A non-profit literacy program for underprivileged youth called First 25 will no longer be offered to John Hopkins Middle School students in St. Petersburg, according to founder Todd Hoover.

"The principal calls us in and says we don’t want your program here in the morning anymore," he said.

For the past three years, between 20 and 25 students showed up every Wednesday morning, two hours before classes began at John Hopkins Middle School, to play sports and then read for 45 minutes, according to Hoover.

Tracie Boykin, 35, said the volunteer reading program improved her son's reading skills and she doesn't want to see it end.

"It really helped him because he was having trouble with his reading at first," Boykin said. "I’m really disappointed in our school for trying to take this out."

Hoover said he blames Pinellas County School District leaders for disrupting his reading program.

"This year they told us they were going to shut the program down," he said. "We had so much success last year. We had lexile scores through the roof and these are for black kids that everybody else has given up on."

School district spokeswoman Lisa Wolf said they're not trying to kill the reading program. Instead, they want to bring First 25 into compliance with district guidelines.

"John Hopkins Middle School was recently able to add a volunteer coordinator position," she said. "Through that full-time position being added, they realized they weren’t always in compliance with district policies when it came to mentorship or volunteering."

Wolf said the volunteer coordinator noticed the school had mistakenly been allowing the reading program on their campus, before school starts, for the past three years.

"That’s when we noticed the mistake had been made," she said. "Then we immediately implanted that action plan to address it and fix it."

The action plan calls for mentors to undergo a two hour district training course, undergo a background check and file an application with the district.

"We’d like for all of our mentors to undergo... that training before they’re directly interacting with our students," she said. “We really do value his program and have really been at the forefront of endorsing it. We just really need to bring it into compliance.”

The plan also calls for mentors to meet with students at lunch or during an elective class. Wolf said meeting before school starts is problematic.

"We just run into some logistical concerns when a mentor maybe wants to utilize our school space before school’s open for the day," she said. "Because part of our policy is also to have mentors be directly supervised by a member of our Pinellas County School staff and that’s really just for student safety."

Hoover said mornings work best for him because he works as an account representative and is a Stetson Law School student. The mentor said it also works best for attracting a large number of students.

"You have to do it to understand that you can’t get 20 at lunch. It becomes too unmanageable," he said. "We had 20 and 25 of them coming all at a time. Very efficiently. They’re suppressing that. Make no mistake."

Hoover said only one or two students could come during an elective class and that he's already undergone a background check as a level 2 volunteer for the district. The First 25 mentor said he's being forced to cancel his reading program because of the new guidelines.

"Just more excuses... Really the question is, why don’t you want 25 kids from the toughest neighborhoods showing up on their own to read?" he asked. "If the district guidelines and the district policies don’t support something like that, they should blow up the district policies and the district guidelines.”

Hoover ran the First 25 reading program with his friend, Alonzo Sullivan, who is a commercial real estate agent. Bay News 9 featured the program in an Everyday Hero story last October.