Hispanic children's education helped through program

Program helps Hispanics get a head start on kindergarten
By Brian Reynolds, Tuscaloosa News, June 23, 2009

Five students who will enter kindergarten in the fall jumped and clapped as they sang about colors and the weather in Tammy Morton’s class at University Place Elementary School.

But unlike the other 39 students in the Tuscaloosa City Schools Jumpstart program, the children spoke little or no English before starting the program five weeks ago.

The Hispanic Jumpstart program was started during summer 2008 by University of Alabama students Wilson Boardman, Laura Dover and Erin Shirley. The program prepares students who speak little English for a school in which English is the primary language.

“The Hispanic dropout rate we found was very high due to the fact that they get so far behind because of the language barrier,” said Shirley, who is leading the program this year. “It’s essential to get them at the 4- and 5-year-old stage because that’s the time in the development that their brain is in the stage where they can learn a new language quickly.

“We’ve already seen a lot of progress in the last three weeks with their English. It’s amazing,” she said.

Shirley, two other UA students, an incoming UA student and a Northridge High School student work with the University’s Blackburn Institute on the project, allowing one-on-one interactions with the students.

“That makes a huge difference because I feel like there’s no time wasted. The entire time they’re with up us, they’re learning,” she said.

The program sprung from Boardman, Dover and Shirley’s shared desire to work with pre-kindergaten students and their interest in Hispanic culture, Boardman said.

During last summer’s program, they saw significant improvement in the students’ reading comprehension and ability to cope in a school setting, said Wilson, who is interning with Goldman Sachs in New York City this summer.

“Even within a month, you could notice a difference in their reading level,” he said. “They’re so much more comfortable with the classroom atmosphere. They were a lot more comfortable interacting with each other, interacting with the teacher.”

Getting the children comfortable in a classroom setting is one of biggest challenges, said Morton, who teaches the class. Many of the students do not have any experience in a setting outside their homes, and going to school can be an adjustment for them.

If the students are unprepared and have a bad kindergarten experience, it can set a bad tone for the rest of their school careers, said Morton, who teaches pre-kindergarten at Skyland Elementary School during the regular school year.

“The biggest barrier, I think more than language, is the lack of experience they have in a formal school setting,” she said. “It gives them a little bit more experience before they hit what we call ‘big school.’

“When the kids get here and we bond as a group through doing hands-on activities and sing and a lot of praise, the language doesn’t become a barrier,” she said.

Morton and the UA students work on basic concepts like colors, the weather and letters in a mixture of Spanish and English to help the children get a grasp on the language.

“I call what I speak ‘school Spanish,’ or maybe I should call it ‘school Spanglish,’ ” she said. “It’s a lot of vocabulary. I’ve found that when I teach Hispanic students, my Spanish gets better and better, just like their English gets better and better the more they’re exposed to it.”

“The first week when they came in, almost no English, and here we are, third week and most of the kids can speak two-to-three word phrases.”

The Jumpstart program consists of three traditional classes and one class for students for whom English is a second language. It is funded by the Tuscaloosa City School System and Success by 6.