Reading mentor reconnects with Kennewick student

Joyce Kerr has worked with a lot of Kennewick children in her 15 years as a Team Read mentor.

But there was one little third-grade girl, a refugee from Egypt, that she always wondered about.

The girl was struggling with English but was particularly bright, Kerr recalled. And she had an affinity for the Skippyjon Jones books, which chronicle the adventures of a large-eared Siamese cat.

“I was just thrilled because she was so inspired and eager to learn,” said Kerr, now 89.

Kerr only worked with the girl that one school year, but she never forgot her.

Kerr’s daughter Patty Jones had heard her mother talk for years about certain children she’d helped, including a little girl whose family fled Egypt.

But recently she realized it was a girl she knew, Jaclin Gabraiel, a Kamiakin High School senior.

And that’s when she hatched a plan for them to meet again at the annual Team Read luncheon.

The two didn’t even exchange words before embracing, Jones said.

When 18-year-old Jaclin talked about what Kerr’s coaching had meant to her, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

“Everybody was crying. I wanted to cry,” Jaclin said.

Team Read was developed by the The Children’s Reading Foundation, which started in Kennewick and has since grown into a national organization.

Team Read partners mentors one-on-one with children in the first- through third-grades who need extra attention on their reading. Kennewick school officials aim to have 90 percent or more of third-graders reading at grade level or better.

Kerr is one of about 200 Team Read volunteers helping in the Kennewick district.

She joined the program in 2000 when it started, first working with kids at Westgate Elementary School before moving to Hawthorne when her daughter became the Team Read coordinator there.

Westgate is one of Kennewick’s most diverse schools. Many families, some of them refugees like Jaclin, hail from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Kerr remembered one first-grade boy, whose native language was Russian, was particularly obstinate in his disinterest in reading.

“He said he could learn everything from TV,” she said. But by third-grade, he’d learned that books could be just as entertaining, she said.

Most of the children Kerr works with, though, want to be better readers. They get excited when they’re able to read a word they’ve previously struggled with or when they beat her in the word games she plays with them.

Kerr had trained to be a nurse, and she assisted her husband in running his Kennewick medical practice after they moved to the Tri-Cities in the late 1940s.

Jaclin’s family originally fled to Egypt from Sudan before coming as refugees to the United States. When she started as a kindergartener at Westgate, she spoke only her native Nubian.

“I had no idea what English even was,” she said. “I didn’t even know what ‘hello’ meant.”

While she’d started picking up English before being paired with Kerr, Jaclin said she made particularly big strides after going through Team Read.

But that wasn’t all that stuck with her as she continued through school.

Toward the end of her freshman year at Southridge High School, as Jaclin began filling out her class schedule for her sophomore year, she noticed she could sign up to be a Team Read mentor herself. She didn’t hesitate to add the extra class at the end of her school day.

“People ask how I can do a seventh hour, and I say, ‘Because I get to teach kids,’ ” she said. “I want to do the exact same thing for kids who need help.”

After the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, Kerr will go back to working with students, but Jaclin said she needs to step away from the program for now because her class schedule at Kamiakin and the Tri-Tech Skills Center has become too demanding.

But she still gets to work with kids — she’s studying early childhood education at Tri-Tech, working in the center’s preschool.

It’s a career inspired by Kerr, she said.

“Your students will be very fortunate,” Kerr told her.

This story was originally published November 26, 2015 at 3:23 PM with the headline "Reading mentor reconnects with Kennewick student."