Freehold schools get crucial help from volunteers

Five girls crowded around Virginia McGall at the round table where she flipped through a small blue book. She found a list of words and pointed as the girls sounded out each word: "cat, be, are, have."

"Oh, you know "have"?" McGall, 80, asked the group in the classroom Freehold Borough rents from neighboring Freehold Township for some of its kindergarteners four miles away from the Freehold Learning Center. The district is so overcrowded that it has run out of room for students in its buildings.

McGall, seen in the video above interacting with the students, isn't a paid teacher or a parent. She's a volunteer from the Applewood retirement community in Freehold Township, which started sending a half dozen volunteers this year to help students who were falling behind in the underfunded and overcrowded K-8 public school district. The in-class volunteer program, started by Applewood resident Helen Coons, officially took off in January.

School officials say the district has been shortchanged millions in state aid year after year, but the consequences have worsened over the past decade as the borough's student enrollment increased. The school population jumping from 1,323 in 2010 to more than 1,700 in 2017 — that's in a school district with buildings that reach capacity at 1,589.

About 73 percent of those students are Hispanic, and 77 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch, according to the district.

A couple of months ago, those English language learners were headed for a repeat year of kindergarten. Now they're all moving on to the first grade. One of them was named teacher Cheryl O'Donnell's student of the month for April.

"They were struggling a lot at first, and it was like a switchfoot turn," said McGall, a retired high school math teacher. "They started to really get the connection between the sound and the letter."

Filling the gaps

Applewood is one of a handful of community groups that have stepped up to help Freehold Borough Schools.

While it's common for volunteers to offer homework help or other educational resources, school officials say these programs are crucial for a district that is short 50 teachers and faces increasingly overcrowded classrooms.

"There's a lot of working poor families who could use that extra support that a middle-class or upper-middle-class family gets from the parents," Superintendent Rocco Tomazic said. "These 'extra' resources are not extra. They make a difference."

Mera Archambeau, coordinator of the Freehold Area Open Door tutoring program, says over the past three decades the program has helped students in grades 3 to 5 who cannot afford private tutors and whose parents speak another language.

Freehold has just under 12,000 residents, and nearly one-third are foreign-born. U.S. census data does not have information about how many immigrants without legal status live in the borough.

"We are serving kids that would otherwise not be served," she said.

Monmouth University School of Education Dean John Henning says it takes a village to educate a child, from parents to teachers to volunteers. But school funding also plays a crucial role in determining how much support students get.

"While volunteer efforts from civic-minded groups may make a tremendous difference, they cannot fully make up for a fundamental lack of support in school funding," he said.

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School officials trained Applewood residents before they entered the classrooms. Now Helen Coons, the resident who started the program, visits Rina Fattorusso's bilingual kindergarten class once a week and reviews the classwork with a handful of students.

"I usually give her my lowest (level) students, and she just reinforces the skills that my children learn on a daily basis," says Fattorusso, who runs a classroom with an assistant teacher in the Marshall W. Errickson Elementary School. "We're trying to get everyone on the same footing."

Seeing results

School officials say they don't have data to illustrate how much of an impact these programs have had on students, especially those who are considered at-risk, but they say they see first-hand the progress students have made.

The Applewood volunteers have helped reinforce math and reading skills to struggling students, which can be crucial at the earliest levels. One kindergarten student who was at risk of being held back a year brought up her grades with help from McGall. In April, she was named the student of the month.

"She all of a sudden just came out of her shell, raising her hand, actively participating throughout the day," said O'Donnell, the teacher.

Archambeau says the program started out three decades ago with one tutoring session each week. Now it runs four days a week and has roughly two dozen students this year who attend at least one day a week.

She says she doesn't keep track of students' standardized test scores or report cards from year to year, but she has seen results. One graduate became a lawyer. Another became a hairdresser. Others, like Karen Amaro and her brother Cesar, have returned to visit or volunteer.

Karen, 18, and Cesar, 15 attended Open Door for homework help. Now they volunteer at least once a week, helping students with their multiplication tables and reading prompts.

"I feel like it's good to give back to a community that's like you because I was one of those kids too," said Karen, whose parents immigrated from Mexico 20 years ago. "I was one of those kids that couldn't really ask my parents for homework help because they didn't understand."

Now a senior, Karen says she wants to spend her career working with districts like Freehold Borough. She plans to pursue a career in elementary education.

Steph Solis: 732-403-0074; ssolis@gannett.com .