Scott Krautman: Adult Literacy Volunteer

Scott Krautman: Adult Literacy Volunteer Scott Krautman is a sales and marketing executive at a small television station in the West Palm Beach, Florida area. He has been with the station since 2012.

He volunteers much of his free time with the Literacy Coalition of Palm Beach County, teaching reading skills to adult learners. "It's just a few hours a week," he says, downplaying the importance of what he does. But he is committed to doing what he can to ease the problem of illiteracy not only in adults, but across the board.

The facts, he says, are jarring. About one out of every seven adults in the United States are unable to read. These are numbers far higher than he had ever imagined. "I never thought about it before I was in college," Scott Krautman recalls. Then he had an encounter with the building manager where he lived off-campus at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. "He was a good guy, a middleaged guy who was friendly and responsive to the needs of his tenants," he says. One day the building manager asked Scott Krautman to help him read a medicine label. "I could tell he was humiliated, having to ask me that. But he had a sick kid. He got a prescription but couldn't read the label, so he swallowed his pride and asked this smart-aleck college kid, which is what I was at the time, to read it for him."

The experience had made all the difference in Scott Krautman views the issue. "I thought, holy cow, what if I couldn't read a label like that? Or help my kid with his homework, or fill out a job application – I started thinking of all these mundane tasks most of us take for granted, and imagining what it must be like for people like that building manager – decent, ordinary people who for some reason never learned how to read, or how to read proficiently."

He did not begin volunteering his time with a literacy program right away, but the memory of that building manager stayed with him. After he completed his education and relocated to the West Palm Beach area he became active with the Literacy Coalition, and has been now for more than five years.