Mathew Stevenson entered Grade two at Uplands Park School reading at a very early Grade one level but now his future is looking much brighter thanks to the efforts of his parents; his teacher, Carol Jepson; a tutor; and most especially to the Uplands Park PAC who, along with the principal, Marie Harel, enthusiastically supported a pilot "Rec and Read" summer program and worked hard to bring a pilot version of this three week reading intervention program to Grade two and three students in the school.

For the past several years, Donna Klockars has championed the program, which is based on extensive education research. Terri Mack (a former Neighbourhood Hero from three years ago) and Sean Weighill have implemented it over the past two years.

Last January, twenty-two Uplands Park students who were reading below expectation were identified as being "at promise" and broken into four groups of five or six each to work with Carol, Donna, Terri, and Sean.

All of these students saw their reading ability improve dramatically over that three-week period and those improvements have continued since.

Mathew, whose parents and teachers describe as being a "shy boy", surprised everyone with his progress. He improved four reading levels during the three week program so Mrs. Jepson was pleased to grade him at level 16 on his report card -- At the end of Grade two students are expected to be reading at level 20 -- but then, just before the report cards were sent home, Mathew proved to Mrs. Jepson that he should be given a level 20 grade.

"He just read like a hot darn," she exclaimed. "He answered all the comprehension questions, the inferencing questions, which are what you use to see if they've got it, and he could relate what he was reading to his own life ... I had to go back and redo his report card."

Both Mrs. Jepson and Mathew's parents were surprised that this "shy boy" had the confidence to speak up for himself. Normally his dad told me, he would have come home and asked one of them to speak to Mrs. Jepson on his behalf.

By the way this "shy" boy doesn't talk a lot about his reading achievements but get him talking about his pet spiders and caterpillars, caterpillars he has seen evolve into Monarch butterflies, and he could talk for hours ... but let's get back to his reading successes.

Mathew's reading achievements have been so extraordinary that he was recently recognized over the entire school's PA system and all of his classmates applauded.

It wasn't hard to see the excitement in his eyes when he told me about that day. I hear he was also pretty excited when he learned that he was going to be recognized in this column, a well-deserved recognition.

Last Friday I found myself walking along Hastings Street, a street, as you probably know, that is populated by a high percentage of people who are facing devastating life challenges. With each passing block and each defeated, empty-eyed face, I couldn't help but wonder how many of these people would have avoided this fate if they had found a literacy intervention program when they were Mathew's age or even as a teenager - A similar three week literacy program has recently been implemented at John Barsby Community Secondary School.

No doubt miracles similar to the one Mathew experienced will be seen at Barsby and the lives of dozens of teenagers may well be transformed - It's never too late.

Let's hope our provincial government and our school board chose to invest in the future of these programs. It would be an investment that would change lives and pay huge dividends in social security savings in the future.