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Tyreek Wiggins struggled to read anything longer than three-letter words at the start of this school year.
But with the help of his Joyful Readers tutor Kirra Silver, Tyreek — a third grader at Philadelphia’s Mastery Prep Elementary Charter School — quickly began gaining confidence.
He mastered the challenging and sometimes conflicting “z” and “s” sounds and jumped six units ahead in his studies. Last week, dressed in a sharp grey suit and classic black fedora, Tyreek accepted a 2025 Young Reader of the Year award from the tutoring program to mark his accomplishments.
He held his trophy high to a cheering crowd and triumphantly announced: “Reading is not my best skill, but I am improving.”
Not long before that ceremony, however, David Weinstein, the founder of the Joyful Readers program, got some much less uplifting news. The group’s grant would be terminated effective immediately as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to AmeriCorps through the U.S. DOGE Service.
Joyful Readers is one of the 28 AmeriCorps programs across Pennsylvania that has been gutted by DOGE. While tutors will finish out this school year, its future is now uncertain. Cuts to AmeriCorps have also affected student tutoring programs elsewhere.
Weinstein, a former AmeriCorps member who spent his first year of service at Kensington High School, said the order ending the grants came from DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency and is led by business executive Elon Musk. The order stated that the work Joyful Readers was doing no longer matches the federal government’s priorities.
The anger and sadness came immediately, Weinstein said in an interview with Chalkbeat.
“Since when is teaching kids to read not a national priority?” Weinstein said.
AmeriCorps, created by Congress in 1993, pays young people a small stipend and some money to help offset the cost of a college degree to spend a year working full-time on community service projects. Every year, more than 200,000 AmeriCorps volunteers and workers nationwide work on disaster relief efforts, educational programs like tutoring, environmental stewardship, community health programs, and services for military veterans.
In Philadelphia, AmeriCorps members work with the school district to provide computer science tutoring and mentoring, arts education, academic instruction, social-emotional support, and more to thousands of students through programs like Joyful Readers, City Year, ArtistYear, and Teach For America (TFA).
But in April, federal government representatives informed these program leaders and the state agencies that disburse their grants that some $400 million in contracts would be cancelled across the country — $6 million of that was designated for Pennsylvania
For Weinstein, that would have meant sending a late-night email or making a phone call to his 50 tutors to tell them not to show up to school the next day. Those tutors who told their students “yes you’re going to see me at the next session” would have had to “break that promise,” Weinstein said. And 1,000 Philly kids like Tyreek would have been left to wonder what happened.
Weinstein said he avoided all of that by pulling together enough funding for his tutors to finish the school year.
Weinstein said the program’s grant this year was for some $833,500. As part of the AmeriCorps program, Joyful Readers was required to find matching funds from the Philadelphia community. They applied for an expanded grant next year to support up to 75 AmeriCorps members, but Weinstein said he hasn’t heard back yet.
“It’s hard to imagine we’d receive that grant,” Weinstein said.
Lawsuits say gutting AmeriCorps will have ‘irreparable’ impacts
Weinstein said he’s managed to keep the program afloat for the time being, but he’s eagerly awaiting the results of legal challenges to the AmeriCorps cuts.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro signed on to a multistate lawsuit alleging the Trump administration’s “abrupt decision to dismantle AmeriCorps flouts Congress’s creation” of the agency and “usurps Congress’s power of the purse and thereby violates the Constitution’s separation of powers.”
“The gutting of AmeriCorps will inflict immediate and irreparable harms on the Plaintiff States, their residents, and the public at large,” the suit says.
According to the complaint, more than 7,700 K-12 students in the Philadelphia area have an AmeriCorps teacher.
Education advocacy groups, community organizations, and the AmeriCorps Employees Union AFSCME Local 2027 have also filed their own suit challenging the cuts.
Without the services provided by AmeriCorps, the teacher shortage in the city would get worse, said Anna Shurak, executive director of Teach For America Philadelphia.
This school year, 120 out of more than 300 vacant positions were ultimately filled by TFA educators. More than 400 TFA alumni work as teachers in Philadelphia classrooms. And nearly 10% of all Philadelphia principals are TFA alumni, Shurak said.
“At a time when teachers are needed more than ever, Teach for America plays the vital role of having folks coming in that are committed, that are interested, that are focused on our students,” Shurak said.
If the AmeriCorps cuts stand, Shurak said, it will not only rip educators away from their classrooms but hamper TFA’s ability to recruit young people into the teacher pipeline — a process that was already strained in the years following the pandemic.
For Philly school leaders, the chaos and uncertainty of the Trump administration’s cuts to education programs has been “consuming,” Lewis Elkin Elementary School Principal Charlotte Gillum said in an interview.
One of Gillum’s students, second grader Saarenn Roberts, also won a Joyful Readers Young Reader of the Year award this year.
While the school works with a variety of programs to meet the needs of their students, Joyful Readers is a standout, Gillum said. She said the tutors work on self-confidence and “make the students believe in themselves” while also working to improve reading skills.
It’s “that mix that allows students to know they can stumble and they can be OK and keep trying,” Gillum said, which delivers real results for her students.
“It is disappointing that there is an attack on education that is going to potentially rob us of that,” Gillum said.
Juny Ardon, Saarenn’s Joyful Readers tutor, said at the awards ceremony that to help elementary school students with reading, “you need more than just methods and strategies. You need heart and humanity.”
Lakia Cintron, whose daughter Autumn Taylor won a Joyful Readers award, said she’s seen Autumn’s reading improve significantly but she’s also “improved as a person as well.” Cintron said, “she’s elevating.”
Tyreek’s tutor Kirra Silver said she’s disappointed the federal government is targeting programs like Joyful Readers.
The more that students and children have access to programs like Joyful Readers, “the better it will be for our society,” Silver said.
Silver’s advice to parents and caregivers if Joyful Readers ends?
“Read to your kids as much as possible, uplift them, tell them it is OK to make mistakes as long as you’re trying,” Silver said.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect more precise teacher vacancy figures from Teach For America.
Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.
