Community Collaborations

One of the goals of the ACEE program is to empower parents, the schools, and the community to help meet the critical educational needs of children. To accomplish this, ACEE works closely with several community groups and agencies that focus on literacy and learning. We have built several successful collaborations that are listed below. ACEE members work throughout the year in various ways as partners in these initiatives.

Literacy Champions

Since 2004, ACEE has collaborated with the Austin Partners in Education (a joint venture of Austin Independent School District and the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce) to develop and sustain a meaningful and effective way to use community volunteers in supporting literacy achievement at the elementary school level. Literacy Champions operates at two of the ACEE project sites, Allison and Sanchez Elementary Schools. Community volunteers work to support reading fluency and comprehension in second- and third-grade students once a week for 45 minutes. ACEE staff and current members help to support the volunteers. More than 50 community volunteers have served as Literacy Champion tutors at Allison and Sanchez Elementary Schools since the program began. In addition, ACEE staff developed and piloted a second grade reading fluency program where community volunteers work in small groups under the direction of classroom teachers during the day. APIE has successfully used this model, Partners in Reading, in over 15 elementary schools.

Reading Is Fundamental of Austin—Family Fun Nights

Beginning in 2003, ACEE joined with Reading Is Fundamental of Austin to deliver a literacy-based Family Fun Night at each of the four ACEE schools and six additional elementary schools. Family Fun Nights are theme-based events (literacy, math, or science) in which parents and children participate together in hands-on activities that demonstrate inexpensive and effective ways parents can support their children's learning at home. The literacy Family Fun Nights consist of twelve "stations" that families rotate through to learn games and activities they can do at home to enjoy reading together. Family Fun Nights have been a part of the ACEE program for over ten years, but by joining with RIF-Austin, we were able to significantly enhance and expand this program. ACEE provides the manpower to create the stations and to help staff each event. RIF provides a free pizza dinner to all participants and a new book for every child (all ages) who attends the event. ACEE and RIF work together to put on fifteen Family Fun Nights each year, and have added additional schools each year. Last year, over 2,500 children and their families attended the events and indicated that they had learned new ways to work on reading at home! When the event takes place at an ACEE school, the ACEE members take the lead on planning and implementing the event.

Día de los Niños/Día de los Libros—Bilingual Family Literacy Event

The Día de los Niños/Día de los Libros (Children's Day/Festival of Books) is a celebration of culture and literacy, co-chaired by ACEE and the St. John Branch Library in Austin, that takes place the end of April each year. Día de los Niños/Día de los Libros is a national effort sponsored by the National Library Association to bring a traditional Mexican holiday (El día de los niños or Children's Day) to Hispanic communities in the United States and to combine this much-loved holiday with an emphasis on family literacy (see www.main.org/ninos for more information on the history of the event). The Austin celebration involves over 45 community agencies that support literacy and learning that come together at the St. John Branch Library to provide literacy activities, information about their services, new library cards, youth performances, a free lunch, and free books to over 3,000 participants. The event has grown in seven years from a small grassroots effort to an award-winning, inclusive celebration that people return to year after year.

Other Community Collaborations

The partnerships listed above are our primary collaborations, but each year the current members develop partnerships on their own with area non-profits that reflect their own interests and career aspirations. They work on evenings or weekends to accrue service hours and non-profit experience. Some of the programs that members have supported include