Metro faculty members help low-income residents learn to read
By Linda Hardesty & Perry Swanson
The Metropolitan
On a recent Friday night, Adriann Wycoff was alone at the Hope Six building at North Denverâs Quigg-Newton subsidized housing project. She was working on the computer, trying to load an ancient program onto an ancient machine ÷ and she was so absorbed in her work, she hadnât noticed how late it had become.
ăI heard shots outside, and people started throwing rocks at the window,ä she said.
She closed the blinds and moved away from the window. She checked the phones.
ăYes, sometimes Iâm afraid,ä Wycoff said.
But Wycoff and Arthur Campa are dedicated to helping people at Quigg-Newton learn how to read and how to live in a world that demands cultural literacy.
Wycoff works for Metroâs Family Center. Campa is a professor in the Anthropology department. The two have worked together for 12 years.
They have a grant to develop a Family Literacy Center at Quigg-Newton, which is near 46th Street and Pecos, and home to 1,300 people.
Wycoff said some families have lived at Quigg-Newton for generations and are illiterate. She described one woman who did not know that two dimes and a nickel equaled a quarter. Apparently, when this woman went grocery shopping, she just laid her money on the counter and let the cashier count it.
One service the center provides is an after-school tutoring program for students at Remington, Smedly and Horace Mann elementary schools. Sometimes more than 20 children attend the program, which is held four days a week and staffed by volunteers.
ăYou really see here, working with these kids, the absolute lack of structure in their lives,ä said Fraser Ohlgren, a volunteer at the tutoring program and graduate of the University of Denver. ăThey have zero conflict resolution skills. The minute somebody says something, they fight.ä
Ohlgren said the children have a hard time imagining what life is like outside their community. He described an incident following a drive-by shooting where a victim lay dead on the ground for 20 hours before police arrived.
When Ohlgren asked the children what they did that day, they responded, ăWe went to see the body with the head blown off,ä he said.
Ohlgren and his friend, Dave Parson, who also volunteers at the center, said they try to reach school-age kids ÷ when they havenât given up yet.
ăIt definitely is a rough crowd, but you canât get frustrated,ä said Ohlgren. ăIf I quit on them, Iâm just one more in a long line of people that said ÎYou suck.âä
Parson said itâs important for children living in a housing project to realize they have a choice of what to do with their lives. He helps run a dance group for students at Horace Mann Elementary.
Another volunteer at the center, Dee Britton,
is a resident at Quigg-Newton and president of the local resident council. She said illiteracy is a family problem.
If parents canât read, they are not likely to have books around the house, and they donât read bedtime stories to their children, who get a message that reading is not important. Even though the kids go to school for a while, they arenât encouraged to do their homework and they may end up illiterate. ăItâs a cycle,ä Britton said.
She said her own family came from a small
Mexican-American community in New Mexico where everyone spoke Spanish. Her family moved to Silverton right before she started school.
ăI started first grade and didnât know how to speak any English at all,ä she said.
Out of 13 kids in her family, she was the only one who graduated from high school.
She didnât have her own bedroom where she could find a quiet place to study. Besides, she said, the bedrooms didnât have heat, and Silverton has very cold winters. The whole family of spent their evenings around the wood stove in the kitchen-living room area.
She wanted to graduate because she saw how her parents had to struggle. She would help them pay their bills. Her dad would set out his weekly wages and all his bills on the kitchen table. She would fill out the money orders to pay the bills.
Although her siblings can read, Britton said, they regret not finishing high school. Her brothers ended up going into the military and her sisters got married.
Britton said the cycle of illiteracy can be broken, but itâs best if the parents do it.
Wycoff and Campa agree. They said family learning is much more effective than teaching the parents and the children separately. Thatâs why Wycoff and Campa have established a home-based family literacy program. There are 32 families at Quigg-Newton in the program.
Each week, two teachers visit each of the 32 homes. The families are typically a single mother with pre-school- aged children. The teachers give assignments to the whole family, and then the homework is reviewed at the next visit.
In-home education is effective because parents can help their children and learn for themselves at the same time.
Britton says that illiterate adults often have feelings of self-loathing. They consider themselves stupid. She suggests that support groups help these people because they need to know they arenât the only one who canât read.
Metroâs family literacy program includes English as a Second Language and GED instruction. Child-care is provided for these programs so adults can concentrate and work together.
The Metro family literacy program also holds a homework clinic for school-age kids each day after school. Wycoff says quite a few kids come to the clinic, partly because they donât have anything else to do.
ăIâm real pleased,ä Wycoff said of the program. ăOf course Iâd always like to see more. But these kinds of programs take a long time.ä
Wycoff and Campa have spend hundreds of hours at Quigg-Newton that they call ăface-time,ä which simply means becoming a familiar face at the complex to gain residentsâ trust.
Campa once spent so much time there, he was nominated for an office at the residentsâ council. He explained that he was ineligible because he didnât live at Quigg-Newton. The people at the meeting said, ăYou donât?ä
Wycoff does her grocery shopping in the neighborhood. Once, she ran into a resident who was looking at all the varieties of teething biscuits at the local Safeway. The resident couldnât read English very well and asked Wycoff for help. The two discussed biscuits for half an hour.
ăTrust is a big feature,ä Campa said.
