During the Fall semester of 2015 I was enrolled in an education course which required 10 hours of service dedicated towards the education field in a pass or fail assignment. I had no idea when I began with United Way, a charity organization serving Macon, Georgia, that the experience would change my life. I was in the Read2Succeed tutoring program and my expectations would soon surpass just the 10 hour goal. I was placed in a Iow performing elementary school in the Bibb County District, which is also the lowest-performing district in the state of Georgia, which is nationally one of the lowest ranking school systems in the country. My assignment was simple: Tutor seven 3rd graders once a week in Reading Literacy.
Of course I quickly became attached to my kids and it was really hard for me to see such bright students have their potential squandered because of the lack of resources they have available to them. Two of my kids I genuinely believe could pass as genius-level and the rest of them are just as smart. However, because of our emphasis placed on standardized testing, their abilities are never fully measured. One of my students I realized quickly was an auditory learner. He could easily follow the story listening to someone else reading it but for him to read it in his own head, the story simply got lost. Children like this are who our education system truly leave behind. There is still hope because all of my student's Lexile scores after me working with them for a solid 3 months had major improvements. One even jumped the scale 300 points on his next test!
There's another layer to this story. When we look at poorly funded school systems we always tend to think financially. We tend to think of poverty in only monetary standards but there are resources that children sometimes don't have access to that we simply take for granted. For example, the resource of a good role model. I by no means am perfect but I am there weekly and I am someone they can count on, to confide in, and to help watch them grow and build them as a person, which is something that some students would otherwise never receive. I never truly understood what it meant when they say "It takes a village to raise a child," but thanks to seven beautiful souls... I do now.
I stayed on as a tutor and finished up the 2015-2016 school year. Unfortunately the program will not be returning next school year but it forever changed my heart and hopefully the hearts of my children as well so I'm grateful.
