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JOHNS ISLAND — Mt. Zion Elementary School teachers rely on a strong base of
volunteers, but few of their helpers have children in the school.
The rural school's more than 50 volunteers are mostly retirees who live on
nearby Seabrook and Kiawah islands. The majority of its 200 students are
low-income.
Sue Holloman, a retired school administrator and volunteer, coordinates the
outside help and matches volunteers' interests and availability to teachers'
needs. The careful planning results in teachers and volunteers feeling
satisfied, both groups say, and students are the ultimate beneficiaries.
It's such a well-run system that Charleston County schools Superintendent
Nancy McGinley holds it up as a model she'd like other schools to follow.
Many schools have volunteers, but they haven't been used in strategic ways
to help elevate students' performance, she said. The district plans to hire
a director of public affairs to organize volunteers across the district in a
concentrated effort to boost literacy.
McGinley said she hopes to find a group that will identify site coordinators
for each school and recruit churches and businesses for their support.
"The key is having someone in charge of volunteers at the school so it does
not become the responsibility of the principal," she said. "We really think
we have a lot of potential to mobilize volunteers."
Principals say they don't have time to create and run a volunteer force.
When volunteers do show up, they're often put to work filing papers or
making copies instead of working directly with students.
But volunteers who don't have a meaningful experience or feel like they
aren't valued won't come back, Holloman said. Mt. Zion's system helps ensure
that volunteers feel good about the time they're giving, she said.
More than half of the school's helpers are former teachers, and the school's
teachers say they trust them to give students what is needed.
At the school last week, one volunteer was helping small groups of
second-graders take tests. In another room, a volunteer was working with two
first-grade students on identifying letters and the sounds they make.
Dara Jiravisitcul, a first-grade teacher in her fifth year at Mt. Zion, has
volunteers in her classroom Monday through Thursday, and she plans her
classroom lessons around the extra help.
With a volunteer, she can break students into smaller groups or give them
more individualized lessons. Without the volunteers, students would get less
one-on-one instruction, and classrooms would be more hectic, Jiravisitcul
said.
"I couldn't ask for anything better," she said.
Volunteers are so engaged in Mt. Zion students' education that they chart
students' data and are among the first to call the school and ask about test
score results. They chaperone field trips and serve as monitors during
standardized testing.
They give financially too, and provide supplies and uniforms to families who
can't afford their own. Last year they decided to pay for one of the
school's most advanced students to attend Charleston Collegiate on a
scholarship, and that wasn't the first time they've done that.
Students are aware of the extra adults on campus and say they look forward
to their classroom visitors. Fifth-grader Pinita Tobar read books with a
volunteer as a third-grader, and said that volunteers still do whatever they
can to help her and her classmates.
Students' scores on the state's standardized tests shot up this year. The
percentage of students scoring proficient and advanced in math doubled to 28
percent, and the percentage of fourth- and seventh-grade students scoring
basic and above in science jumped almost 10 percentage points to 59 percent.
Mt. Zion Principal Deborah Fordham credited teachers for the improvement,
but said volunteers are a strategy and support that teachers use.
"They are just so good to us," she said. "Our jobs would be a lot harder if
it weren't for them."
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