Multilingual Ambassador Program empowers students

Max Walpole, Contributing Writer

The VCU School of Education hosts a Multilingual Ambassador Program in which multilingual VCU students provide multilingual K-12 students in central Virginia with academic tutoring and career preparation services.

The VCU students working with the program travel to participating schools and work alongside teachers in a classroom setting. Students interested in becoming an ambassador can find more information on the MAP’s website.

Jenna Lenhardt, head of the program and director of strategic recruitment and outreach at the VCU School of Education, said her personal background inspired the creation of the MAP. Lenhardt’s family on her mother’s side is Iranian, and her great aunt who was married to an Iranian diplomat found empowerment through access to education and learning how to speak English when she came to the United States.

“A throughline with my life is very much around empowering students through education,” Lenhardt said.

Lenhardt said one of the most important aspects of the program is that it gives multilingual VCU students who wish they had more support when they were in middle and high school the chance to help current K-12 students in a similar situation.

“At the end of the day, that’s the heart of our program, is supporting K-12 students and having our college students identify opportunities to better support themselves two years before,” Lenhardt said.

In addition to supporting K-12 students, Lenhardt said the MAP also gives VCU students the opportunity to explore career possibilities in the field of education. Lenhardt said one of the first multilingual ambassadors found a passion for teaching working with the MAP and became a teacher at one of the program’s partner schools.

“She was able through the multilingual ambassador program to get really relevant career experience to then apply to jobs and work in our schools,” Lenhardt said. “And that’s really the hope that I have is that more and more students see education as a career.”

Lenhardt said she hopes to further expand the MAP beyond the scope of a federal work-study program, as at present only federal work-study eligible students are able to apply to become ambassadors.

Lenhardt said the most significant obstacle in the way of that goal is a lack of funding, as well as issues with transportation. Being an ambassador requires VCU students to travel to various schools around central Virginia.

“So that is the hope in the future to grow, so that we have the ability to have a work study role, to expand how many ambassadors we can hire. Those are big dreams, but I still dream them,” Lenhardt said.

Lenhardt said while it was too early to tell how the Trump administration’s harsher immigration policies would impact the operations of the MAP, the program has no intention of stopping.

“Right now, I think I’m steadfast, and I think our students are steadfast in doing what we can to provide support to the students and taking it a day at a time,” Lenhardt said.

The Trump administration’s announcement on the Department of Homeland Security website that ICE agents can now enter schools to make arrests could pose a threat to the K-12 students the MAP supports. There have been no confirmed sightings of ICE agents in schools, according to CNN.

Lenhardt said she believes it is important to shift away from defining people by their deficits, and instead it should be recognized that supporting multilingual students supports all students and the community as a whole.

“I think it’s important for us to value the strengths and the skills of our community members. I think that that’s really what I want MAP to be, is that our students see themselves as having skill sets that are very important in the world of career and college,” Lenhardt said.

Third-year chemistry student Amelia Valdez-Machicado has been working with the MAP program for nearly a year as the events lead. Valdez-Machicado, who speaks English and Spanish, said seeing multilingual people grappling with educational difficulties firsthand sparked a desire in her to uplift the multilingual community.

“I’ve known people personally in my own life that have struggled with it or maybe they didn’t see it as perfect for them. And so I wanted to be a sort of, I guess, a model for these students,” Valdez-Machicado said.

While she mainly plans events for the MAP, Valdez-Machicado said when she did tutor, the impact it had on her students was immediately apparent.

“When I help out a student, you kind of see the shift in their expression or their demeanor once they realize, ‘Oh, I get it now,’” Valdez-Machicado said.

Valdez-Machicado said she intends to continue working with the program in the future, and she finds fulfillment in being able to continually help students achieve their academic goals.

“I feel familiar with the work, and I enjoy interacting with the students. And on my end I do a bunch of planning and so I enjoy the work of organizing something like a field trip for the kids,” Valdez-Machicado said.