Removing Barriers

Program Overview

Sherwood Elementary School is home to many ELL students. For many years the families of these ELL students have lived far below the poverty line due to the struggle of the parents to find employment due to limited language proficiency. The goal of this project is to provide English language instruction for parents of ELL students who attend Sherwood with the end goal of promoting equity within the school and community by expanding the opportunities available to these families.

These language classes will be offered on site at Sherwood Elementary. The funding provided by this grant will incentivize attendance at the language classes by providing a meal to families who attend the language classes, gift cards for attending, and materials to take home to continue learning. In addition to incentives, funding will also be used to rent a van from Missouri State to transport families from Briarwood Mobile Home Park where 20+ multilingual families reside to Sherwood for the programming. Finally, funds will be used to create interactive activity boxes that pair a book with activities for the children of these families to work with a teacher candidate to develop their literacy skills.

Students enrolled in ELE 501: Home, School, and Community, will provide both the educational enrichment activities to the children in these families and facilitate the language lessons with the adult learners. The English Language Institute at Missouri State will train ELE 501 to provide these language lessons to families. The instructor of ELE 501 will teach these teacher candidates how to work with ELL students to provide engaging and enriching learning opportunities to expand their reading and language skills using the activity boxes supplied through the grant funding. This creates a natural bridge between learning about the connections between home, school, and community and actual practice in providing a program while meeting a need in the community. This hands-on, real world experience will create a powerful learning experience for the college students but also the community around Sherwood and Springfield in general.

Cost Info