The challenge
When Joelle Formato looks at students who used to struggle with reading at her school, she sees something new: hope.
“They are excited to run down the hall every day and sign into tutoring. They’re feeling the progress,” says Formato, K-4 principal at Persistence Preparatory Academy.
It can feel like a small change. But for a school leader who’d spent years watching a group of kids fall further behind despite real gains in her school’s core reading instruction, that shift, kids running toward help instead of away from it, was proof that something had finally reached them.
“They really needed that individualized instruction piece that was really targeted to them,” Formato explains.
Since 2020, the K-8 public charter school in Buffalo, New York, had been retraining its teachers in Science of Reading-based instruction, and the quality of core reading instruction quickly increased. But the school faced a challenge that’s become familiar in districts across the country: First grade teachers trained in the Science of Reading could expertly walk a 6-year-old through decoding, but universal instruction was simply not enough to get every child reading on grade level.
A group of them sat right on the cusp of grade level, not struggling enough to qualify for the school’s most intensive intervention tier, but not getting what they needed from Tier 1 instruction alone. “We had this bucket of students who still had those struggles and really needed that individualized instruction piece that was really targeted to them,” Formato says.
For those kids, a gap that started at the start of their education continued to widen as they progressed through elementary school, and teachers in the upper grades still had no playbook for a 6th grader who’d missed their “learning to read” window.
“They are excited to run down the hall every day and sign into tutoring. They’re feeling the progress!“ — Joelle Formato, K-4 Principal, Buffalo, NY
Persistence Prep served a student population of 486 kids in school year 25-26, the majority of whom come from economically disadvantaged households. With 12 percent of students receiving special education services and no funding to hire additional interventionists, the school couldn’t deliver the one-to-one instruction those students needed on its own.
Formato considered training up college students or retired teachers to fill the gap, but managing that effort herself, on top of everything else on a school leader’s plate, felt overwhelming.
That’s when Ignite Reading first landed on Formato’s radar.
“Ignite [Reading] just kind of seemed like this brilliant total package solution that came right at the right time,” she recalls. “As a school leader, it is the easiest program we have ever implemented.”
The start of the partnership
Persistence Prep entered a pilot program with Ignite Reading in mid-February 2024, enrolling 25 students in daily early literacy intervention. The students in the pilot were mostly 2nd graders, along with a handful of 3rd graders and one 5th and one 6th grader who had spent years in intervention without the growth Formato wanted to see.
Ignite Reading paired each student with their own certified literacy tutor who used an evidence-based curriculum to deliver 1:1 reading instruction five days a week, 15 minutes a day.
A dedicated member of the Ignite Reading literacy team established and monitored student goals for the program, oversaw the certified literacy tutors to ensure the intervention curriculum was taught with fidelity, and met regularly with Formato and her teachers to review program data.
Student selection was deliberate. “We targeted students who were below or well below grade level, but who were not receiving RTI services,” Formato says. “They were these kiddos, like, right on the cusp, who just needed that extra push.”
How it works
Day to day, the program runs with almost no lift from Formato or her teachers. Students log in during their acceleration block, an existing small-group learning period that’s built into the school day so no one misses core literacy instruction.
Younger students are logged in by the school’s specials teachers; older students handle it themselves. Formato describes watching 20 students working at once in the same room, headsets on, each on a different skill.
“It’s what we call command control,” she says. “Twenty different conversations are going on that are all super productive and individualized.”
Persistence Prep teachers each have access to their students’ Ignite Reading program data, so they can see exactly what their students were working on and connect it to what was happening in the classroom.
“It doesn’t feel like this one-off, totally unaligned intervention,” Formato says. “There really is that alignment between Ignite Reading and what they’re doing in their Tier 1 instruction.”
The impact
Formato compared her 2024 Ignite Reading cohort to a group of Persistence Prep 2nd graders who started the prior year at a similar reading level without the program, and the difference surprised even her.
“I mean, blew the data out of the water,” Formato says. “It more than doubled in terms of their fluency.”
Before high-dosage intervention began, 90 percent of students in the program were reading below or well below the DIBELS benchmark. When those students were assessed again, after an average of 13.8 hours of one-to-one instruction, 60 percent had moved to reading on or above benchmark, and none remained well below it.
A comparison cohort of students from the year before, working with core instruction alone, saw only 38 percent of students reach benchmark over the same stretch.
The growth held up across every skill DIBELS measures. Seventy percent of students in the Ignite Reading cohort made “above average” or “well above average” growth on their composite scores, compared to 46 percent of the prior year’s cohort.
Fluency growth was the starkest difference: 70 percent of Ignite Reading students posted above-average or well-above-average fluency gains, against 38 percent the year before.
“We saw critical development,” Formato says of her students’ reading outcomes.
By the end of the school year, the gains showed up in students’ actual reading levels. Two students who started the program reading at a kindergarten level were reading at a 1st grade level by June. One student who began the year not yet reliably identifying letter sounds ended it reading r-controlled vowel words.
- 21 of the 25 students finished the pilot decoding multisyllabic words, the mark of a fluent reader.
- 20 of the 25 students passed every single assessment they took all year, and one student read every word correctly on every assessment given.
- More than half of the students in the program had gained one to two years of reading skills growth.
The partnership today
By the end of the year, those results had done more than validate the pilot: they helped Persistence Prep secure the funding to grow the program the following school year. School year 2026-27 represents the third year of partnership with Ignite Reading.
The qualitative results
The results weren’t only academic. “Qualitatively, their confidence and their joy around school, and finally feeling like they were not drowning, and had a fighting chance to keep up: that was huge,” Formato says.
Reading intervention program overview
School: Persistence Preparatory Academy, Buffalo, NY
Students Served: 25
Model: 1:1 reading intervention, 15 min/day, 5 days/week
Duration: 18.8 instructional hours on average
Result: 73% closed all foundational gaps; more than 50% gained one to two years of growth
