Want to know the secret behind the wild improvement in kindergartners' reading skills at one southwest Denver school?
The Ruby Hill Boyz.
They’re a group of men, some of them dads, from the heavily Latino community in southwest Denver.
One is tutor Gabriel Martinez, a big man with an even bigger smile. He welcomes a group of first-graders to his small group table.
“Bum bah duh bum bum …” he says.
“Bum bum!” the kids respond.
It’s a friendly introduction for the three wiggly first-graders, who are laser-focused on the guy in front of them. They practice the hard “g” sound with flash cards and sound out simple, three-letter words. Martinez knows that “e’s” and “i’s” are tricky for many of the students, especially English language learners, because in Spanish the letter “i” is pronounced “eee.”
“He helps us to read the letters,” said Manuel, 7.
Ninety percent of the children at Rocky Mountain Prep Ruby Hill elementary school are Latino, and almost three-quarters are English language learners.
“They're seeing mouth shape changes, and they're hearing it and watching me do it, and then I'm having them do it,” he said. The children learn what a closed syllable is, a short sound, that a “b” is like a belly on a stick figure, and a “d” sound is like “diaper” on the back of the stick figure.
Little things like knowing the sounds in Spanish, knowing what their families are like, is what’s behind the success of a new model of tutoring.
It’s the idea that, what if parents, mostly Latino or Black, who look like and come from similar backgrounds as the children they teach, could be paid to tutor children at schools who are below grade level?
The Oakland Liberator Model
Martinez is like a big, friendly bear, a stabilizing presence, and that’s partly because he has a daughter in the first grade and he has a middle schooler upstairs. In the middle of his lesson in the main hall, a little girl wearing an animal nose suddenly runs up and gives Martinez a spontaneous hug.
“There’s something very natural and paternal that I feel towards all of the kids,” he says.
The idea of parents as tutors is based on a similar program called the Oakland Liberator Model. It focuses on empowering and investing in the community, often in low-income neighborhoods.
“One of our main pillars here is ‘literacy is justice,” said Martinez. “If you can read, you can go anywhere and do anything.”
The tutors or “liberators” help kids who are reading or doing math below grade level in small groups — and the adults themselves sometimes choose to move on to a new path in life to becoming teachers.
It’s a powerful model. Martinez puts it simply: “I am so invested in this place succeeding and this place educating people because my own kids are here.”
Samy Alkaihal, director of family empowerment at Rocky Mountain Prep and the manager of the Peak Family Tutor program, said tapping parents to become tutors boiled down to familiarity.
“They knew our kids better than we did,” he said. “The kiddos knowing that you are their friend’s mom or you are their friend’s Dad, gets them a lot more engaged and families have such a unique way of teaching.”
How the Ruby Hill Boyz got their name
In January, the Rocky Mountain Prep school network launched a Denver and Aurora-based model hiring 22 full-time paid literacy tutors. The program is funded completely through donor support.
During a five-week training using a phonics-based curriculum, the Ruby Hill squad of four men, mostly fathers, all sat in the back row. People started calling them the Ruby Hill Boyz. Now the group is called the “Ruby Hill Boyz and ‘Fedy’ girl” — short for “Federal” because a female tutor joined Rocky Mountain Prep Federal, the middle school upstairs.
Ricardo Tabulo, a tutor, saw the progress his son was making at school and thought, “Why shouldn’t I help out other students?”
He’d been a dean at another school, but much prefers “that here I don’t have to be the bad guy as some students would see me.”
He likes the camaraderie. The Ruby Hill Boyz check on and learn from each other, and all have deepened their sense of belonging in the community. He recommends that other schools look to parents for support. Martinez agrees.
“When you have parents that are passionate and love to connect with the students, with the community, with the faculty, then you have this sort of unstoppable force that is willing to do anything to teach these kids how to read and to help them grow.”
‘They’re just like me when I was their age’
Today, Christian Lopez Torres is working on the letter “o” with a group of third-graders. The strength he brings to the job is having a deep understanding of who the children are. Sometimes Lopez Torres will accompany his dad on welding jobs at the apartments across the street from the school.
“I see many of the kids I tutor there, they live there … I know all their neighbors, I know their background. I know everything. They’re just like me when I was their age.”
Lopez Torres had immigrant parents. He didn’t know English as a young child.
“I always felt excluded from everything,” he said. “I felt like my teachers didn’t pay attention to me. I felt like my voice didn’t matter because I didn’t know English. My main goal was to fix that. I want them to feel like they have an adult they feel comfortable around.”
Even just to say a few words in Spanish, he said, just to feel some relief during the day.
Lopez Torres was in training to be a nurse, but it wasn’t the right fit. But teaching is another story.
“I love this! ” he said. “Every morning, I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t wait to get to work!’ ... I’ve always wanted to be a teacher.”
Now he works with students on substituting the end of the word, like changing clap to clack. He’ll also have them say sounds with their hands on their throats to feel the vibration, or feel the plosive breath of the “p” sound, on their hands. When they get stuck, he’ll say the word out loud, sound by sound, syllable by syllable, using his fingers.
It takes patience, he’s learned.
Third-grader Katia appreciates the small group tutoring, away from a big classroom. With a lot of kids in class, “We have to shout out something, we get confused.”
She’s proud that her efforts are paying off.
“Now I got to a higher score in my reading things, and now I can read big books.”
The program is showing results
The Ruby Boyz have consistently posted some of the highest gains in Rocky Mountain Prep’s program. One nine-week cycle showed students' skills improved significantly, with several students achieving over a year of reading growth.
“Their success has become a model for how culturally responsive, relationship-driven tutoring, with the male role model experience in the play, can impact engagement and academic outcomes,” said Alkaihal.
The school is seeing the strongest gains in kindergarten. That’s similar to the findings of a study on the Oakland program. It found that trained parent tutors were just as effective as classroom teachers in helping students make literacy gains. Extraordinary demands are placed on classroom teachers who may have 25 or more students each at different levels with individual needs. The study called community members “untapped pools of talent.”
Many tutors are also tutoring in math now.
A new path
After a long morning of helping children underline the “short” i sounds on marker boards and practicing three-letter words, Gabriel Martinez tells his students, “You crushed that one so quick!”
As he tidies up his small-group table, he explains how the position has changed him in many ways.
“Working with other people’s children in a professional capacity has actually helped me personally as a parent, grow as a father,” he said. It also inspired him. He’s gone back to school through a program that helps working adults become teachers. He wants to do what he’s passionate about — to become a special education teacher.
