Twice a week, in a second-grade classroom at Silas Willard Elementary School, a woman named Dorothy walks through the door and the room shifts. There are smiles, waves, and the occasional hug. To her students, she is Miss Dorothy. To the school, she is a volunteer. To Angie Benson, the teacher whose classroom she shares, she is something harder to categorize.

"Dorothy James is one of my favorite people," Angie said. "I lost my grandparents at a younger age. I lost my mom. She's someone I can look up to." Dorothy, for her part, puts it simply: "I could be her grandma."

Dorothy James is 82. She moved to Galesburg in 2022, settling into the Village Villas at Seminary Village — independent living, a duplex, and Friday morning coffee with the larger community. Not long after she arrived, she spotted a notice in the bulletin at Bethel Baptist Church. The then-principal, Dr. Springer, also attended Bethel, and she was looking for reading buddies. Dorothy had wanted to do something like this for years.

"This is something that I have dreamed of doing," she said.

Her original dream had actually been bigger — teaching adults who had never learned to read. "I had no idea how you do that," she said. "But somebody does it. So this was the next best thing." She told her daughters she was going to look into it. They worried she'd catch colds from the kids. She hasn't had a single one.

Getting her officially re-enrolled as a volunteer took some doing. Background check, fingerprinting, a technology component, and a long wait. Angie called the district and made the case. The school gave Dorothy elevator access because the stairs had become difficult. They got it done. "She had to go to the board office," Angie said. "They were very kind to her."

It was worth every bit of friction.

Dorothy now comes every Monday and Tuesday, spending about 40 minutes each visit working with a small group of four students — listening as they read aloud, helping them sound out words, tracking their progress week to week. The structure is simple. The impact is not. The children know exactly when she's coming, and Angie has found that Miss Dorothy's visits have become something students actively want to earn. Antsy behavior means staying back. "I tell them she's a volunteer," Angie said. "This is a privilege."

What Dorothy offers is a clear and deliberate inversion of what people assume a reading buddy does. "They're reading to me," she said. "They'll say, 'It's your turn, Ms. Dorothy.' And I say, 'No. I'm listening to you.'" There is a strategy in that. The children take ownership — of the words, the story, the act of reading itself.

Angie sees the results in real time. In a small group where risk-taking feels safe, she said, children can ask questions and try things they might not attempt in front of the whole class. "They can take risks, they can ask questions, and they can grow as readers," she said. "It builds a relationship with a caring adult. It models a love for reading."

Dorothy, too, keeps learning. One session recently involved a book about U.S. territories — Virgin Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico, and one more that the group spent a moment trying to recall. Dorothy learned something she hadn't known. She finished the session, said so, and walked out happy. "She just says, 'I learned something new today,'" Angie recalled. "And walks away."

None of this is accidental. Dorothy has been showing up for people her whole life. She grew up wanting to be a teacher — got a scholarship to Western Illinois University — married instead and went to beauty school. She ran a beauty shop out of her home on a farm near Alexis for more than 50 years, retiring at 75. She taught Sunday school for 50 years at the same time. "I always tell people I got the best of both worlds," she said. "I was a hairdresser, and I taught Sunday school 50 years." In her decades behind the chair, she heard things. "When people tell me a secret," she said with a laugh, "I say, remember — I'm a hairdresser. I know how to keep my mouth shut."

There's one more thing worth noting. Dorothy's two older children attended Silas Willard Elementary School — 60 years ago. Different building, same name, same neighborhood. The school that welcomed her as a reading buddy is the school her children once walked into as students. That's not a coincidence anyone planned. It's just the way some things come around.

"I dearly love it," Dorothy said. "I really do."

Angie Benson has been teaching second grade for 22 years in the same classroom. She has a senior heading to St. Ambrose on a soccer scholarship and a kindergartner at home, and she thinks every day about what she can offer the children in her care that might be different, better, more. "These are someone else's babies," she said. "If you can just provide them a caring environment" — she pauses, finds the simplest way to say it — "you know, we just kind of work it out."

Miss Dorothy is part of that working-it-out. Not because it takes someone extraordinary to be a reading buddy — Angie is clear about that. "It doesn't just take someone special like Miss Dorothy," she said. "It's anyone who has the willingness to listen, encourage, and share the joy of reading."

But it does take showing up. Week after week, Monday and Tuesday, elevator access and all.