In a quiet corner of the Eisenhower Elementary School library, a retired schoolteacher and a first-grade student are softly reading together from a colorful collection of stories. It’s a scene that bridges decades, bringing together an adult who remembers the stories from a generation ago and a child discovering them for the first time.
STEP stands for the Senior Tax Exchange Program. Launched by the Wauwatosa Recreation Department and the School Distict, it invites residents 65 and older into elementary schools to act as reading buddies.
The program requires volunteers to pass a background check and undergo training. Once in the schools, they spend thirty minutes to two hours a week reading with children and supporting library staff. As an added benefit, seniors can earn up to $750 a year in property tax relief for their service.
For the volunteers, the emotional rewards far outweigh the financial ones.
Art Carter, a retired teacher and STEP volunteer, saw the program as the perfect chance to reconnect with youth. “I really like kids, and I’m at an age where there aren’t any kids in the neighborhood or in my family,” Carter says. “It looked to me like an opportunity to mingle with children again.”
Educators note that students love reading with the STEP participants, often looking forward to their time and even trying to sneak in extra turns. More importantly, the program helps inspire a genuine love of reading. Staff members emphasize that it is valuable for kids to see that people of all ages—and from all across their community—want to be there to help them learn.
Carter says what impacts him the most is seeing the students’ incredible reading fluency-and the lasting bonds they form in just 15 to 20 minutes.
“Children remember their emotions permanently… when they walk past me in the hallway, they wave and want to high five and so on. In many cases, they’re excited to get out in the hallway and interact in a small setting with just one adult.”
As the STEP program wraps up another successful year, its true value is measured not just in books read or tax dollars saved, but in the bridges built across Wauwatosa.
“I think the STEP program is an amazing opportunity for people in our community to connect with kids in our schools in a way that wasn’t possible before the program started,” Brodzeller said.
