Education At Its Best
Freedom School 2011
In a summer seemingly dominated by a roller-coasting stock market, urban flash mobs, military helicopter crashes and excessive heat waves, one true oasis sheltered fifty children for six weeks in the Children’s Defense Fund Freedom School held at First Church for the second year.
With a mission “to ensure every child a Healthy Start, Safe Start, Fair Start, and Moral Start in life,” the Freedom School “depends upon the help of caring families and communities” working with carefully chosen teachers, trained college students who are called Servant Leaders.
Among the leaders was First Church’s Valient Solomon, a second-semester sophomore at Virginia Union University in Richmond. Note: this was intended to be a straight-forward news article about the school, but after several at-tempts to shape the article into an objective, balanced piece, personal feelings kept intruding, so this is an observation from a life-long educator who visited the school once a week during the session.
What transpired this summer at the church is one of the most exciting educational adventures I’ve ever seen, all of it centered on reading, reading, reading: reading to, reading aloud, an Integrated Reading Curriculum (IRC), and, especially, “DEAR Time” - Drop Everything and Read Time.
Books abounded; you could not walk in the class-rooms without literally making your way through books. In all, the children were introduced to between 40 and 50 books, some of them ear-marked for the foundation of a personal library while others were slated for the development of an on-site library.
Discussion and activities followed most of the reading. For example, after hearing a story about a family tree—photos of mothers, fathers and grandparents in among the leaves of a tree—the children were asked to do their own family trees. After a story about elephants, the Scholars, as the students are called, discussed where they had encoun-tered bullying in their schools or in their lives. Even on a bus trip to Baltimore and a medieval castle, Brian Harris read a story about peace in a book illustrated with children of all nations and the words for peace.
The staff, all given a week-long training for their jobs by the Chil-dren’s Defense Fund organization, was outstanding. Guided by Conti-na Lundy, the members showed love and patience and understand-ing equaled only by the enthusiasm, energy and smiles of the children. The atmosphere in Longstreth Au-ditorium and the adjoining class-room shimmered with learning.
Twice during the session, the children were tested for their read-ing levels, the results of which are not yet available. In the past, how-ever, Freedom School attendees scored higher on standardized read-ing tests than those in other enrich-ment programs. African American middle school boys made the most progress.
The Children’s Defense Freedom School, the brainchild of Marion Wright Edelman, is the local “child” of First Church’s Eileen Jones. If what happened here this summer could be replicated through the school system of Philadelphia, the future would be far brighter than many people feel it is currently. And if you want to observe first-hand teaching and learning at its best, make certain that next sum-mer you stop by the church to visit the Freedom School.