Getting students to spend their summer breaks reading is hard, but when most of those students have to read in a language they do not speak at home, it becomes even more difficult.
However, a five-year-old tutoring program for Hispanic youth run by Presbyterian church El Buen Pastor (Spanish for "The Good Shepherd") in Winston-Salem is trying to make reading less of a chore for children from Spanish-speaking families.
During the summer, the church offers free one-hour tutoring sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays for children in preschool and elementary school. The program also runs for four days a week during the school year.
Mary Bolton, who has been with the outreach program since it became a nonprofit organization in 2006, said that it has about 100 volunteers who work with the children throughout the year. Most volunteers are members of the community or local college students.
Bolton's daughter Anna, who recently received her master's degree in education from Virginia Tech, also tutors with the program. "They need as much support as they can get," she said.
Andres Miranda, 22, whose mother, Rosa, started El Buen Pastor when the family moved here from Mexico in 2001, said that the tutoring began as a way to bring people to its Sunday services. In the past school year, the program provided academic support to 60 students.
During yesterday's session, 10-year-old Leticia Montufar was inside reading about the Atlantic Ocean. With the help of Anne Jones, a 22-year-old graduate student at Wake Forest University, she got through the paragraphs with little trouble.
After some reading, Jones had Leticia find the ocean on a globe to reinforce the context of the words.
Jones said that she got involved in the program because "it's a great opportunity to empower a group of children that is going to be part of our future."
Meanwhile, the population of students overcoming language barriers is growing in the region.
The number of children classified as Limited English Proficient, or LEP, in Forsyth County schools has risen from about 2,700 in 2004 to an expected 7,000 this fall, LEP Coordinator David Sisk said.
About 94 percent of those students come from Spanish-speaking families, he said.
Sisk, who oversees about 80 English-as-a-second-language teachers in the county, said it is a challenge to deal with the diversity of LEP students' needs.
"Learning English is the end goal, but how you do that is extremely important," he said, stressing that parental engagement helps in the learning process. Parents "may want to help their children, but because they don't have the language abilities, they're not able to do that," he said.
Family literacy programs at three local elementary schools are working to overcome that barrier by using the students' curriculum to teach English to their parents.
As a result, "parental involvement goes up tremendously, because they feel like they're a part of the school," Sisk said.
Outreach efforts such as those at El Buen Pastor can create a smoother transition for immigrant families, he said.
"Anything you can do to get them involved … goes a long way both psychologically and socially."
■ Christian Kloc can be reached at 727-7270 or at ckloc@wsjournal.com.
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