For years, faculty at the College of Education’s Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk sought the right opportunity to partner with the YMCA of Central Texas. Two years ago, a revolutionary cross-age tutoring study provided the opportunity for a perfect pairing.
Now, COE investigators and YMCA leaders are reaping the benefits of their community partnership. Together, they are transforming literacy intervention for families who often have limited access to private tutoring because of time and financial resources.
The YMCA is just incredible with the services they provide for the community,
said Elizabeth Swanson, a Special Education research professor and principal investigator of the project. They wanted to help students academically, but we were not sure how that would look. So, we co-designed a scientifically robust but feasible randomized controlled trial with the YMCA.
COE researchers, along with partner investigators at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, worked with YMCA afterschool program sites in Central Texas and Middle Tennessee to test a 17-week program called Reading Buddies across nearly 70 elementary campuses from 2023-2025. Trained third through fifth grade tutors delivered the intervention for kindergarten through second grade tutees for 20 minutes a day, three days per week. Both the tutors’ and the tutees’ growth were recorded and compared to students with adult tutors or no tutoring at other participating YMCA campuses.
According to the results, not only did the cross-age tutoring work as effectively for the tutees as those who received tutoring from adults, but the third through fifth grade tutors also grew in their literacy skills throughout the process.
The cross-age model is really innovative because it has created a sustainable approach to supporting the literacy outcomes for so many kids in the YMCA,
said Emily Mauer, COE doctoral candidate and project coordinator for Reading Buddies. As we know, reading tutoring is highly expensive if you have time and access to it.
Older students also displayed social growth in leadership skills and told investigators they felt satisfied witnessing the positive impact and academic growth that resulted from the tutoring sessions. One third-grade student said her favorite part of the program was that it made her super-duper happy
to see younger students learn.
A real benefit of a community-university partnership is that our perspectives are very complementary,
Swanson said. As researchers we tend to focus on academic outcomes and the YMCA opened our eyes to the kids’ perspective.
Academically, the younger tutees saw significant improvement in their oral reading fluency and basic reading skills that are essential in early development. Meanwhile, the older students serving as tutors improved in oral reading and reading comprehension skills.
Improving reading comprehension is not an easy needle to move,
Swanson said. Teaching younger children how to read words, how to understand what they are reading and how to read connected text seemed to positively influence tutors’ own reading fluency and reading comprehension.
For the YMCA, the partnership came at a perfect time as site leaders at elementary campuses had noticed a significant decrease in student homework after the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Wendy Greinke, YMCA Reading Coach, the organization had always promoted academic support as a pillar of their programming, and the lack of homework had made that goal increasingly challenging to fulfill.
The YMCA’s mission is always to serve the mind, body and spirit of the children in our community,
Greinke said. We promote to parents that we provide homework support, but not all kids brought homework in. Without homework to do, opportunities to support students’ academic growth were limited.
Though the YMCA is known for having student populations that come and go, most students continued throughout the program and benefitted from building cross-age relationships in a safe, structured environment which also translated to their school life.
This program has really served a great need,
Greinke said. You won’t find a teacher out there who will complain about some extra reading support, and this has been a great plug to further the mission of the YMCA.
Now, as data collection is complete and researcher involvement will take a step back, Reading Buddies is preparing for the next step: sustainability. The program was designed from the beginning in close partnership with the YMCA of Central Texas to be sustainable once federal funding ended.
Swanson, Mauer and Greinke have put hours of work into making sure that materials including tutoring toolkits and online training modules are free and readily accessible for any after school provider to use going forward.
It is a huge accomplishment for us as researchers and for the YMCA to continue a quality program built on evidence we gathered through this partnership,
Swanson said.
Starting this year, nearly 50 YMCA sites across Central Texas — almost half of their active sites in 2025 — have opted to adopt or continue Reading Buddies as a part of their programming. Their goal is to someday implement a version of this at every site and make it an integral part of their programming. Meanwhile, they are also considering implementing it as academic support in districts transitioning to four-day school weeks where the YMCA provides childcare on the fifth day.
The program’s implementation is so simple it can be done independently with self-guided modules. Combined with the materials they already have, and other free materials being developed, sustaining and expanding this program will be an ambitious but achievable mission.
As we are preparing for the new school year, part of our conversations is how we can utilize the materials that have been provided to us in the best way and open this opportunity to new sites,
Greinke said. I would like to see Reading Buddies being a part of our daily YMCA schedule — just like going outside, playing team building games and participating in STEM programs — something that’s simply part of what we do at the YMCA.
