Elderly Give Boost to Appalachian Reading Project

By Alan Elsner
Reuters
Monday, December 26, 2005

MOUSIE, Ky. -- In a battle against entrenched poverty, where adult illiteracy, unemployment and drug addiction are rife, teachers in the Appalachian region have unleashed a new weapon: grandparents.

Under a program sponsored by Save the Children, schools in several counties of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, among the poorest in the nation, have recruited more than 80 grandparents to work in schools helping children learn how to read.

The grandparents -- all but three are women and most are well into their seventies -- spend several hours a day, working one-on-one with children who have difficulty reading.

"I want to see them do better than driving a coal truck," said Alma Fraser, 71, in her eighth year as a volunteer. She puts in 7 1/2 hours four days a week at Jones Fork Elementary School in the village of Mousie, and is one of six grandparents working at the school.

"I want to see them wearing ties and white shirts. Be a lawyer, be a doctor, be a chemist, an engineer," she said. "But you can't do anything without an education anymore, and reading is the root of it."

Mousie is in Knott County in the hills of eastern Kentucky, traditional logging and coal country. But both industries are in decline, and nothing has come to replace them. Median household income was $23,500 in 2003 -- little over half the national average. Almost two-thirds of the families live below the poverty line.

Some companies in Kentucky report difficulty in recruiting suitably educated and trained workers even when jobs are available. Others considering setting up facilities may be deterred by the lack of a skilled workforce.

"Our biggest problem is their home lives. The value of education is not that strong," said Greg Conn, principal of Jones Fork Elementary School. "This is a community where drugs are very prevalent. Not that many of our students have fathers at home; adult illiteracy is very high, as is unemployment."

Although illegal, marijuana is the number one cash crop in this region, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. But Appalachia has also experienced a dramatic upsurge in the use of methamphetamine as well as prescription drug abuse.

The majority of children arriving for their first day of kindergarten are already well behind their peers in more affluent neighborhoods, said Dana Slone, principal of the neighboring Cross Creek Elementary School.

"The majority have no phonetic awareness at all. They are not aware that sounds make words. They have never been read to at home," she said.

Tabatha Holcolm, a first-grade teacher at Cross Creek, said she could always tell which children had been read to at home. "They understand the way words are put together, and how print works and where a book begins and ends," she said.

Some children have hardly even been exposed to real conversation, said Alisa Huff, the "reading recovery" coordinator at Cross Creek, who helps train and supervise the nine senior volunteers who work in the school.

The grandparents get a small stipend of a bit more than $2 an hour from Save the Children, which receives charitable donations.

Home for some of these children is a mobile home parked with a few other similar dwellings in an isolated "holler" -- a narrow valley that cuts into the forested hills. A few stray dogs run around the muddy clearings where the homes stand. Horses munch on grass, and the area is strewn with dozens of wrecked and abandoned vehicles, plundered for their parts.

Sometimes, the children confide in the grandparents, telling them that "Daddy hit Mommy last night," or "Daddy went to sleep with his girlfriend."

Dorothy Seals, 76, once heard a child say that her home was robbed the previous night, "but they didn't get nothin' but Mom's drugs."

At Cross Creek, only 44 percent of fourth-graders (9 and 10 years old) are reading at grade level and only 35 percent of seventh-graders (12 to 13). In mathematics, the situation is worse, with 74 percent in the fifth grade below the required standard.

But the grandparents are making a difference. At the lower grades, where they have been working one-on-one, scores are rising and most students are at or near grade level.

Loretta Shepherd was thinking of retiring after 36 years as a teacher. But she decided to stay on at Jones Fork so that she could teach the first generation of grandparent-trained students to reach her classroom.

Now she thinks half of them could go to college.

But without parental backing, this may be a vain hope. "If the expectation from the home is not there, it is not going to happen," Slone said. "I see kids who are straight-A students who drop out of high school, and that potential is never fulfilled."

The grandparents themselves are among the biggest beneficiaries. "It's good for us. It gives us a reason to get up in the morning. And the kids are very good to me. I get hugs every day. It means a lot," Fraser said.

In a school district in which an estimated 40 percent of the adults are illiterate, it is not surprising that some children initially resist efforts to be educated.

Fraser recalled one child, whose father was illiterate, who said he didn't care if he learned to read or not. That child is now 12 and said he sometimes reads to his father.