 My name is Mariah Riggs and I'm the director of the Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center. Welcome to the program. Today I'm really excited. Our guest is Laurie Quinn, who is the president of the Stern Center. Hi Laurie, welcome to the program. Thanks Mariah, glad to be with you. So really quickly, you came to the Stern Center in early 2021. What was your background before you came to the Stern Center? So I was working for most of my career in higher education as college and university administrator. So I had a lot of familiarity with working closely with experts, folks who really are passionate about education, who want to help students, and who are used to having a lot of independence and joy in their work. And so there was a bit of a natural connection between the work that I had done helping college professors to be successful with students and the work at the Stern Center helping our team in supporting their success with students. Yeah, because it's really a support network for education. Yes. And so it really kind of keystones well into the work that you've been doing at the academic level. I think so. I mean, 2021 as anybody knows who changed jobs during the pandemic was a heck of a time to start a new job and getting to know folks virtually as well as from a distance in person whenever possible. So it's actually been wonderful because being able to gradually get to know people better and better, have those moments of realizing that you've been working with someone for almost a year and you're now having your first in person meeting. Wow. So it was a fascinating introduction to an organization that I had known about in the community for a long time, but getting to see the inside workings, get to know the team, and get even more passionate about the mission than I was when I was a parent. Yeah, that's an interesting way to come in to lead an organization like the Stern Center because it really has a sort of client relationship and to come in from such a virtual standpoint during the pandemic, which has been kind of a unique situation. It was, but I will say that one of the things that was so exciting to me was the number of times when I said to folks, I'm going to be the second ever president at the Stern Center for Language and Learning. So many people said to me, oh, Laurie, I can't even tell you how much the Stern Center helped our kid or our grand kid or my nephew or my niece or my neighbor. That sense of impact in the community and that sense of actually now multiple generations of helping was so empowering. And I thought, you know what, I'll put up with lots of Zoom meetings and all kinds of things to be able to do this work with this team. Yeah. And you know, it's such important work. And I can actually add myself. I've also, the Stern Center's worked with both my children and I can attest to the remarkable organization that it is. I did work with them before you. Like some of the people you just talked about, it's a real thing. And the work that they do helps bring up a lot of the children in our community, which is invaluable work. So it sounds like, I mean, what drew you to work at the Stern Center is sort of how it engages in the community. It helps the children in the community and it does. It lifts up kids who sometimes get left in the cracks by our educational system. That's right. And when you think about the impact of a child who's struggling with learning, when you think about the impact on the whole family, on the school, on the community, it's really a chance. I think when the Stern Center helps an individual child, we see those ripple effects throughout the whole community. And so being able to be part of that work every day with this incredible team is really cool. Because you're raising the next generation of Vermonters. And the more we're able to give them the tools that they need to be successful adults, the better our entire state grows and becomes a more competent place. That's exactly right. And the economic opportunity part of being an effective learner is huge when we think about how many times people are changing careers now, right? If you can't learn effectively and quickly, you're going to get outpaced in this current employment world. Because the technology is becoming more and more intense. That's it. And really quick. And you have to have, I mean, I think I try to learn a new skill every six months to stay valid. Well, the neuroscientist would be very proud of you. That's how we keep our brains active. Good work. Thank you. Thank you, Laurie. I'll take that. Anything I can get. So just in case some of you are not familiar, I kind of wanted to give a basis of how the Stern Center for Language and Learning started. Sure. So, well, I'm the second ever president of the Stern Center, which means that I followed the founding director of the Stern Center, Dr. Blanche Podyski, who is now the president emerita, retired in 2021 after founding the Stern Center all the way back in 1983 with a tiny little budget and a tremendous sense of curiosity about how kids learn to read. And more specifically, why some kids weren't learning to read as quickly in the current school curriculum as others. And so that interest in the brain science of reading has really been a through line for the Stern Center for almost 40 years now, paying attention to the neuroscience, understanding the research, and then putting it into practice with, you know, kid by kid, family by family, and now teacher by teacher. And it's interesting, too, because I even know parents who because of the work with the Stern Center that they had with their own children are then able to assist and help other parents because they understand that those, you know, that the Stern Center is there, it's a resource that they can go to. And it's sort of this interconnected piece of the community that supports families. That's a good way to describe it. And word of mouth is an incredibly powerful way that people find out about our work. But of course, coming in as president, one of my goals was also to make sure that we were not a hidden gem that people were telling each other about only in times of extreme need and family stress, but rather a community resource that more folks know about, that more folks can access through our income-based assistance program, really ramping that up, making sure that our doors were wide open, especially as we began to understand the full impacts on learning of the pandemic. So that's actually something I think that's important. And I'd kind of like to dig into for a second. So, you know, a lot of people and I speak to, I'm a parent, so I speak to other parents, but, you know, it does come up sometimes that, oh, I love the Stern Center, but I don't think I can afford to do that with my child. So I think it's important for you, maybe especially for our listeners, to explain how the assistance program works, the fact that there is one, and how somebody would contact the Stern Center if they did want to come and use the resource. Sure. Well, the financial assistance program is actually baked right into the process of first getting in touch with us. So when you reach out to the Stern Center, you know, I want to emphasize this because sometimes in times of need, we get overwhelmed, right? And we're not even necessarily sure exactly what question we need to ask about, what does my kid need? What do I need? We also serve adults, right? And so that initial phone call is really about having a conversation with one of our client frontline folks who will ask the right questions, sort of help pinpoint what the issues are, and talk with the inquiry, the family making the inquiry, about enough detail to then consult with our team and come quickly back to folks. That can include right at that very first step information about family income so that we can get back to the person with a sense of cost, a realistic plan. We do payment plans, we do financial assistance that's based on family income, and that accessibility piece has been a huge focus for me. When I think about what was possible for me in my education, thanks to scholarships and thanks to grants, I have a really personal passion for making sure that our doors are wide open to as many kids as need us. And that's pretty long list these days. And we're going to get into that. But just to kind of go back to that point too, I also think that Vermont, and I've just seen this, this is totally for me being a parent, but that sometimes the kids that need it the most are the ones with the least available funding. And so without, I hate to use leaving them behind, that that's a way to kind of buffer and create the whole of our Vermont, kid, the children of Vermont really lifting them up to their full capacity. And that's a really important thing to think about too. The Stern Center is a nonprofit, and it's an incredibly valuable resource to the capacity of our youth in the state. And so, I feel very passionately about the work that they do. And I think people need to realize that. Well, thank you. I agree. Not surprisingly, I agree. And I think that the strategic ways that we're actually now approaching that accessibility issue have been a real focus for me and the team in the last couple of years. Specifically, we have been working to expand our fundraising so that we can give both larger financial assistance awards and more of them. Last year, we were able to increase by about $30,000, our total awards. And that felt great. But what wakes me up at night is the student we weren't able to give the full award to. And so it's very motivating. It's very motivating to keep that accessibility focus as a strength for us. We also know that the longer families wait and worry about the money for services, the more compounding impact we see on the child's learning. So earlier is always better being able to get in the door and address the issue means that the complexity of doing that later. Yeah, because reading is the building block that all learning is based upon, especially in our society. Like if you can't read the handout your teacher gives you by the time you get to eighth grade, then you're not able to complete the assignment. And that just is a cycle that replicates itself until, you know, next thing you know, you're really just not learning anything anymore. That's right. Oftentimes, we see reading issues that have been missed tend to show up right around fourth grade when that transition from learning to read to reading to learn kicks in. And students are less focused on the act of mastering reading and become more focused on the content that you need reading in order to understand, right? And so that's the point where lots of times the cards are on the table and everybody sort of goes, wait a minute, is this kid really reading or have they learned coping strategies that are now falling apart? Yeah, because they look at the teacher for reinforcement when they're smart, but they just can't make it. Smart, maybe they've memorized lots of words, but you do begin, of course, our English language is vast and complex and at a certain point, you've got to know how to decode those words in order to be able to build your comprehension and your other skills. And also building vocabulary has been shown to open up other parts of the brain as well. Yes, that's right. Especially through development. That's right. And it's a big part of how your brain processes information and through those early years is when you're making the interconnections that will support your brain functionality through the rest of your development. You're exactly right. Yeah. Oh, thank you. I'll take that. Thank you, Lori. But no, but I mean, that's why it's so important. And you know, and I would speak to parents too, you know, if you have a parent who's in second or third grade, and you're noticing, you know, troubles with reading, you know, like when you sit down and you read with your child and you have them read, you read one page, maybe they read another or they're reading to you. And you notice, you know, that there are some issues and there are some difficulties there. You know, sometimes it is worth it to reach out and talk to a place like the Stern Center and really get on top of it because the brain actually develops. I mean, from my understanding, this is just me, but from my understanding is that it's easier to learn things like reading at a younger age than as you get older because your brain's more plastic. That's right. That's absolutely right. And the rate at which we can learn things when we're younger, as those of us getting older are painfully aware. Thank goodness for brain plasticity. It does stick around for a good long time in our lives. But yeah, there's no, we've seen it, right? There's nothing like watching a young child just devour with curiosity, everything that's out there in the world. And so being able to nurture that, being able to make sure that the kids who do need extra help to become successful readers, they have it and they have it on time and they have it in the right ways. So this leads me to another question that I wanted to ask about is, as an educational nonprofit, you do a few different kinds of work. What are the different areas of focus that are included in the organization's mission? Yeah. So about four different areas. And so to summarize, the first is evaluations. And we've been doing evaluations since the very beginning at the Stern Center. Our team of school psychologists and clinical psychologists work together to assess kids for learning differences, learning disabilities, where applicable, and to recommend strategies for ensuring optimal learning and lifelong success with the right interventions, based on what those assessment results look like. So that's the evaluation arm of what we do. We also have a big teaching team at the Stern Center. So we have an instructional team, and we have a social learning and communication team. And so everything from learning to read and write better, to working on your organization and planning with executive function coaching, as your viewers may know, executive function is the part of our brain that tells us what to do, when to do it, how to get organized, how long it's likely to take, and many, many, many people struggle with forms of executive function. And learning those strategies early can make a huge difference. So we log about just north of 17,000 hours a year with students instructing in all of those academic areas. We do mathematics instruction in addition to reading and writing and executive function. And I'm really proud of the work that our social learning and communication team does. That team is focused on understanding the often nonverbal cues in our social interactions and helping folks who have trouble in those areas, specifically folks who are neurodivergent, maybe on the autism spectrum, maybe have severe social anxiety that makes it hard to interact with others. Coaching in that area has really a profound impact on the lives of the clients that we serve in that part of what we do. And then last but definitely not least is professional learning for teachers and schools. So we work with both individual teachers and with school partnerships for cohorts of teachers to help ensure that they are learning the latest research to apply it in their classrooms, so that, to use your phrase no kid, is left without the support that they need. And ideally that support is going to happen in our schools. But the Stern Center has been able to be a bridge between families and schools and between teachers and in their past learning to make sure that everybody has the greatest possible chance of becoming the learner that they can be. And I would assume that the science is constantly evolving. Always, always evolving. And it's been fascinating for me as I came in as a leader who was not already an expert in this field. So talk about lifelong learning. I've been immersed in the deep end. I absolutely love, you know, my own academic background is in literature. So I was a kid who loved to read and I was incredibly fortunate, just the dumb luck of brainwiring. I was able to read easily. And because it came easy for me, it was especially fascinating for me as an adult and as a leader to really stop and reflect on what if it hadn't? What would it have meant to grow up? You know, I didn't grow up in privilege, we didn't have a house full of books, but I was fortunate enough that reading clicked. I fell in love with what stories can do in our world. And as my family likes to joke, never stopped going to school until they told me I had to leave and then I stuck around and helped other teachers. But yeah, you know, education and the power of being a reader and being a learner, it runs really deep for me. And I think the work that the Stern Center does feeds that every day. So I feel really fortunate. And it's wonderful that there's an organization out there too working with our teachers as sort of the science becomes, you know, grows and lets people know that there are different strategies and different ways to approach teaching youngsters how to read. Because it is, it's an ever-evolving science. And it's actually surprisingly intensive. It's very intensive and it's surprising to a lot of people that our teachers don't learn absolutely everything that they need to know for the whole rest of their careers during the teacher preparation years in college. But of course, none of us did, right? And so supporting teachers to really, you know, teachers are helpers, right? That's what they wake up every day thinking about. How am I going to make a positive difference for those kids today? And being able to do that work with experts cheering you on and really believing in your ability to translate that science into excellent classroom teaching, that's a great part of what we do at the Stern Center. Yeah, and it's all about the toolbox that you're supplied with. Yes, for sure. And having all the tools readily available in that toolbox to be able to work with different students who come to reading in different ways. Yes, and one of the huge parts of that, of course, is also being a role model, right? When a student knows that their teacher learns something new every year that can help them be a better teacher, boy, that speaks volumes. That speaks more powerfully probably than anything we tell our kids. So to be able to show that and talk about, I learned something new. We're going to try something new in our class today. I think that's really rewarding for the teachers who work with us. And I think that our teachers deserve our support and our really, they deserve champions who are willing to talk openly about what's working in our schools and what needs improvement. So that kind of leads me to my other kind of quick question too. I also wanted to touch on the Stern Center promotes the science of reading. What is the science of reading and why is it important? So the science of reading is really the big label that we put on about 40 years now, 40 plus years of research from all different fields, from education, from cognitive psychology, certainly neuroscience. And the science of reading is that body of research that has really powerfully illuminated our understanding of how do people learn to read? Where does it go wrong for some learners? How can we best support them? What teaching methods work? And so that whole body of research is called the science of reading. It's what we're based on at the Stern Center. And there's a long history of arguments about how folks learn to read. But in fact, the research is pretty clear and pretty persuasive about how it actually works in our brains and what we can do to support that process happening for almost everybody. The research is actually incredibly encouraging. It suggests that better than 95% of kids can become highly skilled readers with the right instruction. Wow, that's amazing. It's a good news. I mean, we linguistically and in other ways, human beings are such communicators. Yeah, that's right. And it's interesting to know that we're actually primordially hardwired towards reading, which is a very abstract way of communication. Well, here's the interesting twist, right? So it makes perfect sense that we're hardwired for oral language. What you and I are doing right now, our brains know how to do. No problem. When we make that leap into print, of course, that's a relatively new phenomenon for human beings, right? Printed books, when you think evolutionarily at least. And so the idea that we have to train our brains to read through very explicit and systematic instruction is also a huge piece of the science of reading. Yeah. And it's great that we've actually gotten our arms around that and understand that. We now know. And you know, I don't know, we always think about things like, oh, we've had all these great advances and, you know, physics and other aspects of science. But it's really interesting to think that there are fundamentals there based on reading, which is something I think a lot of people sometimes take for granted. Yes, very true. And especially adults. We've known how to do it for a while most of us. We don't think about it, right? That's right. So however, Mont's students, our students here in Vermont, how are they doing with reading based on national trends right now? The national trends are pretty grim. That's my word for it at the moment. I'm worried about how our students are doing both in terms of the nationwide profile and here in Vermont. While where Vermont generally performs better than the nationwide trends, it's not nearly a high enough bar against which we're being measured. And so right now, the national figures are that about 33 to 35% of our fourth grade students based on the national tests are scoring us proficient in reading. That's it? Wait, wait. That's... Yes. Oh, wow. That's why I use the word grim. It is really sobering to think about the downstream consequences of having that many fourth graders struggling with reading. Because of course, as we discuss the effect compounds and some of this comes from a disconnect between classroom practice that has been typical over the last two decades or so and what the science of reading has been busily accumulating in the understanding of what works in reading. So the Stern Center is very determined to reconnect that classroom practice to the best research, really help teachers dig in and understand what are you seeing unfold when a student, for example, when a student starts guessing at words, what are you seeing there? How do you give them a different strategy for breaking down the sounds of that word and thus becoming a truly empowered reader who even if it's a familiar book, even if it's an unfamiliar book, they know how to decode those words. They're going to build their comprehension because reading is clicking for them. Yeah. And that's how you... And I mean, I would also say that that's almost a... It's almost a national crisis. I mean, as a democracy, one of the tenants of a functioning democracy is having a literate populace. You got it. And at 35%, that's... We've got some work to do. That's slightly terrifying. We've got some work to do. You have to be able to read and understand the democracy in order to be able to participate adequately, that's what I would suggest. And people are surprised by these stats. I was when I became more conversant in the reading crisis in our country. And when you think about how that... You sort of ask yourself, how has this not gotten better? It's been stagnant for a couple of decades now. And so I do think that there's a bit of a groundswell now. Parents are beginning to pay attention. Teachers that we work with are just fighting mad that they didn't already know all this stuff. And they're showing an incredibly inspiring commitment to changing practice to help more kids learn to read more quickly. Well, that's a big figure. And that's a very shocking figure. I mean, I'm seeing here and I'm shocked. And I think that's something that I think... I mean, it should be getting out there more. But especially as teachers, I would think as somebody who teaches the practice of reading, that would also be very disheartening. Yes. And it's a huge equity issue. When we look at the stats and break them down by students with the highest need, if you receive free and reduced lunch, the picture is even more serious. It drops to about 19 percent proficiency. And again, those stats are all publicly available if folks want to read up on them a little more. Stern Center's website is a good resource as well. But yes, it's time for us to all sit up and pay attention to this unfolding crisis and get serious about helping ensure that reading becomes the building block for good life for as many kids as we can possibly reach. Yeah. I mean, when you said that statistic, I thought that was the number of children that are being left behind, not the ones who are actually functionally. Wow. I'm in shock. Okay. Thank you, Lori. I don't know if you've just saved me for that. And by the way, research that. If you're a parent, take a look at it. Sterncenter.org has more information on it. I'm sure it's on the internet. And it speaks to staying on top of your children's education, because obviously there are cracks and people are falling through them. So I just kind of want to also touch on the first two years of the COVID pandemic and how that shapes Stern Center's work. And what you're seeing now as far as students in schools post pandemic, because I know that's a big question for a lot of parents and people in Vermont. Sure. And there's been a lot of talk about trying to measure learning loss post pandemic. How do we get our arms around this? How do we start to identify early? What's happening? What can we do about it? And you know, I think our students went through a lot, our teachers and schools certainly went through a lot, and we as parents went through a lot, our communities. And so taking stock of that and understanding that despite those consequences for all of us, we do have work to do. And so the Stern Center's work has actually been last year we were in 38 states and a handful of countries around the world reaching teachers with the virtual form of the learning that we were talking about for applying it to your classroom with success. And that part of what we do, I see that expanding significantly. We've been really fortunate that we had a generous donor who allowed us to establish the Cynthia K. Hale Institute for Excellence through Mrs. Hale's vision. She was an educator who really understood, boy, if you can get to a teacher and change their practice, you're going to get a nice multiplier effect for student by student. And so we give grants to teachers to help them with access to this professional learning through her gift. Yeah. So just so you know, if you're a teacher out there, there are grant programs through the Stern Center that are readily available. Really quickly, the Stern Center, I just want to thank you guys so much because I know you guys have been out there helping Vermonters and everyone in our community for almost 40 years, which is a pretty significant amount of time. And so what is your reach and what impact have you been able to have beyond our state borders really quickly? Yeah. The biggest way that we reach others outside of Vermont is through the teacher professional learning area. So that's really where the multi-state and multi-country reach kicks in. But we also are reaching lots of students now virtually in other states and other countries. Well, which is exciting. Let Vermont literacy go everywhere. That's right. Yay. Well, Lori, thank you so much for coming on the program. It's been an utter delight. And thank you so much for all you do for children around the state of Vermont. It's an honor. We very much appreciate it. Please check out sterncenter.org if you would like more information. And thank you guys so much for joining me this month. I'll see you next month.