The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Varsity athletes volunteering to boost children’s literacy
For Shiloh High Athletic Director Robert Wilson, the job is more than just organizing the school’s sports teams. It’s equally important to connect those teams to the community around them.
“I’m big on community and giving back,” he said. “My parents always taught me that, and at my previous high school in Fulton County, we were very close to our cluster schools and did activities with our athletes as a way to connect.”
When Wilson got to the Snellville school last year, he immediately looked for ways to create that same closeness among Shiloh’s feeder schools.
“One thing I heard from the community was they wanted to get our kids more involved,” he said. And that was the incentive to launch the Cluster Athletic Reading Initiative, a program that takes Shiloh’s athletes into elementary and middle school classrooms to work with students on literacy issues. For one week, mem- bers of the Shiloh football, basketball, softball, track and cheerleading squads fanned out to read and speak with youngsters about reading and more.
Junior basketball player Toneari Lane got to hone his Spanish skills with some second graders.
“I’m taking Spanish, so I read to the kids in Spanish, and they helped me with some things I didn’t know,” said the 17-year-old. “I liked talking to the kids and hearing their points of view. They were super excited, one because I’m 6-foot-5, and they thought I was huge, and because we gave out football tickets. I loved it, and I’m looking forward to going back.”
Wilson reached out to Shiloh’s coaches to identify student athletes as participants. “They had to be doing really well because they’d miss class and have to make up their work,” he said. “And I didn’t want to focus just on football players. So we wound up with almost 20, and many of them had grown up in our cluster and got to go back to their elementary schools.”
Wilson also worked with the feeder school principals to find out what sort of activities would most benefit their students, and he learned it wasn’t just about literacy.
“Some needed volunteers in PE classes,” he said. “We even helped out by stuffing envelopes for teachers. We had a Q&A with the middle school across the street to talk about what it’s like to be a student athlete and how high school is different from middle school. For some of our students who would rather not speak publicly, it gave them a chance to work on those skills, too.”
But literacy will remain the hallmark of the program that Wilson plans to repeat again this spring.
“We want to get the kids to understand that reading skills have to be on point, and we encourage them to do well,” he said. “Even though the main focus was reading, we talk about the importance of doing well in school as whole.”
And the young students in Shiloh’s five feeder elementaries are looking forward to it, he said.
“The response from the kids was great. To them, these giant 6-foot-6 basketball and football players are rock stars. It was like having the Atlanta Falcons show up and talk.”