“This is life-changing, it’s more than just English,” said one of our adult learners at Catoctin Elementary School.
The Fall Session classes wrapped up recently, and we are still hearing from our teachers about this past session. One of our volunteers, Jennifer Baker, works as an ELL teacher at Catoctin Elementary School. Jennifer dedicates nearly all of her time to teaching English; she works daily at the school teaching children English and she also helps lead the PEP Program at Catoctin Elementary School and teachers adults English weekly. Below is an excerpt from Jennifer about the program:
This is our fifth year of the PEP (Parents as Educational Partners) program at Catoctin Elementary School. The PEP program helps teach second-language parents about our school, and makes them feel a part of our school community and their child’s education. This year, we have worked with Loudoun Literacy Council to provide an Adult English Class in addition to the school information that PEP allows us to give to our parents. Combining the PEP program and Adult English class has allowed us to quadruple the number of parents that we reach each week; our class size has grown from an average of 6 parents to 24! Thanks to our amazing group of volunteers, we are also able to provide child care and homework help while the parents are learning English. While we know that we are expanding and moving the program in a great direction, the real proof comes from the parents themselves. A father who has three students at Catoctin and his wife in the newly formatted PEP program told us, “This is life-changing, it’s more than just English.” We are looking forward to helping more parents at our next session, starting in January!
At Loudoun Literacy Council, we greatly appreciate our volunteers and all their hard work! Our genuine thanks goes out to our Catoctin Elementary Volunteers:
Jennifer Baker
Denise O’Kane
Claudia Rabe
Erin Taylor
Jacquelynn Hess
Katrina Davis
Michelle Coggins
Debra Neely
Renee Venegas
Also, a big thanks goes out to our other volunteers from McLean Bible Church who helped with the childcare!
Students and volunteers celebrate their Fall graduation.
Written by AmeriCorps Member, Janna Starr
jstarr@loudounliteracy.org
LoudounLiteracy 