How churches, a soup kitchen + farm are helping Beaufort Co. students bridge pandemic gap
A soup kitchen or an organic farm are far from the first places that come to mind when thinking of a classroom, but they’re two of 10 extended learning community partner program locations in Beaufort County School District.
Community partners provide a place for pre-K through high school students to participate in learning activities after school. The school district provides the program, including snacks, dinner and transportation, at no cost to the students’ families.
Activities are Monday to Thursday each week from 3 to 6 p.m. with one location, the Hilton Head Boys and Girls Club, operating from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturdays.
A pilot program ran from January to May with six partners after the community expressed a need for learning beyond the classroom to make up for learning loss during the pandemic, according to school district instructional services officer N’Kia Campbell, who helped start the program.
Recent state testing results at elementary, middle and high schools show that most proficiency levels aren’t back to 2019 pre-pandemic levels yet.
“The task at hand is to find ways to extend learning opportunities for our children so that it goes beyond just the traditional school,” Schools Superintendent Frank Rodriguez said.
It has since expanded to 10 partners, with one more starting January 2023.
“I think that the partnerships and the relationships that we’ve developed just in that short period is truly a win-win for the community and the children because everybody’s engaged,” said Gaynelle Dantzler, director of community and extended learning. “The community partners are really vested in this initiative because they want to see it work.”
The following partners are involved:
Church of the Harvest
New Life Deliverance Temple Tutorial Center
Marshview Community Organic Farm
Meadowbrook Baptist Church
Grace AME Church
Scott Community Center
Mt. Carmel Baptist Church
St. Paul Baptist Church
Bluffton Community Soup Kitchen
Hilton Head Boys & Girls Club
St. Andrew By-The-Sea, starting in January
A typical afternoon
Once kindergartner Malachi Dawson finishes school, he gets on a yellow bus with about 10 other pre-K to third-grade students to go to Mt. Carmel Baptist Church. The church is a few minutes away from where the children attend school at James J. Davis Early Childhood Center.
Davis and the rest of his classmates step off the bus and are greeted by a Mt. Carmel volunteer. They get their temperatures checked for signs of a fever, use the restroom, then meet their teacher, April Smalls, in a room with plastic folding tables and drawings from the students on the walls.
Smalls is a pre-K teacher at James J. Davis Early Childhood Center.
“I’m a product of Beaufort County schools, a product of this community, and ever since I graduated from college, my goal was to come back to my community to help out and give back and do as much as I can for the children,” Smalls said. “Teaching is my passion, my love, my gift.”
She starts the afternoon by passing out Cheez-Its and applesauce then asking each student how their day was.
Answers included “I got an A ++ on my math quiz” and “I read my book quietly without bothering anyone.” Each response was met with a round of applause from the class.
Then, Smalls reads a short book aloud that a different student is assigned to bring each day.
“We do a lot of fun stuff. I like it here,” Dawson said. “I want to live here.”
From there the students do literacy and math activities, play games and have free time. Each of the locations has a unique schedule that is approved by Dantzler.
“We tell them to always make sure that you include that recreation time, because we don’t want it to be another three hours of traditional school,” she said.
Despite that, it’s still difficult for some students to go straight from school to a learning program.
“I want to stay home,” Davis Early Childhood Center student Makai Watson said. “It’s too hard to sit here all day.”
Smalls said it’s easier to engage students, even if they’re having a bad day, because of small class sizes.
“This way you can do a lot of individualized things for them and make it fun at the same time, not just school, since they’ve been in school the whole day,” Smalls said. “We want to get the school stuff done, the homework, then we like to do other things to make it fun and exciting for them.”
Completing homework before going home is a relief for some students.
“My parents don’t have to worry about me, and I don’t have to worry about anything, just washing up and going to bed,” Riverview Charter School third-grader Tyria Washington said. “That way I can sleep.”
Washington is in a room with children her age and a different instructor. The room next to them is for middle school students and their instructor.
Typically programs have dinner around 5 p.m. before students are bused home or picked up.
Is it working?
School district staff are monitoring attendance, behavior and academic performance.
Each of the community sites are capped at 25 to 27 students, with an adult for about every eight children, and there are over 200 students in the program with 12 more joining this week, according to Dantzler.
Smalls said there is a waiting list for her classroom.
“I don’t know how everybody’s getting my phone number, but I tell you, the word is out there,” Dantzler said. “My phone rang constantly of parents that are wanting their kids to join this program.”
Parents are able to enroll students through their schools.
Teachers monitor social skills like whether students are making friends and interacting with each other, something that they missed while learning from home during the pandemic.
“They really were having trouble making relationships and being a part of a classroom because they were so used to ‘There’s nobody with me, it’s just me in this computer, and I don’t have to talk to anybody,’” said Donna Coxwell, children’s ministry director at Meadowbrook Baptist Church.
“We’re working on things like talking nice to each other because they’ve been apart from each other for so long they missed that element,” Smalls said. “We talk about manners and how we speak to each other, little things like that because they’ve been away for so long.”
Teachers and administrators say that students’ scores have been improving but didn’t provide any statistics.
“The academic piece is vital by having teachers in the building in the morning going through math, science and English,” Hilton Head Boys & Girls Club Unit Director Kim Likins said. “It’s improving their academics but also by being able to provide full-day child care is really helping our families from an economic standpoint too.”
Funding and the future
The program costs an average of $32,000 per site since January and is funded through federal government relief grants, according to Candace Bruder, a district spokeswoman.
The Beaufort County School District received approximately $73.6 million from ESSER II and ARP ESSER grants.
The funds cover teacher pay, bus-related expenses, school supplies and meals for the students.
The program has funding until 2024, according to Dantzler, and organizers are prioritizing documentation to reapply for grants.
“We do know that fundings come, and then fundings go,” Dantzler said. “So a part of the sustainability plan is really accessing those grants that ... can support us beyond the funding source that we have here.”
