Our Beginnings

Every Kid Can Read (formerly Foundations Tutoring) was born from a public school reading program that Christina Clark founded in 2001 at Pleasanton Unified School District. The program utilized the Orton-Gillingham-based Barton System, pairing trained volunteers with at-risk students for intensive, multisensory one-on-one tutoring. Over more than a decade, these evidence-based methods demonstrated remarkable results where students who had been written off as “lazy” or “slow” were finally reading at grade level.

When the school program ended in 2012/13, Christina and Laurie Kristof, who had been a tutor and facilitator in the program, knew the need hadn’t disappeared. They co-founded Foundations Tutoring to continue serving students who needed this specialized, structured literacy instruction. Today, as Every Kid Can Read, we’ve helped over 450 students through remote, one-on-one tutoring. Our approach remains rooted in the Orton-Gillingham philosophy with the same evidence-based methods, the same personalized attention, and the same life-changing results now accessible to families everywhere.