Baylor LEAF literacy program hopes to branch out

WACO—An encounter with a woman at a Waco middle school eight years ago underscored for Baylor University education professor Randy Wood the impact education has on parents—especially Hispanic immigrants with little or no English proficiency.

At the time, Baylor’s School of Education was transitioning from a traditional on-campus teacher education program to a field-based program that places both Baylor faculty and future teachers in Waco public schools. Students in Wood’s multicultural education class began tutoring 25 students at University Middle School who had never passed the state-mandated TAKS exam.

“After three weeks, a parent came to the door, she looked in, walked away, then she came back and literally leaped across the room and hugged me and said in broken English, ‘Thank you for saving my family.’ I thought, ‘What in the world have I done?’” Wood said.

The woman’s daughter had been coming home from school every day crying and calling herself “an idiot” because of her failure at school. But after tutoring sessions with a Baylor student, everything changed.

“Her mom told me, ‘She’s now tutoring her friends …, and it has made our life so different,’” Wood said. “That’s when I said to the school principal, ‘We’ve got to help these families.’”

Two years later, after much planning and preparation, the LEAF—Learning English Among Friends—family literacy program took root.

Baylor education students, as well as those taking part in an Engaged Learning Group on “Hispanic Families in Transition,” volunteer their time each week as ESL teachers for the LEAF (Learning English Among Friends) program at one of five middle schools in Waco.

“My hope is that others all across the state will catch this vision and many other LEAF programs will ‘branch off’ from ours to help families end the cycle of poverty through education,” Wood said “Baptists in Texas can do it. We have the financial base, but we’ve got to get over color, culture and class. We’ve got to understand that if people can’t read, how are they going to know what the Bible says to them?”

The concept for LEAF is simple: If parents are literate in English, good things happen for families. Their children fare better in school, and the parents gain a better understanding of the American educational system and improve their employment opportunities.

Baylor’s LEAF program officially began in fall 2003 at Waco’s Cesar Chavez Middle School, an entirely neighborhood-based public school that serves a Hispanic, low-income community located about one mile from the Baylor campus. During the planning stages for the program, the school identified that nearly 70 percent of the students’ parents could not read, write or speak English, leading to significant communication barriers between teachers, parents and students.

With that in mind, LEAF was opened to parents of children enrolled at Chavez, as well as any community resident. On that first night, 12 trained Baylor student volunteers met with 24 people. Since then, the program has served more than 450 families, with an average of 300 families each week, and has expanded to include four more Waco middle school locations—University, Carver, Lake Air and La Vega. The program also reaches out to the community during the summer with a LEAF book club, where LEAF parents read some of the same books their children have at school.

“If the parent is willing to put this kind of time and energy into learning English, you can imagine the impact on their children,” Wood said.

LEAF’s success is all about long-term relationship building among the families and more than 100 Baylor volunteers, Wood stressed. A weekly dinner, available childcare and simple conversations have established an unbreakable bond between families and volunteers.

“We spend the first five to 10 minutes every week talking about our family. Show pictures, talk about your brothers and sisters. It’s a way to practice English, but LEAF is not just an acronym. It’s Learning English Among Friends, and it’s all about relationships,” Wood said.

Faculty from Dallas Baptist University, Baptist University of the Americas and Howard Payne University have expressed an interest in expanding the program.

“We’ve got universities in the Panhandle, in East Texas and South Texas and West Texas. We are scattered out fairly well. It could be a great base,” Wood said. “If the universities started it, we could then encourage the churches across the state.”

Preliminary plans are in place to invite Baptist universities from throughout the nation for a national literacy conference at Baylor’s School of Education, Wood said. He also plans to create a LEAF “toolkit” that would assist universities in establishing their own LEAF programs.