COLORADO SPRINGS — When Barbara Swaby got into education, she quickly decided that she could have more impact teaching teachers than teaching children.
She was so good at it that the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has named an endowed professorship in her honor.
What’s even more telling is that the first endowed professorship in the College of Education was started while Swaby is still teaching, whereas such honors are often posthumous.
“I’m still teaching and I’m not dead,” Swaby said, laughing.
She has spent 33 years at CU-Colorado Springs preparing elementary school teachers to teach literacy, providing one- on-one tutoring of youths, leading community reading clinics and organizing an ongoing book project that has given thousands of books to low-income children in the Pikes Peak region.
“When we teach children to read, and particularly when we teach children who have little or no probability of upward mobility to read, we don’t just give them a living. We give them a life,” Swaby said.
All her projects are aimed at that goal.
“This is why I do what I do,” said Swaby, after observing a teacher working with a student at one of Swaby’s clinics. The girl being tutored was a fifth-grader by age, but she started the free reading clinic at the first-grade reading level. Swaby is dedicated to helping her catch up with her peers.
In the clinics, Swaby’s students work one-on-one with kids based on their needs.
Swaby said literacy is her life, a statement backed up by the list of awards she has been given over the years and her projects, including the Literacy For All Children Initiative.
In five years, the donation- funded Literacy For All Children Initiative has distributed almost 100,000 books to more than 9,000 local children.
The project was initially started to help families who had moved here after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. It has since been expanded to reach as many kids possible who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches in local schools.
