When Reading Programs Work, Why Do They Stay Pilots?
A literacy tutoring program in Hamilton County brought 91 first-graders from below grade level to grade level during the 2024-2025 school year, with participating students making nearly twice as much progress as their classmates. But the program's expansion to 11 schools happened not through district budget allocation but through a three-way funding arrangement between a university, a nonprofit, and a temporary federal grant, revealing how public schools have outsourced the teaching of reading itself.
Literacy First operates through what amounts to a financial Rube Goldberg machine. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga provides funds and recruits teacher candidates to serve as tutors. Chattanooga 2.0, a local nonprofit, administers the program. An AmeriCorps State grant through Volunteer Tennessee supplies 14 additional tutors for high-need elementary schools. Each organization solves one piece, funding, staffing, administration, that school districts traditionally handled internally.
The program served nearly 550 kindergarten and first-grade students across Hamilton County in 2024-2025. Kindergarteners receiving tutoring grew 27% more than their peers. First-graders made nearly twice the progress of classmates who didn't receive the intervention.
The Machinery Behind the Results
Literacy First uses a structured phonics approach developed by the Florida Center for Reading Research, focusing on systematic instruction in letter-sound relationships rather than whole-word memorization. Tutors work with small groups of students multiple times per week, following scripted lessons that progress through specific skill sequences.
The program began as a pilot at East Side Elementary in 2023-2024. For the current 2025-2026 school year, it expanded again: UTC contributed funds and recruited five teacher candidates as tutors at Brown Academy, while Montessori Elementary at Highland Park partnered with Chattanooga 2.0 to launch the program there.
That expansion pattern illustrates the core tension. When a program doubles student progress rates, growth happens through grant acquisition and university partnerships, not through line items in the district's operating budget. Hamilton County Schools, under superintendent Dr. Justin Robertson, has embraced the program but hasn't absorbed it into core funding.
Why Success Doesn't Scale
The reliance on external partners isn't unique to Hamilton County. School districts nationwide face budget constraints that intensified after pandemic-era federal relief funds expired. ESSER funding provided temporary resources for tutoring and intervention programs, but those dollars disappeared in 2024, leaving districts scrambling to maintain services.
AmeriCorps grants typically run for one to three years. UTC's contribution depends on the university's priorities and available funds. Chattanooga 2.0's capacity is limited by its own fundraising and staffing. None of these funding streams offer the permanence of a district budget allocation.
The 550 students served represent a fraction of Hamilton County's struggling readers. No public data shows what percentage of the district's kindergarten and first-grade population reads below grade level, making it impossible to calculate how many children need intervention but aren't receiving it.
The Outsourcing Ecosystem
Thirty years ago, school districts employed their own reading specialists and funded intervention programs through general operating budgets. The shift toward grant-dependent partnerships accelerated in the 2000s as state funding failed to keep pace with enrollment growth and special education mandates consumed larger portions of district budgets.
UTC's involvement through its Center for Excellence and Innovation in Education, directed by Dr. Allen Pratt, provides teacher candidates with classroom experience while filling a staffing gap the district can't close on its own. The arrangement benefits both parties but raises questions about sustainability. What happens to Brown Academy's tutoring program if UTC redirects those five teacher candidates to a different partnership next year?
Dr. Elaine Swafford, executive director of the Chattanooga Charter School of Excellence, operates in the same ecosystem. Charter schools and traditional public schools compete for the same pool of grant funding, creating a system where effective interventions depend on an organization's grant-writing capacity rather than student need.
The Pilot Trap
Programs that prove effective often remain pilots indefinitely because districts lack mechanisms to convert successful experiments into permanent operations. The budget process operates on annual cycles with predetermined categories. Adding a new program requires either cutting something else or finding new revenue, both politically difficult in communities where property tax increases face voter resistance.
The alternative is what Hamilton County has chosen: maintain the program through external partnerships and hope the funding continues. That approach works until it doesn't. When grants expire or university priorities shift, the students who would have benefited simply don't receive intervention.
The data from 2024-2025 shows what's possible when struggling readers get systematic, intensive support. Those 91 students who reached grade level aren't abstract statistics, they're six-year-olds who can now decode words independently, setting them on a different educational trajectory than they would have followed without intervention.
But the delivery mechanism exposes a fragility in how America funds early education. If districts can't absorb proven literacy interventions into core operations, the question isn't just about reading instruction. It's about what public schools can actually guarantee to provide.
Hamilton County's Literacy First program will continue through at least the 2025-2026 school year, funded by the current AmeriCorps grant and UTC's commitment. What happens after that depends on variables outside the district's control.