Every week, for four days a week, five hours a day, Emma Robinson serves as a foster grandparent to students at Summerton Early Childhood Center, reading and playing various literacy comprehension games. She volunteers with the ultimate goal of having children learn how to read and improve their literacy skills.
Robinson is one of the foster grandparents of the Save the Children Program at SECC. Coordinators at SECC and St. Paul Elementary School, as well as 11 foster grandparents at the two schools, help students start out on a good foot when it comes to literacy.
“It’s amazing,” Robinson said. “I had a student last year who would misbehave to try to take attention away from reading because he didn’t know how. By the end of the year he was asking to read to me.”
Save the Children is an international independent organization that works in the heart of communities, where they help children and families help themselves. Programs at SECC and St. Paul, for students kindergarten through the sixth grade, have shown success, according to Barb Acker, deputy director for Programs at the organizations’ South Carolina Office.
“With a very small amount of resources, we’re able to make a really big impact here in Summerton,” Acker said.
There are several components at both the early childhood level, and at the elementary level that contribute to student achievement.
At SECC, those programs include Early Steps to School Success, and the bookbag exchange. Early Steps to School Success is a program that works with children from pre-birth to kindergarten. It includes home visits, and an intensive early intervention program that helps out students, as well as helping parents become more well-rounded. In the bookbag exchange, a child takes a book home, and a parent tracks the number of times that they read to the child, the number of times they talk to the child, etc.
When a child enrolled in a program turns three, local Save the Children Coordinator Leola Parks helps the children transition to an early-childhood program.
“What our research is showing is that the children who are read to everyday have an average vocabulary growth for receptive language,” said Acker. “That takes away that gap for children who may not normally achieve such success.”
About 70 children are enrolled in the Save the Children program at SECC, 20 receive intensive services and 50 participate in the bookbag exchange.
After children move on from SECC to the third grade, they can transition into the four-day a week program at St. Paul Elementary School.
The in-school program includes Phonics, a teaching method used to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters. The in-school program guides students in reading practice and fluency using various reading tutorials.
Students summarize books they’ve read to Antoinette Postell-Nelson, St. Paul Elementary Save the Children Coordinator, and foster parents. After being quizzed on the plot, theme and characters, they take a computerized accelerated reader test, which tests their reading skills.
The afterschool program offers reading aloud, independent reading or reading to foster grandparents. It also includes the CHANGE (Creating Healthy, Active, and Nurturing Growing-up Environments) component that focuses on various physical activities, as well as teaching healthy eating habits. The students stay active through soccer, basketball and jump rope.
“Besides focusing on their literacy skills, we also want to help children stay healthy and fight obesity,” Postell-Nelson said.
About 150 students are enrolled in the two programs at St. Paul. About 96 students, or a third of the school, are enrolled in the in-school program, and 40 students are enrolled in the afterschool program.
Rosa Dingle, principal at St. Paul, said that the program contributed to improvements in the school’s report card in the last two years. She also said that the foster grandparents contribute largely to the school’s success.
“I don’t know what I would do without them,” she said. “They are a tremendous help to making our students successful.”
