VCU news

By Patrick Kane

Six members of the Southside Boys and Girls Club circle a Monopoly-inspired game board on a Wednesday night. Instead of ownership of Park Place and Boardwalk, each roll of the dice brings them closer to literacy skills.

A girl rolls the dice, moving her team’s game piece (the dog) to short “o.” That means her team has to say a word that includes that vowel sound.

“Octopus!” replies one of the girls.

“Octopus is an interesting word. It has both the long and the short ‘o’ sound, doesn’t it?” says Spencer Nichols, a Virginia Commonwealth University AmeriCorps team leader. “Can you put in a sentence? Maybe something to do with the fact that it lives in the water?”

“Octopuses live in the sea, and they are wet,” says the girl, matter-of-factly.

“Okay, there we go. That was a very good sentence, and now we’re back to the boys,” Nichols says.

Game leaders Nichols and Jasmine Johnson, a sophomore at VCU, are among the 25 members working with some of Richmond’s young residents this year, as VCU’s AmeriCorps program celebrates 20 years. The national AmeriCorps program was established in 1993, with roots dating back to the 1960s with President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

VCU’s program is the oldest and largest in Virginia.

“AmeriCorps is a national service program, it engages individuals across the United States. They are addressing community needs. In Richmond, we’re addressing education,” said Jenny Callear, program director.

Although AmeriCorps has worked in Richmond’s public school classrooms for many years, “we are seeing that the need is in out-of-school-time support, so we’re working with Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCA and the Peter Paul Development Center this year,” Callear said. VCU AmeriCorps members are helping those groups expand capacity to reach more kindergarten-through-fifth-grade students at high-priority schools.

“We average 80-percent success rate for our elementary students that participate in the program, moving to grade level or on-track for their grade level,” Callear said. “We’ve been with [Richmond schools] so long they trust VCU’s judgment.”

“What we’re bringing in terms of literacy tutoring didn’t exist here before. We can bring a real focus to literacy,” said Nichols, a 2014 Virginia Tech graduate. Once the Boys and Girls Club members arrive from school, they have fun activities, homework time, group literacy activities and more.

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“We do a lot of reading and vocabulary. I try to make it as interactive as I can, because I know they have been in school all day,” said Johnson, who spends her afternoons working with first- and second-graders. She enjoys watching the kids recognize a word, phrase or pronunciation gleaned from a lesson.

Now in his second year serving full time, Nichols has followed some kids from the classroom to after-school as AmeriCorps’ focus has shifted.

“It’s given me an insight into a lot of what their life is like. Now I find out that they spent four or five hours—after I saw them—here,” he said. The club, located on Bainbridge Street in Richmond, offers deeper opportunities for bonding and relationship building.

“You’re meeting with them, talking with them, asking how their day has been. It’s more of the mentor aspect versus the tutor,” Nichols said. “You get to know what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling and what kind of things are going on with them. You build that connection.”

Johnson said learning is a two-way street at the Boys and Girls Club.

It’s just really cool to be able to be here with them and get to know them, because they teach me a lot.

“It’s just really cool to be able to be here with them and get to know them, because they teach me a lot,” she said.

The young students are not the only ones who take something away from AmeriCorps. Although Johnson and Nichols are at different stages of their careers, they agree that AmeriCorps has reinforced their commitment to careers in education.

“I’d never heard of the program before. I realized that right next door to my hometown … VCU was putting on their AmeriCorps program working in schools,” Nichols said. “I want to be a school psychologist, so this was a brilliant opportunity to get experience with the school system.”

“I get a huge amount of satisfaction from helping a child overcome a problem. When I see something that they’ve been struggling with for weeks or even months and that breakthrough happens, I’ve had that make my week,” he said. “They put in the work, their effort is what did that, but the fact that I was able to facilitate that, that’s a great feeling.”

As an education major, Johnson is gaining critical experience through AmeriCorps.

“I did not expect to be so involved with kids so early in my college years. I was thinking, ‘It’s going to take forever until I get to really be teaching or anything with the children,’ so I’m so happy to have this experience already,” she said.

While the program draws most of the student members—who serve 15 hours a week—from VCU, they do welcome other students. Some of the full-time members, who serve 40 hours a week, are graduates of other colleges.

“They get to experience a little bit of VCU. A lot of them choose to go into a master’s program here after serving. They love being in Richmond and what that offers. It becomes home to them and they get very attached to their students and their schools,” Callear said. AmeriCorps frequently opens their eyes to lower-paying, yet rewarding, careers they may not have considered at first.

Other full-time members are older adults, and also see it as a springboard to refresh skills, switch careers or re-enter the workforce.

“A lot of our alums work in the public schools or careers like social work,” she said. “It shows something about the individual. You’re doing it because you want to serve, you want to learn and you want to develop skills.”

Among those alumni is Jaleesa Pleasants, who served part time with AmeriCorps during the 2012-2013 school year while studying at VCU. That transitioned into a job at the club, where she has bonded with the children and community.

“Because of AmeriCorps, I’m here at the Boys and Girls Club now. It worked for me, three or four years later,” she said. Pleasants will graduate from Virginia State University in the spring.

Callear doesn’t just serve as the program’s coordinator. She has been involved with AmeriCorps since graduating in 2009, having served two years in the corps and then working in administrative roles.

“For me it was a transition piece,” she said. After growing up in the suburbs of Midlothian and studying psychology, she intended to pursue further education and research. But her professors challenged her to serve more in the community.

“Sometimes you need that direct service experience to connect with individuals and learn from them,” she said.

Nichols, who feels his career path is reinforced as “completely correct” by AmeriCorps, agreed.

“This is a worthwhile thing to do, and I would encourage people to give it a look,” he said.

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