By Laura Umbrecht

WASHINGTON—Sofia Marquez hunches over a desk just her size, her tiny fingers curled firmly around a red crayon. She traces a deliberate “S,” followed by hesitant “o.” With effort, she signs the final “a” in her name with a preschooler’s flourish and flashes a proud smile at her tutor. After two months of concentration, the four-year-old proudly shows off her first perfectly spelled nametag, memorialized on yellow construction paper. Sofia celebrates with a victory lap around the classroom, presenting the evidence of her hard work to her classmates, all wearing red Jumpstart tee shirts.

Sofia hurries back to her desk, where Claire Naylor, her tutor, is waiting. Claire and Sofia make an unlikely pair: Naylor, a 5’9” sophomore at Georgetown University, towers over the preschooler, who is small for her age. Naylor’s cropped blonde hair and green eyes contrast with Sofia’s dark features.  Their appearances highlight their different circumstances: Naylor, a student at a prestigious national university, never faced the academic and social challenges that Sofia does. Sofia’s victory lap is something tutor and preschooler alike can celebrate. “She had been struggling with the spelling for a long time,” Naylor recalls later. “And then she did it, she wrote her whole name, and I was so proud of her!”

They’ve been working together since fall 2007, when Sofia first enrolled in preschool. This partnership is at the core of the Jumpstart School Success Program, which strives to reduce the achievement gap between low-income preschoolers and their more affluent peers. One-on-one relationships between college students and children are designed to build language, literacy, and social skills, which are often weaker for children in communities like Sofia’s. According to the program’s research, disadvantaged students can begin school with vocabularies one-quarter the size of a middle-income or wealthy child. Faced with this challenge, the Georgetown Jumpstart Program works closely with Sofia’s preschool, Washington’s Rosemount Center.

Like many of her peers at Rosemount Center, Sofia is the daughter of low-income, Spanish-speaking parents. A quiet child, Sofia struggled with the social interactions that Jumpstart describes as essential for early-childhood learning. Her preschool teacher recommended her for the program so she could gain more independence and confidence in the classroom. With her tutor by her side, Sofia practices reading and writing, and has made remarkable strides.

 Working together was not always easy for the pair. “It took a few sessions for Sofia to warm up to me,” Naylor explains. “I definitely remember a few sessions sitting there, with her doing a puzzle and just not talking to me. But after that we were best friends.” Since joining the program last fall, Sofia has become one of the more outspoken children in the classroom. “It was amazing seeing the change in her,” Naylor recalls. “You could see her definitely switching roles, and by the time she left she had really strong opinions and ideas.”

This was the vision of Aaron Lieberman, Jumpstart founder and former CEO, when he conceived the idea as an undergraduate at Yale University. Lieberman penned the Jumpstart mission statement in 1993, and it is still used today: “To work toward the day every child in America enters school prepared to succeed.” Now in its 14th year, the Jumpstart Corps has grown from just 15 Yale students and one participating preschool to more than 3,500 members across the country at 75 universities, partnering with nearly 14,000 children. Though not affiliated with Head Start, a federal school readiness program, the Jumpstart model has been implemented in many preschools that receive Head Start Funding, like Rosemount Center.

With the United States ranked by the United Nation’s Children Fund (UNICEF) as one of the worst industrialized nations in which to be a child, Jumpstart recognizes that insufficient early education has become a “national problem,” especially for low-income children. Aimed at bridging this gap, Jumpstart targets preschool programs in low-income communities.

The program has established five sites in Washington, D.C. Studies have shown that the District of Columbia has the highest child poverty rate in the United States, with approximately three in ten children living in poverty. The Washington Post reported last year that “in reading and math, the District's public school students score at the bottom among 11 major city school systems, even when poor children are compared only with other poor children.”

Embarking on its third year, the Georgetown University Jumpstart Program has been performing well. Kate Murphy, 25, is the D.C. Site Manager for Georgetown, and works to foster the relationship between District preschools and the University’s program. “The centers see the high quality work that we provide to children,” she said. “The first year skepticism has been replaced by sites and families wanting all of the children in their schools in Jumpstart.”

Student members of the Program take their job seriously. Jumpstart Corps members work long hours, often balancing heavy course loads and extracurricular activities and putting in lengthy commutes between the preschools and the university. Committing 15-20 hours a week to the program—not including travel time—can be challenging for a college student. But Brittany Keates, 19, believes it is worth the effort. A team leader for a District preschool, Keates says her work has a real impact on the children who participate in the program: “As much as we may be helping kids learn the alphabet or learn how to read, it's the other things that we're helping them develop—like independence, an interest in reading and learning, and problem solving skills—that are really going to carry over and positively affect the rest of their lives,” she said.

The highly structured Jumpstart model is designed to do exactly that. Taking place after the ordinary school day, Jumpstart sessions are divided into three parts: one-to-one reading time, to improve reading and analytical skills; “circle time,” in which children participate in group activities to improve literacy, language, and social interaction; and “choice time,” where children are encouraged to develop and carry out their own plans for play.

In some ways, the model is less about what children should do than about what Corps members should not: the program’s emphasis on “process, not product” discourages members from using patterns, coloring books, or excessive praise. The intensive training period begins about a month before the program begins—even for returning members—and involves all manner of child psychology techniques. The program reports that the number of children served has tripled since 2002, and that preschoolers involved in Jumpstart have maintained statistically significant gains in school readiness skills.

Back at Rosemount Center, Claire and Sofia are wrapping up their session around 5 o’clock, when Sofia’s father arrives to take her home. Sofia is excited to show her papi her nametag, but before running to his side, she gives her tutor a parting hug around the knees. Naylor recalls, “I was thinking about their early childhood learning experiences and just how clearly children remember experiences and people who have had an impact on them, especially in the huge developmental age of three to five year olds. So it’s really exciting to be part of that.”