After two decades as an educator, this now-founder inspires students to read more

While Michelle DeBlois was working as a teacher at Lewiston Middle School in southern Maine, she led her students through a process called expeditionary learning: you find a problem you’re passionate about, research it, construct a solution, and present it to your community. The program is designed to immerse students in an issue that spans various disciplines, encouraging them to think deeply and become active contributors to their communities.

“As the students were working on their chosen problems, I kept saying to them, ‘You have a voice; you have a choice to make a difference,’” DeBlois recalls.

At the same time, DeBlois was facing her own challenge. Her return to teaching came after a successful career at an environmental engineering firm that took her around the world. Teaching—her other passion—offered the stability she wanted to return home and start a family.

But throughout her two decades as a teacher, she noticed the myriad ways that students were being failed by educational systems that reduced them to a series of test scores. As a literacy teacher (at different times, she taught in an elementary school and at a middle school), it wasn’t unusual to be introduced to a new student with only their score on the latest standardized reading test.

“I just really had a problem with that, because I realized that I wouldn’t want to be represented by my achievement score alone,” she says.

It weighed on her. Students are more than their scores, she knows. And she worried that the intense focus on test scores risked alienating students from the material they were learning. After all, how could a young student learn to love reading for the sake of it, if they never really had a chance to read just for the sake of it?

All this was on her mind as she coached her middle school students to recognize a problem—and fix it.

“One day I went home and looked in the mirror, and I said to myself, ‘You either need to decide to step up and make this change—why are you looking to someone else to do it for you?—or you have to leave education, and not be a teacher anymore.’ And I decided that I couldn’t walk away; that I really love my students, and I cared about them. And I cared about their futures, about them thriving,” she says. “That’s when I created ReMo.”

ReMo, DeBlois’s venture, is a web-based platform for independent reading that connects young people with books that they’ll love, while allowing educators to foster a passion for reading on a wider scale.

“I wanted students to have agency over their own reading journeys. I wanted them to have their data so they can make choices about those journeys. And I wanted educators to be a part of that journey, and to be able to support kids to thrive, and not just need a standardized score,” DeBlois says.

DeBlois’s venture and her entrepreneurial spirit grabbed the attention of the judges for this year’s Northeastern University Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. The annual awards honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. This year’s recipients—students and alumni from the Northeastern community—were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding.

DeBlois was honored among winners from Northeastern’s Roux Institute, where she participated in the Founder Residency, a venture creation and acceleration program for women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and other historically marginalized people. She also earned second place in one of the specialty categories of this year’s Innovator Awards, “Powering Social Impact.”

Audrey Lones, a business mentor at SCORE Southern Maine, met DeBlois in 2019 when she enrolled in the small business mentoring program at the organization. “I was impressed by Michelle’s focus, grit, and attention to detail as an entrepreneur developing a SaaS [software as a service] product while also teaching full time,” Lones says.

“Michelle lived the problem that ReMo was designed to solve: the overwhelming challenge teachers faced in documenting student reading progress while trying to inspire the love of reading that so many students have trouble finding,” she says.

ReMo works because it solves these interlocking problems for students and teachers. Students can create an account and then can track their own reading in a visually appealing display. They can set their own reading goals and track their progress and, based on their own data about what they liked and didn’t like, are empowered to make more informed reading choices.

Teachers, meanwhile, get to see a dashboard that includes all this information about their students. They can dive in to better understand the reading habits of their students—beyond simply whether or not they did read. That information can help teachers shape classroom reading goals, and enables them to intervene earlier if persistent roadblocks come up for their students.

ReMo is getting ready to launch at a full scale. It’s been in beta testing since 2020, slowly building up an enthusiastic and dedicated group of teachers and students who use it and have helped shape many of the features through trial and error. One of the features, which tallies the total number of pages each student has read throughout the year, has been especially impactful, DeBlois says.

“That’s when we saw the kids saying, ‘You know, I never thought of myself as a reader. But I read this many pages, or this many books. And now I really am a reader,’” DeBlois says. “It’s like when you exercise and you say, ‘Oh, I’m not a runner.’ But once you have all these miles built up, you can’t tell yourself you’re not a runner because your data is telling you that you are. We see the same thing here. And it’s beautiful to see kids start to realize that they are a reader.”

And while the process of building and sustaining a venture such as ReMo brings challenges, risk, and plenty of late nights spent worrying, it’s moments like those that bring DeBlois back again and again every day. When the stresses start to pile up, she focuses on the big picture.

“You know, reading is a lot of things to a lot of different people,” she says. “It builds empathy, it helps you to think about who you are as a person—and to become a better person. And it’s how we have a democratic society: you have people who can think for themselves. Literacy is power. And really, we’re about empowering students and their teachers.”