First-grader Tresslyn McCurry and second-grader Madison Combe listen as HEROES coordinator Barbara Moore reads Friday to a group of students at Heppner Elementary School.<br>Staff photo by Sarah Britain

Last spring, Heppner Elementary School faced losing its community volunteer reading program, Start Making a Reader Today (SMART).

So the school decided to take matters into its own hands.

With the help of Heppner Schools Adopt-A-Teacher and a community-wide fundraising effort, the school will be starting its own program this year, known as Heppner Elementary Reading Opportunities for Every Student (HEROES).

“I was just so lucky that my school didn’t want this to go away,” said Barbara Moore, a former coordinator for SMART and now the program manager for HEROES.

Moore said she remembers well the meeting in which she and six other SMART coordinators were told they wouldn’t be paid for their jobs anymore.

SMART has brought volunteer readers into classrooms in Umatilla and Morrow counties for the past seven years. Typically, volunteers spend two hours a week reading to children. But the heart of SMART is its coordinators, who recruit, schedule, train and monitor the community volunteers.

On April 4, seven of the eight Umatilla and Morrow county coordinators met in Heppner for their monthly meeting. Melissa George, the SMART area manager for Umatilla and Morrow counties, stood up and told them the organization had decided to shift the coordinator position from paid to volunteer.

“We were heartbroken,” Moore said. “We loved our jobs.”

Moore said she knew she could not spend as many hours working as a volunteer as she had being paid – she was paid for 14 hours a week but frequently worked 20 or 25.

Matt Combe, Heppner Elementary’s principal, said SMART’s change of philosophy hit the school hard. Without a coordinator, he said, there was no way to keep the reading program running. And reading programs, he said, are an essential part of Heppner’s success.

Combe said Heppner Elementary’s test scores are extremely high when compared with other schools of the same size. And Molly Rill, who teaches third grade, said 100 percent of her students met state benchmarks last year.

“These kids were coming up with a lot of reading,” she said. “They had SMART for kindergarten, first, second and third grades.”

Heppner also uses the Accelerated Reader program, which tests reader comprehension through computer- enhanced testing.

But HEROES is not just SMART with a new name. Unlike SMART, the new program will serve all elementary schoolchildren. And, while SMART coordinators typically used a special room for volunteer reading sessions, Moore also will be working in the classroom. She will help kids with reading and incorporate the AR program into HEROES.

Also, HEROES is not confined to those books approved by the SMART program, which had strict guidelines (Moore said books were allowed to mention winter, but not Christmas). Although her library still is small, Moore said teachers are donating books and the school librarian has offered the loan of books to the program.

“(SMART) was a great program, but I think we can really build on it,” Moore said.

Rill said securing funds for the program still is in the works, but she is confident the money will show up. In addition to support from Adopt-A-Teacher, she is getting help from the Umatilla/Morrow Education Services District to write grants and the school staff has come up with some good ideas such as a Read-a-Thon where students ask for pledges in exchange for reading.

“What better way can we do this than to say, ‘Yes, Johnny, if you read five books I’ll give you $5’,” she said.