor and family physician at Mayo Clinic in 1992, which had a total of 100 doctors at the time.

During his 30 years at Mayo Clinic, Dr. Willis has become renowned for his research on Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions affecting minorities and for working to create a more diverse medical staff by exposing under-represented medical students to Mayo Clinic. He is passionate about his family, his community, and his profession, and credits how reading, learning, and teaching is what’s so important in everything he does.

“When my children were growing up, I stressed to them that the most important profession on earth is teaching. That is what READ USA is doing - providing free books and teaching students how to read and understand them. I’ve been an adjunct professor in three different medical schools and Mayo attracted me because it was said that we may have the opportunity to begin a teaching program. This was exciting to me,” said Dr. Willis. “It is the reading, the learning, and the teaching that is really important in everything.” 

Read more about Dr. Willis here.

Also, you can read more about our 2023 Peace in the Pages event, presented by David & Monique Miller, which will take place on Sept. 28 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at TIAA Bank Field, here.

Donors who support READ USA at $1,000 a year or more receive several benefits, including seats at Peace in the Pages. You can become a READ USA donor today by clicking here.

Shelley Read: Helping At-Risk Students Stay in College

In addition to being an internationally acclaimed author, our 2023 Peace in the Pages keynote speaker Shelley Read has also been a university professor and lecturer for the past 30 years – yet her most meaningful contribution has been helping at-risk students remain in college.

In 2009, while she was a Senior Lecturer in English at Western Colorado University, Ms. Read co-founded the PRIME (Promoting Readiness In Math and English) program with a fellow professor.

“I founded PRIME because I was heartbroken watching first-generation and at-risk students with tremendous potential being accepted to the university but soon dropping out because they simply didn’t have the skills or support to navigate academia,” said Ms. Read. “This program gave them community, skills, and hope—everything from help with reading, writing, and math to advising, scholarships, warm jackets, food, hugs, high fives, etc.”

PRIME’s goal is to inspire students to meet their educational challenges, become an active participant in the campus community, and to ultimately graduate with a degree. Since its founding, the program has resulted in a nearly 70% retention rate of the at-risk student demographic compared to a less than 15% average retention rate nationwide. This earned the program the Colorado Lieutenant Governor’s Program Excellence Award in 2014.

“I continued teaching all of my regular English, environmental studies, and Honors classes alongside my PRIME classes, but my ten years working with PRIME students was absolutely the most meaningful aspect of my three-decade career as a professor,” Ms. Read shared.

READ USA is thrilled and honored to have such an esteemed, caring, student-oriented educator join us at Peace in the Pages! Ms. Read will be signing copies of her new book and looks forward to meeting our guests at this year’s event.

You can read more about Shelley Read here.

Parent Education Corner: Helping Our Children Sound Out Words Smoothly

These activities are typically appropriate for children in kindergarten through third grade.

Sounding out a word involves saying the sound of each letter or letter combination one by one until the end of the word, and then saying them all together again quickly. Help your child sound out words by:

• Showing how to say each letter sound in a word, starting at the left-hand letter and moving right, and then joining all the sounds together to form a word.
• Stretching and connecting sounds together as much as possible. The box below shows an example of how this might sound.
• Reminding your child to check their pronunciation after they connect the sounds together. For example: ask if the word is a real word, ask if they know the word, or if the word is not familiar, ask them to reread the word to make sure it is correct.
  
  
  

From The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences and The What Works Clearinghouse.

Submitted by Kathi Hart, Tutoring Program Content Specialist

Do you have any questions or ideas for the Parent Education Corner? Anything you’d like to learn? Let us know here!