For most of her school years, Savanna Varese dreaded her morning alarm.
She didn’t like class and rarely wanted to go, pleading with her mom to let her stay home, she said. If she went, she skipped class, convinced school wasn’t for her. No one there cared about her, she thought, so why should she care about it?
So Savanna was surprised when a teacher at La Follette High School, where she’s now a senior, encouraged her to apply for Root 2 Rise, a leadership program in which upperclassmen tutor kids in elementary school.
She was intrigued. She recalled a similar experience when she was an elementary school student. Savanna moved schools often, but had positive memories of the year when older kids came in and helped at the after-school program she attended.
Savanna didn’t have any teachers of color at the time, she said, so building a connection with older students of color meant a lot.
“I looked up to them and got really close with them,” she said. “Just having the opportunity to do the same thing as them really made me want to do the same thing.”
Last year, she did, working with a class of second graders at Henderson Elementary through Root 2 Rise. The experience transformed her.
“It changed me as a person and helped me have a voice,” she said. “People can’t change me back into the person that I used to be. I’m focusing on my life now and what I want to do.”
Enabling students to find joy and purpose in their education is the core of Root 2 Rise, a Madison nonprofit that operates school-based tutoring and mentorship programs for juniors and seniors each semester. They help younger elementary school students with homework, in-class reading and math exercises, classroom projects and do one-on-one or small-group tutoring.
Student leaders also focus on encouraging and building relationships with their younger mentees to support a positive classroom environment, said Denise Hanson, the executive director and founder of Root 2 Rise.
Students apply and sign a rigorous contract promising to show up for tutoring sessions, engage in learning and behave professionally.
“Remember, you are a leader,” the contract reads. “Grow in your commitment to serve others with unconditional kindness and patience to all of the children.”
When they complete the 90-hour program, students earn high school credit, a $750 stipend, and entry into the Root 2 Rise community, which connects them to career resources and nonprofits after their contract ends. The hope is that the opportunity and responsibility give disenchanted students new meaning to their education and help them see the positive influence they can have.
“They feel like they have a responsibility to every one of those little kids in their classroom, and it makes them show up better for their own lives,” said Hanson, who spent 24 years in the classroom as a Spanish teacher.
The program targets students who may be overlooked for leadership opportunities, Hanson said. They generally have below a 2.0 grade point average, miss school frequently, and sometimes have a disciplinary record.
Ultimately, schools select the students who participate and contribute some funding, but Root 2 Rise fundraises for all student stipends and operating costs. The program includes monthly discussion groups, collaboration with school staff counterparts, reviews of student level data, and assistance for staff who respond to any challenges tutors encounter.
“We are working toward building a sustainable funding model in which our school and district partners have meaningful financial investment in the program while philanthropy continues to play an important role,” Hanson said.
The stipend is a crucial draw for students, many of whom come from low-income households, Hanson said.
“Money talks. So a lot of times they sign for the money. These kids are like, ‘I can earn some money during my school day and get credit and go do this thing at an elementary classroom,’” she said. “But they stay because a whole class of little kids falls in love with them.”
The idea for Root 2 Rise came from Hanson’s classroom experience teaching Spanish at Madison West High School. She had several Latino students who were struggling to learn the material, and so she began to examine how she was teaching it.
“I turned everything on its head, and the Latino students who were failing Spanish, I put them in leadership roles in the front of the class at a podium,” she said.
It worked. The students began to engage in their classwork.
Later, she became the behavior coach at West and noticed other students, most in remedial math and reading classes, only coming to school to socialize and get free meals.
“They were disenchanted, stuck in these lower classes,” she said. “When you get stuck in remedial reading at any high school in the country … you don’t get to take glassblowing or ceramics or choir.”
When you hate school, you don’t have any joy, and so you don’t care, she said.
“I was knocking my head up against the wall thinking, ‘What do these kids need?’ And I just felt like they needed to feel the power of being a leader, of being of service and having a side door into their academic experience,” Hanson said.
The 2013 Race to Equity Report released by Kids Forward, formerly the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, revealed extreme racial disparities among Black and white residents in Madison and crystallized Hanson’s vision.
She applied for her first grant through the city of Madison in 2017 and was awarded $3,500 to place seven students from West High at Lincoln Elementary first thing in the morning or at the end of the day, with each mentor earning a $500 stipend (which has since increased).
Over time, the program has served 482 high school students and 9,000 elementary students. It became a nonprofit in 2020 and has since expanded to La Follette and DeForest Area High School.
Transportation is a hurdle for the group, which has no way to help students get to their tutoring sessions. Students are limited to schools within walking distance of their high school. Root 2 Rise is raising money for a van to transport up to nine students.
Hanson and the school leaders who work with her want to expand the model throughout Dane County public schools and the state.
“We have to scale this up,” said Mat Thompson, principal at La Follette. “The next goal to see Root 2 Rise achieve is to be in all the comprehensive schools in Madison.”
Thompson has seen the transformation Root 2 Rise spurs directly: building confidence for students, helping them find purpose. When students become leaders and are relied upon, that is powerful, he said.
“Coming from a person who barely graduated high school myself, what I really love about Root 2 Rise at La Follette is we want to create an environment where everybody has a place,” he said.
After participating in the program, several students from La Follette now want to become teachers themselves, said Molly Hayes, student and academic engagement coordinator at the school.
“That’s pretty amazing,” Hayes said. “So now we’ve given a student a vision for what’s possible.”
Teeli Thao, 18, is one of those students. After graduating from La Follette last year, he is now a freshman at Madison College pursuing elementary education. Thao tutored with Root 2 Rise both semesters of his senior year.
“I was more motivated because I worked with kids every day, and just being motivated to go to Root 2 Rise after school really helped me as a person learn more about myself,” said Thao. “I learned that I had a passion for working with kids.”
A highlight was doing a presentation in several elementary classes about his cultural traditions for the Hmong New Year. He brought in traditional food and showed videos of Hmong dances. The kids loved it, he said.
Savanna Varese is now thinking of working in a daycare after she graduates. She plans to tutor again with Root 2 Rise in the spring, her last semester of high school. Now she tells everyone at school about the program.
“I really feel like Root 2 Rise can change anybody,” she said.
Visiting her elementary students excited her so much that it got her out of bed each morning. The kids all wanted to sit next to her, so their teacher made a chart so they could take turns.
“I could never really miss a day. I would not want to miss a day,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to let a kid down or make them feel sad.
“I love just waking up knowing I had somewhere to be and somewhere to go to make somebody happy. That really made me happy.”
