By Kathleen Acuff

Reading is fun, and learning to read is serious business, as the faces of these children declare. Selena Cipres and Alice McGuckin enjoy a funny story.

Fourth-grader Jennifer Salto read aloud from “The No-Five-Year-Olds Club,” oblivious to eavesdropping adults.

The Castro Elementary School student read with expression. When she came to an unfamiliar polysyllabic word, she calmly sounded it out: furn - i - ture. Furniture!

Asked what the story was about, Jennifer gave the Town Crier a synopsis and the news that the book has a new fourth chapter. Jennifer introduced a character, “a kitty named Fuzzy,” and a story twist that will not be revealed here.

She has been working with her tutor, Gillian Croen, a resident of Los Altos Hills, for several weeks. Together, they’ve learned a lot.

Jennifer has a head start on Croen. She participated in the pilot program conducted by volunteers in the Avenidas Early Literacy Program at Castro last year.

This story has a plot twist, too. In early September, Jennifer and many other Castro children are working twice a week with tutors trained in the YES Reading program.

YES Reading is a non-profit organization that trains community volunteers to help struggling first- through fifth-grade students become adept at reading.

Castro is the first school in Santa Clara County to provide the program.

Executive Director Sarah Almy explained that tutors work with students in a structured, curriculum-based program to build basic literacy skills. Students leave the program when they read at grade level, she said.

“Castro is a great school environment. Principal Carla Tarazi and the district have been really welcoming to us,” Almy said.

YES provides pre- and post-testing of students each year. Almy said the testing shows that students improve one grade level after 30 hours of tutoring. Volunteers tutor students in 40-minute sessions twice weekly.

“A lot of kids in the program are just a little bit behind,” Almy said. “They move around, miss critical parts of reading instruction. We fill in the gaps, and they take off.”

The program is privately funded at no charge to the school or the district, Almy said.

“We want to be a support to the schools, not a burden to them. We know how strapped they are,” she added.

Almy joined YES Reading after teaching fourth- and fifth-graders with learning disabilities in Houston.

“It helped me see that reading is absolutely fundamental. Students have to read to do math problems, science, homework,” she said.

“Struggling with reading makes them lose interest in everything. We want to make sure that reading is fun and not a chore,” she added.

YES Reading does that through its one-on-one focus on each child.

“They see how much we want them to succeed in reading. And we encourage them to talk about themselves in relation to what they read,” Almy said.

Third-grader Brian Melo-Alvarado read to tutor Pam Randall, a dual-immersion kindergarten teacher. As he tackled strange word formations - contractions - and encountered odd punctuation - exclamation points - he also wrestled with new ideas as he read aloud from “I Want to Go Camping.”

“Have you ever been camping?” Randall asked him. Brian shook his head.

Most of the tutors at Castro are from the Los Altos area. They were working with 34 students by last Monday, and the number grows weekly, Almy said.

Most of the books in the reading center are donated, many of them by employees of Intuit and SAP who held book drives.

The program gives books away to children every month to help them build home libraries.