Georgia Summer School Program Bridges Gap for ELLs

By Ines Alicea, ELL Outlook™ Contributing Writer

Every fall, Julie Garrison, an ESOL teacher in Barrow County, Georgia, would get frustrated seeing how much English her students had lost over the summer. She wanted to counter that but knew it would be difficult because her Hmong students all lived in the same apartment complex and spent their summers speaking primarily in Hmong with friends, neighbors, and family.

“We had seen them come so far during the school year,” said Garrison, who teaches at Auburn Elementary in Auburn, just north of Atlanta. “But by the fall we saw many of them had had setbacks.”

Then luck stepped in and a local Boys and Girls Club announced to community leaders that they would be giving away some grant money they had not been able to use. Garrison knew exactly what to do with the money and received funding to start a summer program for all English language learners (ELLs) at her school, which serves kindergarten through fifth grade.

The program she started with fellow ESOL teacher Patty Birchenall lasts about five weeks and offers participants three and a half hours of instruction in the mornings on Mondays through Thursdays, followed by field trips in the afternoons. On Fridays, the students go on an all-day field trip. Breakfast and lunch are provided to the students through funding from the county and agencies like Partners in Education. This summer will be the program’s third year.

Students are broken up into small groups of seven or eight by grade level, and during the mornings they focus on instruction in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. They read to each other, work on plays, do writing activities, and talk about issues. Teachers from the school are hired to teach the summer classes, and bus drivers are hired to shuttle the kids to and from home and field trips. The county provides the buses.

The afternoon field trips are often simple things like skating, bowling, or going to a pool, an activity many of the participants had never done before. Some of the students had to be shown how to put on a bathing suit, Garrison said. The program was able to save a lot of money by participating in many free local activities, such as a weekly summer program for children at the movie theatres and regular library programs such as magic shows and wildlife presentations with live animals.

The Friday field trips are a bigger production. Last summer, the students traveled to Tennessee for an overnight trip to visit an aquarium and a children’s museum. They’ve gone to Atlanta’s zoo, the city’s Center for Puppetry Arts, where they were treated to a show and learned how to make their own puppets, and to the Six Flags theme park, which has a program that rewards students with a free entry ticket after they have read for six hours.

“I didn’t realize how much of an impact a good base of experiences can have on a student,” said Garrison. “As educators, we tend to focus on academics. But in our program, we just step back and give them experiences. They’ve gotten to do a lot of things they had not done in Atlanta. We try to relate the field trips to what they do in the classroom, and they use English throughout. The experiences help them become more competent in our culture.”

Students are given the Iowa Test of Basic Skills reading comprehension subtest prior to and after the summer program to measure progress. The students’ average scores were at the 29th percentile on the pretest and at the 36th percentile on the posttest. This test’s norms are gathered from native English speakers; at the 36th percentile, 36 percent of the native speakers in the norming group scored below that score, and 64 percent scored above. The students also have shown progress on the standardized tests that the school gives, as well as on Georgia’s Criterion Referenced Competency Test. Garrison’s school was recently recognized as a Georgia School for Excellence because of the huge gains students achieved on the criterion referenced test over the past three years. The school ranked ninth in the state among top gainers, and Garrison credits the summer program for some of those gains in scores.

“We stopped seeing the setbacks we were accustomed to seeing after the summer break,” said Garrison, adding that Hmong parents have also become more involved in the school since the program began. “The kids felt more like they were part of the school. The parents sensed that we were reaching out to them and that they were part of the school too, not outsiders.”

Initially, the Hmong parents were worried and unsure what to make of the program. But Garrison said that she and other teachers, plus a Hmong teacher, Alina Yang, and her husband Wayne, both native Hmong speakers, visited the parents in their homes. They discussed the program and gave the parents program information written in their native language to assure them it would help their children academically.

“We made several of these trips to promote the program, gain the trust of the parents, answer questions, and finally to gather registration information, such as emergency contacts and health information on our participants,” said Garrison. “These visits were essential to the success of the program, as we knew from experience how frustrating it could be for the parents to sort through the stacks of papers in English coming home each week with every child in the family and to determine which ones were important or even relevant to their children.”

Garrison said she was fortunate to get that first grant to launch the program. Getting the funding for subsequent years has been more challenging, but she has a lot of faith, as well as help from Auburn Elementary’s principal. Garrison learned as she searched for funds that all ELLs are eligible for the federal government’s Title I funds, so her program has received funds from that, as well as from the federal government’s Title III program, which provides funding primarily for ELLs.

“One thing that is intimidating for people is that they don’t know where they are going to get the funding,” said Garrison. “But there are tons of grants out there. We’ve learned about writing grants. You just never know where you’ll have an extra pocket of money.”

Barrow County is relatively new at dealing with the nation’s growth in English language learners. Until about seven years ago, the county had few ELLs, but today, about 4 percent of the county’s students are ELLs, according to Georgia’s Office of Student Achievement. About 13 percent of the students at Garrison’s school are ELLs. Other schools in Georgia have been calling her to ask her about how she launched her program, and she hopes it will serve as a model for others.

“It has been wonderful,” Garrison said. “The kids are so appreciative.”