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Company Retired Executive Promotes Read Naturally in California Schools
Dick Weismann likes to help kids become better readers, because he’s convinced reading is the key to doing better in school and having greater success in life.
As a retired business executive with 30 years of experience in sales and marketing, Weismann, of Monterey, California, knows something about being successful. But now he’s content doing volunteer work promoting reading in schools, and he has a special passion for one program in particular—Read Naturally.
“The concepts that Read Naturally brings to education are something that I believe in very firmly,” Dick says. “It’s the best program of its kind.”
Weismann's interest in the program began about eight years ago. He had been buying audio books for a K–5 school in Monterey when a teacher came to him excited about a program called Read Naturally, saying it was the best reading program she’d seen in 25 years of teaching.
Weismann ended up buying Read Naturally Software Edition (SE) for the school and convinced a local foundation to donate money to buy the software for the rest of the elementary and middle schools in Monterey County.
Read Naturally has now helped many students in the Monterey area become better readers. Dick was especially impressed by the results achieved in a program for students whose mothers are in shelters for abused women.
“As you can imagine,” Weismann said, “children in these families suffer in many ways, have little interest in school, and face many challenges.”
A reading specialist and literacy coach at the students' elementary school described many of them as “reluctant learners” and “not particularly motivated to improve academically,” but while administering end-of-the-year reading assessments, she found that almost all of the 20 students in the program had increased their fluency dramatically and were able to respond appropriately to comprehension questions.
“When I checked with their classroom teacher to find out what had changed,” the reading specialist noted, “I learned that they had all been involved in Read Naturally.”
“We plan to track the overall academic performance of these students,” Weismann said. “However, for now, I’m ready to accept the fact that these children will be motivated and perform better in the future. I continue to be struck by the enthusiasm and excitement exhibited for the program by at-risk students.”
The reading specialist thinks that one factor in getting the students interested in the program from the beginning was the fact that Read Naturally SE is a computer-based program, and the charts and feedback from the software made the reading program feel like a computer game to students.
“What is exciting and promising about this is that there are hundreds of thousands of kids in this predicament,” Weismann said. “These are at-risk kids, with no parental support. Unmotivated, they will continue to struggle in school, drop out, and may not succeed in society. Reading is their ticket out of this mess, and Read Naturally, in this case, worked perfectly in helping them get a start.”