AUSTIN — After two months of training, it was finally Jamaria Holmes' moment.
The 7-year-old Avalon Park Elementary School student bounded across the auditorium of the By The Hand Club in Austin one recent morning, high-fiving her coaches as an announcer bellowed her name and the Chicago Bulls intro music shook the floor.
She was running toward a reading quiz.
Jamaria was among about 100 elementary school students who had been brought to the club, 415 N. Laramie Ave., from different corners of the city to participate in "reading playoffs" for a book they'd spent the summer digesting in pieces.
The program was disguised as a summer camp, constantly interrupted by dance breaks and popsicles. But it was there to keep kids' academic skills sharp during a time when students face what Anwar Smith calls "the education leak."
"When you work really hard all year, then you go three months without doing anything, schools end up having to spend more time to catch students back up in the fall," said Smith, the managing director of operations for By the Hand. "So our goal now is ... to catch students back up, to keep kids using their minds and growing during the summer."
By the Hand, a non-profit organization that grew out of The Moody Church in Cabrini-Green, runs an after-school program during the school year.
But over the summer, it formed a kind of book club around "The Space Mission Adventure," a novel that chronicles four African-American boys on their way to space camp.
The book was handed out to older students, who were told to read a chapter every week. As for students in third grade or below, volunteers came to their houses and read to them.
Each week they were brought together for discussions about the characters and their adventures.
All participating students had been hand-selected by their school's principal as being "critically in need of intervention," Smith said, often lacking the resources or role models to help them keep advancing through school.
But by telling them in advance that they were headed for a competition — the winning team would win tickets to a Chicago Bulls game — educators found a way to trick them into diving deep into the book's subject matter.
"It's a friendly competition where they're engaged in the story because they know this is coming at the end, but they're reading it with a sense of purpose," Smith said. "Then they find out along the way, wow, this is actually a really good book."
On the day of the "reading playoffs," students were jumping over each other to answer questions about rockets and three-headed Martians.
Their enthusiasm wasn't the only sign that the program was working. Based on tests and surveys that book-ended the summer, the average student's reading ability had jumped an entire grade level from start to finish, administrators said.
And for students living in areas rocked by violence this summer, Austin site director Bernadette Ballenger said, giving kids the opportunity to discuss a book together delivers benefits beyond the nuts and bolts of reading and vocabulary.
"Coming here or being visited at home gives them security and balance and stability," Ballenger said. "A lot of them have cousins or family members who have been shot, or they have to act like parents to their little brothers or sisters. Our job is just to give them a place where they can be a kid."
Niveah Simone Hester, 11, said the center had become "like a second home" as she prepared to start sixth grade at Oscar Depriest Elementary School, 139 S. Parkside Ave.
"It's a place where I know I'm safe," she said. "And I like that when we read together...it's like we can imagine this whole other world."
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