Students help local children plan futures

VCU students are helping children learn to read.

America Reads and AmeriCorps have partnered with local schools, government and nonprofit agencies to form ARCH, or America Reads in Richmond City & Henrico.

ARCH is a “literacy program that provides reading assistance to first- and second-grade students in Richmond and Henrico Public Schools,” said Franklin Wallace, director of America Reads and AmeriCorps.

America Reads hires only college students. Wallace said students from J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, Virginia Union University and Virginia State University have assisted with the program.

AmeriCorps can hire anyone older than age 18, but most are college students.

“Sixty to 70 percent of our members are current college students,” Wallace said. “The other 30 to 40 (percent) are recent graduates who need to pay off loans, are in-between semesters or just graduated from high school and want to earn some money to get into college.”

Elizabeth Pettit, a VCU senior history major, said she has worked part time for both programs for four years. Her first two years were spent at Bellevue Elementary School in Richmond. She then moved to Glen Lea Elementary School in Henrico County.

Pettit has worked with many students during her four years with the program. On average she said she has worked with five to eight children a year. One year Pettit worked with 13 children. Of those, she remembers one child in particular.

“This student was on a Level three for like eight months. She could not even write her name when we first got her,” she said. “Then one day she had this big word, and I was about to assist her. She was getting really frustrated, but told me to ‘Shut up I can do this.’ We sat there an hour and a half while she tried to figure out this word and she did it.

“Two weeks after that she jumped from Level three to Level 14. She was at the bottom of her class in first grade (and went) to one of the highest in second grade.”

Michelle Hairston, principal for Laburnum Elementary School, said the ARCH program has helped SOL and other test scores rise.

“When I first arrived here (four years ago) our scores were in the 40s and 50s, now they are in the 70s and 80s,” she said.

The program, however, is not about just improving reading skills.

“You are modeling, showing children what you want them to do when they get out into the real world,” Hairston said. “You are exposing our children to situations they might not have ever had and therefore give them the hopes.”

At Laburnum, teachers talk to their kids about college and moving to higher education after high school.

“It does not have to stop at high school, we pride ourselves in letting our children know that college is a possibility,” she said. “We have brainwashed our kids to think Virginia Tech is the best school.”

Having college students come into the elementary schools may be their only exposure to higher education, Hairston said. It can also show the children there is opportunity for them.

Laburnum wants to bring the 5th grade class to tour the university and other schools so that everyone, not just ARCH students, can be exposed to college.

“We see personality changes, kids gaining more confidence and kids
gaining more goals on stuff they thought they could not do before.”

– Elizabeth Pettit, history major

Many of the students have a lot of obstacles outside of school.

“Some children don’t have fathers at home and their mothers are working, so they don’t have a close contact,” Hairston said. “We try as much as possible here to build relationships with our children. Building relationships with our children has been a real positive impact on the children’s personal lives and educationally,” she said.

Pettit agrees.

“We see personality changes, kids gaining more confidence and kids gaining more goals on stuff they thought they could not do before,” Pettit said.