University of California has lots of partnerships with local high schools, but there's nothing quite like the plan two friends worked up between workouts at the Y.

Ellen Switkes, a UC assistant vice president, wanted to help Oakland's public schools, and she knew plenty of her co-workers felt the same.

History teacher Patricia Arabia figured she could use some help, especially when it came to reading the dozens of essays she assigned each week to her students at Fremont High School in Oakland.

So the two friends, who meet thrice weekly for workouts at the YMCA, hatched a plan that enlists legions of volunteers from UC's Oakland headquarters as essay readers for students at Arabia's high school.

The program matches Switkes' desire to help with Arabia's needs -- but more importantly it helps students improve their writing skills.

"I just think it's such a swell idea," Switkes said of the program that enters its third year this fall.

And the duo didn't let their idea become bogged in red tape. They just did it. On their own. Without asking the school.

"Lots of people here would like to help with the public schools," said Switkes, assistant vice president for academic advancement. "People, particularly from the office of the University of California, are paying close attention to how much trouble the schools are in, particularly the Oakland school district. People would love to do something, but don't really know what to do."

As proof, Switkes points to the overwhelming response she received to an office-wide e-mail she sent asking for volunteers willing to spend about two hours a week reading essays. Nearly 100 people responded, she said, far more than she could really accommodate.

"This year," she said, "we're going to set it up better and we will hopefully use them all."

The volunteers were from all walks of life at UC -- from attorneys to secretaries, Switkes said.

The readers don't grade the essays. That job still falls to Arabia and other teachers who participate in the partnership.

The readers check grammar and spelling, cohesion of argument and verify that students cite mandatory second sources in their essays. They're also asked to provide feedback to the students, an important part of the learning process that Arabia says overburdened teachers are often unable to provide.

"When you have 150 students, doing any deep reading of 150 essays just doesn't happen," Arabia said.

Each year, the program becomes better defined, Switkes said. The first year, UC volunteers read essays from two of Arabia's history classes and, once, from an English class. Last year, Switkes and Arabia expanded the program to an English class and three history classes. They also tried to partner volunteers with specific students to provide more continuity for both readers and students.

Arabia said the extra eyes were a big help, especially in an advanced placement history class she taught for the first time last year. She wanted her students to write an essay each week so they would be prepared for the mandatory, end-of-year standardized AP history test. Arabia estimated the 30-student class produced at least 90 essays a month.

Without the extra help, "there's no way I could have assigned an essay a week," Arabia said. "I couldn't have assigned an essay a month. Actually, I could have assigned them, but I couldn't have given any realistic feedback."

Arabia said she asked the volunteers "to read (the essays) the way you would read somebody's work who was working for you. Read for obvious errors -- spelling errors, grammatical errors. Then, I told them to try to come up with something that was good in the paper. Try to come up with something that works so we're not wearing these students down or discouraging them."

Arabia said the program paid dividends in her students' work.

"I was really pleased with the improvement," she said. "And when students reflected at the end of the year they felt they had improved on their writing."

Arabia said many of her students don't speak English as a native language and are prone to making the same mistakes over and over.

"They've never really been given the rules in English," Arabia said. "Their content is good and their analysis is good, but they keep making the same grammatical error. Having the one-on-one (from the readers), for the first time, some of them start to get it. They say, 'Oh, I see how that works.'"

For volunteer reader Jan Behrsin, a UC attorney, helping non-native English speakers was gratifying. He was born in Sweden and spoke Swedish, Latvian and German -- but no English -- when his family moved to the U.S. and he entered American schools at age 6.

"As somebody for whom English was not their first language, being in a position to help, or think I may have been helping, people in a similar situation game me some good feeling," he said.

Behrsin, the father of two college-age children who sits on the board of Oakland-based First Place Fund for Youth, said he's always had an interest in children's issues. He also taught legal writing in law school and felt he had something to offer Fremont's students -- and teachers.

He estimated he read about 20 papers last year, spending about three hours every two or three weeks.

"Teachers, especially in public schools, are so overworked and the challenges they face are great. I think they probably appreciated it," he said.

Volunteer reader Mike Shannon, UC's manager of communication services, said the experience was both frustrating and rewarding.

"The kids really needed some help," he said. "To think that they were going to be going to college without some really basic writing skills was kind of Shannon worked mainly with three students all year and read three or four essays about every two weeks. He said he also took extra time to write a couple of paragraphs with suggestions on how the students could improve their writing. Two of the students showed marked improvement, he said.

"My respect for teachers went up a great deal," Shannon said. "If I had three essays, that would typically take me an hour and a half, sometimes two hours, to correct."

Switkes and Arabia hope to build on the success of the program this year. Arabia will continue to use volunteer readers when she moves to Mandela High School, a new small school opening at Fremont High.

Both women would like to see more students participate and hope to arrange meetings with the readers and the students.

Switkes also hopes the program will inspire other businesses to arrange similar partnerships.

"Here in downtown Oakland there's all these office buildings full of professional people who would like to do something, but don't know what or how," she said.

Volunteer reader Jill Slocum said the rewards are worth the effort.

"I really enjoyed it a lot," said Slocum, coordinator for health services compensation at UC. "One tends to hear all these terrible things about what's happening in the schools, and Oakland gets a lot of interesting press. I was widely impressed with how articulate the kids were and how complete their thoughts were."

She was the only volunteer who was able to meet one of her students last year, and speaking to him gave her a sense of the pressures students are under and how her feedback helped him.

"There's an enormous amount of work being done by students and teachers," she said. "And given how much writing they're encouraged to do, there's just not enough teacher support to really give the kids all the feedback that might be helpful to them."