New Northside Elementary first graders carefully surveyed the array of stuffed puppies before choosing one to be their reading partner for the rest of the school year. 

Hugging their new puppies tightly, children wasted no time settling on names for their new friends before gathering on the floor to introduce them to fellow classmates’ companions. 

For many children, the day a puppy became their own was highly anticipated. 

"There's this tradition at Northside that the kindergartners know once they reach first grade, they get a puppy, they get to read to that puppy," said Johanna Soderberg, a first-grade teacher at Northside. 

As children waited to pick their four-legged friend, Soderberg said parents often told her how excited their child was. 

"They were like, 'Oh my goodness, she has been talking about this all summer,'" Soderberg recalled one parent saying. 

The puppies are given to each first grader in the district through the Panhandle Alliance for Education’s Ready to Read program, which supports early childhood literacy. 

PAFE, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting excellence in education throughout the district, was founded in 2002 by a small group of community members who wanted to strengthen support for public education. 

Since then, the organization has funded several grants and programs for the district to sustain that mission, and Soderberg has seen how effective the program has been for her students. 

At the beginning of the year, first graders are learning how to read, said Soderberg. However, as students continue to read throughout the school year, she has seen how their reading skills grow with the puppies by their side. 

"Seeing them gain that fluency where they're reading confidently and accurately and with expression is just so exciting," said Soderberg. 

Oftentimes, students quietly read to their puppies in the classroom, an activity that develops oral reading fluency, said Soderberg. 

"That process of reading aloud as they're learning to read is so important," said Soderberg. 

As students read at home and in school, they receive puppy points, which are exchanged for collars, nametags, and other accessories for their puppies. 

With enough points, the students can also take their puppy outside of the classroom for recess or lunch. 

"We've had to clean off a couple of yogurt stains from puppies that made it to lunch," said Soderberg with a laugh. 

The program is "the single most effective reading incentive" one district elementary teacher said she had seen in her 26 years in the classroom, according to PAFE Program Director Heather Lowman. 

"It is one of our favorite [programs] because it has such a positive impact on our community. Our first-grade readers are some of the top in the state when they're comparing reading scores," said Lowman. 

But the program hasn't always been part of the organization. It began nearly 15 years ago, when Carolyn Whalen, then a first-grade teacher at Northside, learned of a similar initiative that gave reading puppies to students in Coeur d'Alene. 

Seeking to provide her students with the same opportunity, Whalen wrote a grant to PAFE requesting puppies for her class. 

"Over time, the students were doing so well. There was so much progress shown and we were having so much fun with it," said Whalen. 

The hopeful teacher returned to PAFE, asking if they would be willing to expand the grant. 

PAFE agreed, and after funding the grant for 10 years, the organization voted to add it as an early childhood literacy program for all first graders in the district.

"Instead of having a teacher repeatedly ask for that funding year after year, that's where we wanted to say, this is impactful, and we want to continuously fund this program," said PAFE executive director Amy Longanecker 

Longanecker said multiple factors, such as teaching methods and reading interventionalists, play big roles in the district's exceptional literacy rates. 

"We're just a small piece of the pie, but if it's something that supports teachers and gets students excited about reading, then that's the role of the Panhandle Alliance for Education," said Longanecker. 

Monthly donations to PAFE contribute greatly to programs like Ready to Read, ensuring that children in the district have access to resources that will help them thrive, said Longanecker. 

"It was magical," said Whalen of the program as she recalled watching her students fall in love with reading. "It really made the end of my career."

    A Northside Elementary first grader smiles with her new reading puppy provided by the Panhandle Alliance for Education’s Ready to Ready program.