Background

Children's Enrichment Program
at Rancho Sespe

Full-Circle Learning Classes for Children of all Ages are provided for a HUD Housing Project between Piru and Fillmore, California serving Migrant Farm Industry Families and, now, a few children displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The number of children served in 2005-2006 is approximately 120 children, preschool-age through secondary school (70 regularly enrolled). The overall mission is to help students embrace their role as society's helpers and healers.

Project Goals: To maximize the potential of immigrant and displaced youth to interact as relevant, connected, compassionate members of the human family; to help them meaningfully participate in and contribute to community life; and to help them to do so by integrating academic development, conflict resolution, artistic and musical expression into character-themed learning units that culminate in service to a local and global humanity.

Project Outcomes: Students will resist gang life, appreciate differences and become ambassadors of goodwill and peace; students will develop not only a vocabulary but a repertoire of strategies that help them practice habits associated with positive character and leadership traits and apply them in interpersonal, community-based and world leadership applications; students will discover new talents and set goals that better their communities, enhance family life and will choose paths and careers of community service; students will catch up with English speaking counterparts and make educational gains that enrich their capacity to serve; and parents will become engaged as they see results in their children and as caregivers play a greater role in becoming teachers and will foster a culture that enhances the goals of membership in the human family.

Results of the Rancho Sespe Program

Most recently, in spring 2006, parents of preschoolers attending for only three months reported in anonymous surveys that their children already showed considerable gains in reading readiness, knowledge of science(75%), interest in the arts and social skills such as generosity and compassion and (62%) in some cases, conflict resolution (50%). Children as young as two years old participated in the assessment. In August, 2005, parents of school-age students responding to surveys reported that over the course of the summer their children experienced improvements in the motivation to learn (87%), in their artistic capacities (75%), in academics (86%), and in social skills such as compassion and conflict resolution (62.5%). Officials in the local school district said that Rancho Sespe students now stand out among others at the school.

Immediate Needs

Migrant funding to County residents has been cut. School-aged students no longer have a place to go to seek positive role models and guidance for their lives and learning while parents work. Older students, especially, need role models and programs that reinforce the humanistic values, goal-setting skills, and the character-driven focus that currently helps them end their summer and start their school year with greater focus. In the summer of 2007, the program also suffered from a lack of trained teachers up front, as the funding did not permit professional teachers to be trained for every grade level, so teachers were stretched thin, and when one teacher took a leave of absence for a family medical emergency, the program suffered.

Retaining enough project funding to include extra teachers in the training enables us to have aides who serve as backups as the need arises. The better trained the teacher, the more effective the results. If professional teachers take time away from other work for professional development, they need compensation. We have found that when we rely only on volunteer support, the program suffers. The best program includes a combination of teachers from the migrant community and volunteers from the surrounding communities willing to receive some training.

The 2007 summer school cost $85 per child for a month of service, including four service-learning field trips by bus and lunch every day for 80 people. The program was short two teachers. The budget also did not allow enough funding for an adequate number of books for the middle school reading program. Although their class was the smallest (12), the middle schoolers were perhaps the class of greatest need. The cost of the winter budget per month is $10 per child. The program needs a paid site director to recruit and manage volunteers, to extend its hours to staff a daylight program. It would also require project materials and occasional buses. An additional stipend for summer and a budget to staff a year-round limited after-school program would amplify the benefits of the program for the students by reinforcing the program goals after the infusion of benefits the summer school provides. An additional $25,000 per year for staffing, supplies and field trip buses would make the program more effective and increase the gains in the important areas of character development among the older students.

Farm Worker Families

Farmworker families bring their children into an environment in Southern California in which they provided needed services for packing plants and agricultural services, while their children struggled to be accepted in the local schools. Parents could not assist with homework, so they often fell behind academically. They banded together and formed cliques to create their own sense of belonging. These factors contributed to the emergence of gangs and domestic violence in the isolated subculture of the migrant community.

In 2002, three organizations collaborated to address the need for violence prevention in a migrant community in Ventura County, citing a plan for disenfranchised families to access to greater literacy support and meaningful opportunities to integrate into community life and to learn peaceful approaches to problem solving. They requested a project that would gradually, organically help a community, through its children.

The Rancho Sespe Plan

The site most likely to host a program, Rancho Sespe, is a HUD housing project with 500 residents, 100 of them children. Because of its specialty in integrating character education, conflict resolution, academics/literacy, and the arts with community service, the Full-Circle Learning approach was selected. La Familia Sana, Health for Humanity and Children's Enrichment Program brought together volunteers from 70 miles around to the isolated location to host the first summer school. Intensive classes were held during the summer and reinforced—due to the distance—with year-round bi-monthly evening programs. Eventually, La Familia Sana's county funding ran out and it became defunct, and Full-Circle Learning needed to hold the reins for hosting its own programs.

Individual donors rose to the occasion, raising enough funds for the next phase of the plan: To create summer jobs for members of the community who would become the teachers of the curriculum and reinforce the values in the community. Each year, one or two bilingual teachers and one aide serve in the project. The project now also houses victims of Hurricane Katrina, for the need for diversity projects has increased.

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