CREATING READERS, ONE CHILD AT A TIME

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Apr 6, 2008 | by CAROL McGRAW

Barbara Swaby, Ph.D., says her life has been a series of "unexplained miracles." Local students might say she is their miracle.

For 31 years the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs professor has been rescuing the futures of children doing poorly in school because they can't read well. As director of the UCCS Graduate Reading Program and the Graduate Reading Clinic, she teaches graduate students how to teach reading. Using their newfound skills, her students provide one-on-one help to children in free reading clinics, and most of them go on to teach reading in their communities.

"She has been changing lives one child at a time," says Jaime McMullen Garcia, associate director of development at the University of Colorado Foundation.

This year, the UCCS College of Education is establishing the Dr. Barbara Swaby Endowed Professorship. It is one of the highest honors a college professor can receive. A $500,000 community fundraising effort is under way to create the endowed chair that will ensure that Swaby's invaluable work will continue after she retires, Garcia explains. This is the first endowed professorship for the College of Education.

Swaby provides 400 to 500 free reading evaluations for children each year. Unlike a typical professor's office, hers is filled with children's books, a child-size table and chairs. On the walls are colorfully drawn thank-you notes sent by children over the years.

"Everywhere I go, when people know I'm from UCCS, they say 'Oh, do you know Dr. Swaby?' And then they talk about how she helped them read, or helped their child or grandchildren to go to college," Garcia says. "I can't believe how many people whose lives have been touched by her."

Step by step -- sometimes by sheer energy and will -- she built at UCCS one of the finest reading programs in the country, educators say. Because of her scholarship, she holds the university's highest title of President's Teaching Scholar, Garcia says.

But Swaby does not promote her accomplishments. Instead, she says simply, "I've had good fortune."

Against all odds

Swaby was almost killed before she was even born. Her mother, Gwendolyn Swaby, and her father, the Rev. Herbert Swaby, a Presbyterian minister, were missionaries in their native Jamaica when Gwendolyn, nine months pregnant, was accosted in their home by thieves, kicked and beaten. She was taken to the hospital where a week later, Barbara was born. Gwendolyn went in and out of a coma for months.

"Neither one of us should have survived. My mother wasn't able to get to know me until I was a year old," Swaby says. Yet her parents' influence on her life is profound. As a tot, they took her with them to the church schools they founded in Tower Isle, Jamaica.

"I could not have avoided learning, even if I wanted to," Swaby says. She graduated from high school at age 14, and began helping her mother at school.

Forty-five years later, she still talks with wonderment about how the right people appeared at the right time to support and guide her.

One Sunday, while playing piano at church, a visitor complimented her on her music. Weeks later, her parents got a letter from that visitor -- Raymond Rankin, president of Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tenn. -- offering a four-year music scholarship to the Presbyterian-founded school.

She arrived on campus in 1964. "I still had girlish ribbons in my hair," she recalls. Being so much younger than the other students, she had few friends. But professor Arnold Thomas and his wife, Ruth, who had three children, took her in. "They became my family and still are."

When she and the Thomas kids, who were white, attended movies, they sat in the balcony where blacks were relegated, and on trips to Knoxville they stayed with her in segregated hotels. "They are my heroes," she says.

After graduating, Swaby went back to Jamaica to teach. She had been there three years when a motorist knocked on the family's door asking for help with a flat tire. "My father went out to help, and I held the flashlight," she recalls.

Her father had much in common with the motorist, the Rev. Calvin Didier, a pastor at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, Minn. Soon after, the House of Hope women's association offered Swaby a scholarship for graduate school. House of Hope congregants Charles and Mary Field became another of her surrogate families.

At the University of Minnesota she studied reading education. "Being from a Third World country, I saw that illiteracy was killing us there, like it is here in this country, too."

The church also helped Swaby get her doctorate in reading. When she graduated in 1977, UCCS was looking to hire.

Swaby's resume stood out to professor emeritus Jack Sherman, then associate dean of the College of Education, and professor Tom Giblin. They knew the University of Minnesota was a reading- education powerhouse and she was a top-notch student.

Swaby decided to take the UCCS job because the graduate reading program was new and she felt she could "create something."