During an annual celebration at the Clemson Football Poe Indoor Practice Facility, Clemson University faculty, staff and student-athletes bring reading to life for first graders and show that practice makes perfect on the football field — and in the classroom. It’s a capstone of a full year of academic work by the Clemson University Early Literacy Center for South Carolina, students and teachers, recognizing an entire community’s effort to improve student reading. Along with celebrating the school year’s success, the annual event aims to combat summer reading setbacks by exciting students about reading over the summer months.
Josie DeLeon didn’t know what to expect when the buses arrived at Clemson Football’s indoor practice facility. She knew her teachers seemed extra excited on the bus ride from Newberry Elementary and that she was on the trip because she had improved her reading.
A year’s worth of hard work had led to this moment. Multiple sessions with reading interventionists, such as fellow bus passenger Michelle Branham, had honed her and her classmates’ reading skills. Success in those one-on-one sessions became success in the classroom and a ticket to this event.
Now, at the end of the school year, she and her fellow first graders waited as buses from other schools parked. More than 250 students from school districts across the state — districts in Pickens, Anderson, Oconee and Chesterfield counties, to name a few — disembarked to join her in a long line in front of the large garage doors to the field.
One of them opened to a wall of music and a sea of orange.
Along both sides of the door, lines of Clemson cheerleaders, Rally Cats and Tiger Band members celebrated the students’ arrival, playing “Tiger Rag” and dancing as the young students walked with their eyes wide to the center of the field. The Tiger mascot was there, competing with Clifford the Big Red Dog for the children’s attention. At the center of the field, Clemson faculty and staff, along with Kathleen Swinney, wife of Clemson Football head coach Dabo Swinney, and several Clemson Football players, waited to greet the students.
All this pomp and circumstance was over the top by design. Every student in attendance had earned their ticket to the Tigers Read! event by making great strides in reading after initial struggles. The event, held in May as far back as 2016, is meant to close out the school year on a high note and send students into summer with a bag full of books and the enthusiasm for reading to go with it.
When DeLeon attended this event several years ago, she and her classmates sat cross-legged to hear some of their favorite Clemson Football players read We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, a book about a family’s puzzling decision to find and then run from a bear. In true children’s book form, the bear also seems confused by the plot.
Teachers, reading interventionists, the dean of the College of Education, and Clemson faculty and staff framed the seated children and were also a captive audience. Branham, who has attended multiple Tigers Read! events, recalls enjoying the comedic effect of a hulking linebacker reading, “We’re going to catch a big one. … We’re not scared” in a soft, hesitant tone as if he were a nervous child sharing a secret with the students.
The students remained completely engaged, hanging on every word and sitting in awe as athletes they’ve seen perform amazing physical feats read the type of book they see daily at school. Think Reading Rainbow hosted by gentle giants.
“When I think back on it, it was so fun to sit and listen to people from Clemson read to us, and we got a bag of books, and then we had a picnic,” DeLeon, now a fourth grader, says. “I read the books a lot that summer, too.”
C.C. Bates, who serves as associate dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Education and director of the Early Literacy Center for South Carolina, says Tigers Read! has been one of the highlights of her year for almost a decade now. What started as a small gathering of a few students in the West End Zone has turned into a chaotic, whirlwind event that she and her fellow educators enjoy getting caught up in for a few fast-paced hours each year.
The event is an exclamation point at the end of an academic year before educators lose touch with students. It’s a lofty goal, but one that Early Literacy Center for South Carolina faculty working with school districts in the state pursued because they know the value of maintaining reading momentum during the summer.
The Tigers Read! event has become a staple for its main sponsors, Dabo’s All In Team Foundation, Scholastic and the College of Education. However, in the years since it started, it has proven to be a powerful complement to the partnerships among College faculty, school districts, and the daily work of educators and students in schools across the state.
“When players read a book aloud to the students at the event, they also discuss the importance of practice and liken summer reading to their time spent preparing for football games. It is exciting to see students who attend the event make that connection and become motivated to read.”
— C.C. Bates
The Summer Slide
Bates is a highly successful researcher and respected faculty leader in the College of Education, but as a former teacher, she knows her résumé doesn’t impress the legions of children at the Tigers Read! event. She impresses with high energy and the ability to add more and more plates to the ones she’s already spinning.
In what seems like a single breath, she talks about the importance of reading, introduces the next speaker, previews the food to come, and then literally runs across the field to cue the next attraction for students. Seconds lost to a fast walk may lose even one child’s attention, so Bates sprints.
Bates considers reading the foundation for all academic success, and after the year-round work of improving reading skills, fighting the summer reading setback — dubbed the “summer slide” among literacy experts — is critical to student outcomes. Bates says reading during summer months helps enhance literacy skills and fosters a love for reading.
“Summer reading helps to prevent the ‘summer slide’ by maintaining and reinforcing progress made during the academic year,” Bates says. “When players read a book aloud to the students at the event, they also discuss the importance of practice and liken summer reading to their time spent preparing for football games. It is exciting to see students who attend the event make that connection and become motivated to read.”
The collaboration with Dabo’s All In Team Foundation and Scholastic has allowed the College of Education to distribute nearly 100,000 books to date to first grade students in 25 school districts across the state.
Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bates and her team distributed books to more than 1,000 children in partner districts. Each year, the 250 students attending Tigers Read! are only a fraction of the total number of students who receive those drawstring bags full of books.
Bates has also used the opportunity to incorporate a research component into the outreach by recruiting a longitudinal sample of first graders who began receiving books in 2017. The study is further tracking the effects of the reading outreach over time.
“While advancing reading skill during the summer sets children on a path to success, many children experience setbacks,” Bates says. “We’ve found an extremely effective combo to support children: supply children with books and have the coaches and athletes they look up to discuss the importance of reading.”
Kelly Brown, senior account executive for Scholastic, has attended every Tigers Read! event since its first year and has also helped coordinate the sale of the books included in the students’ drawstring bags. Brown says that many children don’t have the opportunity to build a home library, so 10 books help to jump-start that effort. The ability to select from several books also gives the children some agency; independent reading tends to be more effective when children can choose what they want to read.
“This event, combined with outreach efforts, has a positive effect because they provide books that bridge the reading gap for kids while engaging them to be lifelong readers,” Brown says. “This event is one of the best things I have had the privilege to be a part of in my career; the excitement on these kids’ faces is something I look forward to every year.”
The idea for the Tigers Read! event originated with outreach work conducted by C.C. Bates and the Early Literacy Center for South Carolina. The center serves the state by providing training and ongoing professional development for reading interventionists and primary grade classroom teachers. By working with Bates and others in the center, teachers level up their skills in early literacy assessment, instructional strategies and the teaching of striving readers and writers.
‘A Celebration for Us All’
Bates and the teachers who attend Tigers Read! do not treat the event by itself as a solution to combat the summer slide. To them, it is the capstone of a full academic year of work. It is a reward for an entire school community’s effort to bring student reading progress to a grade-level standard.
On the bus ride to Clemson, Branham is usually seated next to Teresa Owens, another early literacy teacher leader in the School District of Newberry County. They have worked one-on-one as interventionists with students who go on to attend the Clemson event.
Teacher leaders such as Owens and Branham cascade the lessons learned from Clemson faculty to speech pathologists, early literacy teachers and any other classroom teachers in their district. They take coursework and participate in professional learning with the Early Literacy Center for South Carolina to ensure that the reading interventions teachers implement with students are successful. In schools such as Newberry Elementary, Owens and Branham act as “force multipliers” for all teachers in the school and district as they communicate best practices in reading and writing instruction with other educators.
Owens and Branham also work one-on-one with students such as DeLeon to instill these best practices and strategies to foster interest in reading and independence in readers. Teaching children to use phonics, read aloud to tackle hard words and reread to increase comprehension are some of the many tools that interventionists provide for students.
The students at Tigers Read! may not realize it, but the event also celebrates the work of interventionists and teachers who have made a big difference, not just that year but for each student’s lifetime. Considering that Bates and other literacy experts view reading as the foundation for all academic success, positively affecting student reading in the early grades can alter a student’s academic trajectory in the long term.
“Tigers Read! has been a reward for students who have made accelerated progress and have essentially ‘caught up’ to their grade level in both reading and writing,” Owens explains. “They show tremendous growth from their first one-on-one intervention, so the event feels like a celebration for all of us.”
Bates says data showing reading improvement across districts is very much in line with what is happening in Newberry County. Data suggests that all students receiving an intervention continued to make gains across grade levels and emerged as stronger readers at the beginning of each new school year. Student achievement measures for first graders from the 2021–2022 school year show that those students — now fourth graders — are reading with 95 percent accuracy at a sixth grade level.
Bates adds that data from Newberry and other schools doesn’t just suggest maintaining progress during the summer; it indicates that a combination of interventions can eliminate the “summer slide” and show student growth in reading and writing.
Few are happier about those data points than Kathleen Swinney, who can always be found dwarfed by football players in front of the students or trying to get face time with every student after the reading is complete. Dabo and Kathleen Swinney jumped at the chance to support the event 10 years ago through Dabo’s All In Team Foundation because of the potential impact that Bates’ work would have across the state. Kathleen says it’s been very rewarding to see that potential fulfilled and proven in Bates’ data.
As a former educator, she’s enjoyed getting to experience the event along with the many teachers and students who attend each year. Kathleen knows that losing momentum as a reader can set children up for difficulties in all subjects and even in life, so she values the opportunity to celebrate what the teachers and students have accomplished.
“As a former teacher, I know that the students who struggle tend to have a special place in your heart, so it’s exciting to see those teachers and all of the students they are empowering leave with a backpack full of books,” Kathleen says. “All the work that Dr. Bates and the College of Education do for these children and future teachers really gets at the root of the problem while encouraging students to become lifelong learners and readers. The fact that it’s been proven to be successful is huge.”
The collaboration with Dabo’s All In Team Foundation and Scholastic has allowed the College of Education to distribute nearly 100,000 books to date to first grade students in 25 school districts across the state.
The Quietest Outdoor Library on Earth
Owens says the event stays with students more than people would probably think. When DeLeon talks about it, it’s like it happened yesterday, not four years ago. Owens says she still has students who attended in 2019 come up to her unprompted in the school car line reminiscing about “the day we went to Clemson.”
Owens says she always looks forward to the ride home. Students are still buzzing from a day of activity, and it is extremely gratifying for her to see them still reading on the ride home. She can’t help but think about where those students were as readers at the beginning of the year and how far they have come.
Students such as Karym Urbina, a second grader at Newberry who attended the event last year, continued reading his books on the bus. The football players read The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog! that day, and Urbina says he’s already left that book in the dust. He says he rushed home to read it with his older sister and grandparents as soon as Tigers Read! was over, but he’s moved on to “bigger kid books.” He provides a laundry list of what he’s reading now, from Diary of a Wimpy Kid to The Wild Robot.
Urbina was one of the few who didn’t fall asleep on that ride home. The trip back tends to be low-key because students are reading, full of food and exhausted. The hum and jostle of a school bus rocks students — and some teachers — to sleep, especially if they are returning to a district as far away as Chesterfield County.
Owens says “the quiet” really sticks out to her about the last part of the day, but there is a portion of Tigers Read! that may be even quieter.
After group photos and time spent mingling with football players, students exit the indoor practice facility for a picnic in the field across the road. Students receive Skins’ hot dogs and pound cake from the Pound Cake Man before sitting in groups with teachers and fellow students.
This hour is striking because of the quiet that falls over the field. For at least an hour once a year, the area across from the indoor practice facility — an area known for the noise and commotion of football tailgates — transforms into one of the most crowded and quietest outdoor libraries on Earth.
Students rush to eat and clean their hands so they can dig into the drawstring bags and dive into the books they received a few minutes before. They lie on their bellies with their feet in the air and a book spread out before them, and if they talk, it’s in hushed tones to point out their favorite page in their new favorite book.
Newberry Elementary has a great deal to celebrate from C.C. Bates’ longitudinal research sample. Reading interventionists Teresa Owens and Michelle Branham report that among the first graders who received an intervention in the last four years, 97 percent maintained or grew in their reading progress over the summer before they started fourth grade.
After a reading assessment at the beginning of fourth grade, these students read near a fifth grade level.
Branham says she has already seen this trend repeating among younger students. Second grade students returning to Newberry in August 2024 were reading at a higher level than they left off at the beginning of the summer, and a word reading assessment showed they were achieving at a level equal to students six months ahead of them in the second grade.
“That is not just a credit to interventionists,” Branham says. “That is an entire system at work, from what (Teresa and I) do to the teachers, parents, school leadership and the expertise that Clemson shares with all of us.”
Michael Staton M ’15 is the marketing and communications director in the College of Education.
