With more than 140 local children now involved in an Elon University program that helps struggling readers, administrators sought a larger community space to bring families together with their college student tutors.
With a considerable increase in the number of students and families being served this semester, the Village Project is no longer meeting in the May Memorial Library.
Between 2008 and 2011, the project started by Associate Professor Jean Rattigan-Rohr served an average of 30 students and their families per year for one-on-one work with Elon tutors. At that time, extra people in the library on a Wednesday afternoon posed few inconveniences.
Today, when 141 students enrolled in the project are joined by parents and tutors, the limited space required new accomodations and the Burlington School offered its facilities on West Davis Street as an alternative meeting place for the Village Project.
Louis “Smokey” Oats, transitional head of school, said he offered the space because “helping children discover, build and become is our life’s work” at the Burlington school. “When Dr. Jean Rohr asked about using our space for Elon’s Village Project, there really wasn’t much to consider or think about,” he said.
Elon University students involved in the Village Project said they love working with children and their parents while gaining valuable classroom skills. “The energy and dedication of the families is contagious,” said Elon education major Amy Sudol. “They want their children to succeed so badly that you can’t help but want to support them.”
Elon education major Sarah Rickman, who works with the family of a first grader, offered similar sentiments.
“My involvement with ‘The Village’ has been a pivotal marker of my time at Elon,” she said. “In the education field you constantly hear of the need for parent and community involvement in a child’s learning and growth. Even more than that, as members of a society, we ought to take on an active role in reaching out and supporting each other. ‘The Village’ embodies all of this in a very real practice.”
This semester, another component of the program – “Science in the Village” – includes students in an Elon first-year core curriculum course. Twenty-one students and their professor, Mark Enfield, are connecting energy concepts from Elon’s 2014-15 Common Reading selection, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” with tutees in the Village. The picture book version of the story has been purchased for each young student.
Music in the Village kicked off the semester with Associate Professor Gerald Knight, who introduced this year’s sessions by including music department colleagues Marshall Harwood and Chip Newton, and Elon student performer Caitlyn Balkcum from the a cappella group Vital Signs, to share their talents with the students and families.
Business school students are now a part of the Village Project as math tutors. “The Village Project provides Business Fellows with a unique opportunity to build and apply our leadership skills through engagement with the community,” said Elon student and Business Fellow Wil King.
Parents continue to support the project and find new ways to extend their own involvement. “The project is stellar for its outreach to parents and children in Burlington and also to the young people who are going to be teachers,” said Tara Tinnin, a longtime parent in the program. “To me, it goes far beyond building the kids mastery and reading skills. This program keeps expanding and offering lifelong learning skills for everyone involved.”
Funding from the Oak Foundation, a philanthropic organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, has enabled the Village Project to be replicated at four additional sites: UNC Greensboro, Winston-Salem State University, Concordia University in Oregon and the East Queen Street Baptist Church Evening Institute in Kingston, Jamaica. Funding from Wells Fargo supported a new Summer in the Village program started this year.