Community Collaborations

Reflections on Our Community Partnerships

Each year our program paints a picture, unique to the individual members involved, depicting a milieu of color, style, and texture. Colors are represented by the unique personality of each tutor and child. Textures are cast, layer upon layer, by each tutor’s experiences and responses to the happenings around them. Style is evident in the varied movements of the colors presented—some smooth and silk-like, some dense with pigments, others translucent with airy light. The picture is fluid and alive with movement. Tutors come and begin the etchings; they leave and the canvas is sealed with each individual's touch.

During my prior years with the ACEE tutoring program, I served as one who presented the canvas during preservice training and then came alongside our tutors out in the field, guiding them weekly as they learned to teach our struggling readers about letters and words.

From beginning to end, I witnessed the colorful strokes of applied instructional paint. I moved about in the ebb and flow of the world of instructional best practices, planning with tutors in regard to skills and strategies that helped children along their learning paths. Never a static experience—what clicked for this child did not have meaning for that child, and so would begin the movement back and forth to find learning solutions.

I lived in the professional experience of accomplishing our program's local mission, that of building strong tutors who can teach reading skills and strategies and extend membership into the Literacy Club to each and every child under our tutelage. Mine was an admirable mission that carried me into quite interesting and color-filled places—with children and their tutors, teachers, and school personnel. Is there anything so lovely as the friendship of a child, in all the ways that we learn to love children, and they, us?

However, in 2008-09, a door opened for a new ACEE position—Program Manager—and I left behind my life on the campuses. I relinquished my bird’s-eye view of the front line of making a difference in children's lives. Therefore, much of the business of colors on the canvas now occurs unbeknownst to me.

Oh, yes, I see the results of the colorful paint strokes in lessons presented at Friday meetings and reports of PALS assessments. I imagine the children whose names I hear spoken and the stories sound so familiar. If reds and oranges and yellows can signify the warmth of the love felt and expressed for and by these children, then our ACEE canvas for this year is becoming brilliantly bright and warm.

Part of my new job is to connect our ACEE tutors with community partners. Think of the visual represented by royal blue or deep purple, dripping from a poised paintbrush. The school day ends and in my mind's eye I see members moving into the application of these colors on the edges of the ACEE canvas as they move outward from their local mission to fulfill commitments made to after-school partnerships. Members give and give, making sturdy these connections that bind together the extensions of our daily work with further application of well-developed ACEE talents. Now the strokes of blue and purple are applied to form the borders on our canvas.

I now see how our partnerships serve as our connection to the broader community and our members' efforts do indeed make stronger the places in which we live and the settings in which we serve. We are changed by these moments in time.

Below I explore some of the ACEE partnerships that are strengthening our community and adding layers of color, texture, and style to the ACEE canvas.

Bookspring’s Reach Out and Read Program

One way that the ACEE program and its tutors extend their daily work in schools out into the community is by partnering with Bookspring in its Reach Out and Read (ROR) program at local pediatric clinics.

Reach Out and Read has a 20-year history as a national literacy program. Part of this program involves having tutors read to children and their parents who are waiting to see their pediatricians at local clinics. Aside from making the experience of waiting to see the doctor a little more enjoyable, the goal of our ACEE tutors' participation is to model how to read aloud to children effectively.

The program intent for read-alouds is to help children learn to love books. If children learn to love books, they are more likely to pick up books to read later; in hearing lovely books read to them, children will develop stronger vocabularies.

Recently I visited the Riverside ROR clinic with Leora Rockowitz, ROR director and former tutor in ACEE. This clinic provides an average of 500 well-checks a month to children and their families. After touring the clinic and learning about each component of the ROR program, I watched our ACEE tutors as they read to children and parents, weaving their read-aloud magic in the clinic waiting room.

Isabel Alegria and Jackie Galvan are our bilingual tutors partnering with the real-aloud component of ROR's program within clinics. Lauren Neal, Lizzie Mitchell, and Hillary Robertson-Forrest also serve in this partnership as tutors who share books in English. One after another, the tutors, seated on a rug at eye level with the young patients, took turns reading books of all shapes and sizes.

The children rotated in and out of the waiting area as their turn with the doctor was announced and still the tutors read, applying all the lessons learned on the benefits of read-alouds: building listening comprehension through questioning and extending vocabulary.

I enjoyed each book and felt pride at each reader's use of best practices as they read expressively and made the books come alive for their young listeners. The readers had brought engaging big books from their school campuses—books with larger text and pictures more easily seen by the audience.

Who doesn't love a really good book? I watched as parent and child listened, some making comments and extending the text to each one’s world of personal connections.

A child on a parent's lap snuggled in more closely as the moments of a good story bound us all together. Some children edged closer to the readers as they yielded to the pull of a beautiful book's message. A wiggly little friend became still and attentive when a wildly colorful book was introduced. A mother asked how to engage her child when she tried to read to him at home. My strong belief in the many benefits of reading aloud to children was once again confirmed.

It was time for my visit to end as Leora commented, "This is what we want to happen," referring to the expert read-aloud presentations and the mother's questions and the connections made. We had all been privileged and strengthened by these ACEE tutors' gift to us of a really good read-aloud experience.

The Literacy Coalition of Central Texas

In partnership with the Literacy Coalition of Austin, ACEE tutors teach English as a Second Language (ESL) classes for adults twice a week in the evenings at Lucy Read Pre-K Demonstration School. This partnership assists parents in increasing their knowledge of the English language.

The ACEE tutors remain static while the students move from level to level as they progress. All of these tutors—Aissa Olivarez, Mike Distad, Amanda Schulte, Eddie Mathis, Jeff Keller, and Annie Steinhauser—happen to be Spanish speakers, serving as bilingual tutors in our K-1 one-on-one tutoring program during the day. Mindy Enderle, one of our bilingual ACEE leaders, serves as the ESL onsite coordinator.

As coordinator, Mindy oversees both the academic and childcare aspects of this program. Mindy, along with Sheena Moore and Shalyn Shanks, serves as the child care support for this partnership as parents become the students in the ESL classes. Gabriela Garcia, bilingual specialist for the K-1 ACEE classic program, trains the ESL teachers on strategies to use in instruction; tutors must seek out their own resources for use in applying the strategies.

Jeff Keller uses the strategy of picture telling, asking the students to think of a story to explain what is happening in a set of pictures. When one student responds, "She is cooking," Jeff follows up by asking "What is she cooking?" In this way, Jeff models how language can be extended.

Eddie's class, whose members are just a little more advanced than beginners, was working on understanding "things" and "verbs." Eddie asked his students to fill in the blank in the sentence "Three things that I like are ________." Then he asked them to fill in the blank in "Right now I like to ________" with a verb. Eddie explained to his students that when we speak about another person, we add an s. For example, "She likes to run." Listening to this lesson, I was struck by the complexities of the English language that I so often take for granted.

Amanda is challenging the students in her advanced class to notice the differences in verb tenses as they construct stories using pictures. These stories will contain more advanced grammar and use new vocabulary words that Amanda has explained: the difference between a roller skate and an ice skate, hop scotch and hide-and-seek, outside and out-of-doors.

"How did I ever learn English?" I exclaimed to Gabi as we left Amanda's class. "It is amazing," we agreed.

Annie, who teaches beginning students, has set up centers at which the students answer questions about activities connected to specific rooms in a house: "In the closet in my bedroom I would pick out _________ to wear to the park." and "I would choose _________ to wear to a party." and "My morning routine in the bathroom is _________."

As the students discussed their answers, looking back over notes from previous lessons, Annie smiled at them and encouraged their English conversations. I was reminded of how learning is, indeed, socially constructed and best led gently from the known into a small measure of the unknown.

I asked Annie what her greatest challenge is. "It's attendance," she replied. "I prepared for eight students tonight, and four came. Attendance is fluid. I do backtracking to catch everyone up."

I then asked Annie about her insights into the greatest challenge her students face. She replied, "Isolation of the non-English speaker. They are cut off from resources."

To observe our ACEE tutors working to intervene in this isolation was an unforgettable experience of realizing their profound, life-changing effect on the lives of community members.

Citizen Schools

Citizen Schools is a leading national initiative that focuses on student achievement in middle school by teaching skill-building apprenticeships in after-school programming.

ACEE partners with Citizen Schools at Kealing Middle School, where ACEE tutors meet with students after school to build students' learning skills and work on homework.

As I approached Kealing Middle School for my after-school visit, the middle schoolers were boarding the buses to head home. I was immediately struck by the size of the students our tutors were working with: middle schoolers are taller—and I think louder and more talkative—than our kindergarteners and first graders!

ACEE tutors Shirlette Chambers, Eddie Mathis, Heather Smith, and Keston Campbell support the after-school efforts of the Citizen Schools homework club. The tutors engage not only with homework assignments but also with vocabulary games once the homework is finished.

Shirlette and Eddie led two separate groups of students in a game that framed a review of vocabulary words from a book read recently in language arts class. Dealing with a variety of levels of interest (and two girls who did not especially like each other), Shirlette added calmness and rigor to the challenges presented on the game cards. The card challenge was to count backwards from 20. Shirlette's suggestion: "Not 20—count backwards from 30." Back and forth went the game's progression.

I left Shirlette's group as they dealt with words like cyst and admirable and found Eddie in another room explaining the difference between accept and except, using the words in sentences for clarification. Perhaps one of the best exchanges occurred when a student used the phrase "shut up" in an effort to quiet his friend's banter. Eddie stepped in with, "Don’t say 'shut up.' My mom never let me so I can't let you." And that was the end of that!

Impressed with Eddie's and Shirlette's management styles, I found Heather and her middle schooler working on a math assignment dealing with angles and decimals. This assignment employed a math vocabulary that I have long since forgotten, but Heather rose to the occasion, serving as math advisor, mentor and cheerleader (the child had about 12 pages of math to complete!).

Watching Heather, I realized the contrasting world in which I live—that of letters and sounds. "Hmmm, which role is more simple?" I wondered. Keston serves Kealing on different days than my visit, but Beth Hannon (one of our former ACEE tutors and now the Citizen Schools contact for our partnership) remarked about his successful efforts to organize an after-school football team. I wonder how much redirection of middle school energy Keston has to engage in?

"This is such a different world," I thought to myself as I left Kealing. Our ACEE tutors in this partnership deal with a different kind of struggling learner and somehow it felt like it took a new kind of energy, asked for at the end of a sometimes long day already. Hats off to the ACEErs who serve these older children. I was touched and humbled by their efforts.

Bookspring’s Early Childhood Family Fun Night

Bookspring, in affiliation with Reading Is Fundamental and Reach Out and Read, instills in children a love of reading and promotes books as a means to success.

Offering Family Fun Night literacy activities at early childhood centers is just one of Bookspring’s efforts to help the whole family come to understand how reading can be fun, encouraging parents to read to their children from birth on.

On a stormy evening I drove to the appointed Child, Inc., facility, wishing that I could just go on home because I have a fear of stormy weather. But knowing that I was expected by a group that I knew would show up, stormy weather or not, I was encouraged to be as faithful as I know them to be. And sure enough, my trust in them was rewarded as I walked into the day care center to find seven smiling ACEE faces, all pros by now at making these family fun nights happen.

Katherin Rice, Laurie Straube (the Pizza Queen), Laura Lenhardt (the Bienvenidos Babe), Margaret Silverberg, Leah Burnstein, Shirlette Chambers, Meagan Hamilton, and Eric Harder (the Lord of the Lemonade) have come together all year to create an atmosphere of "yes, we can" as they load the Bookspring van, drive it to different daycares throughout the city, unload the literacy games and books, set up the materials, make the lemonade, and run this event from start to finish. And, yes, there is Mr. Gatti's pizza involved!

As the parents arrived, they were greeted by our members and invited to eat. Then Laura welcomed the guests—in English and in Spanish—and explained the evening's agenda. Parents with all different ages of children began the rounds of literacy centers.

This Family Fun Night is smaller in scope than the ones we hold at our K-1 campuses, and I felt as if I had a better connection to these very little people and their parents. Since I was in charge of the Read-Aloud Center, I quickly forgot my angst about the weather as preschoolers sat wide-eyed before me, timidly handing me their book choices, one after the other. I was having a great time myself!

As the evening drew to a close, the grateful child-care director thanked us, the parents bid us good night, and I heard this comment from one of the tutors: "It is always so much fun—tiring, but fun." As I drove home after the event, the storm had cleared, and I thought how I would not have missed that visit for anything!

I have long believed that to meet the needs of others, to be present to the human experience of another, to lead with an open heart and inquiring mind can serve well the creation of all that is best in the individual. Never have I sensed this more strongly than when I visited our ACEE partnerships and observed the giftedness of our fulltime tutors. If I could summarize those moments, I would say I witnessed snapshots of kindness and a certain extension of tenderness—the cradling of needs and the attentiveness to meet those needs—in many different forms. Am I changed now? Yes. My experience with ACEE is coming full circle and I am deeply grateful. The canvas of my personal life is more colorfully alive than ever before. Thank you, dear fulltime members.

© 2009 Charles A. Dana Center | The University of Texas at Austin
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