What I Learned From Kids and Parents Working at Community Centers and Selling Books Door-To-Door

Fixing Education — Part 2 — Community Centers

In my first post, I gave a little background and overview of what I’m doing to fix education.

In this post, I’ll share a little story about my experience working with kids and parents and what I learned from them. At the end, I will go into more detail of what we are looking for in Community Centers to help under-resourced and low-income families.

After School Program

Upon graduating from high school, in Tampa FL, I landed a summer job working at an after school summer program for the Hillsborough County of Parks and Recreation Department. For those summer months, I got my first experience supervising kids. The coaches were strict and enforced a disciplined culture with good routines in place. Because of that the kids were well behaved and I really enjoyed working there. But that wasn’t the case for my next job.

At the end of the summer, I was offered a part-time position at another park in Thonotosassa. This park was located in a country area supervising 1st-8th graders for their after school program. Unfortunately good routines and discipline were not being well enforced there, so kids were pretty much able to do whatever they wanted to do at this park.

At times, they were downright disrespectful towards their coaches and would not listen or behave at all. Some of the kids would even use profane words when they spoke to coaches.

For me being raised in an Asian culture, any kind of disrespect to older adults was NOT acceptable or tolerated. After a few weeks, I couldn’t put up with it much longer. So, I discussed the situation with other fellow coaches and we came up with a plan to deal with these issues.

After getting the go ahead from our supervisor, we started to communicate our plans to the parents. While we were worried of the backlash, surprisingly, most parents backed us up and were very supportive, even excited for the change. So we embarked on our plans to change the culture of the after school program by teaching them good manners, providing a consistent routine, and a strict code of discipline.

While we knew it wasn’t going to be easy, we didn’t realize it would take so long to change the existing culture. For the next six months, there were a lot of warnings, timeouts, and suspensions given.

When we first started, the worst kids opposed, tested, and retested our resolve by throwing big tantrum fits and trying to get away with all kinds of stuff. This eventually earned them suspensions. Sometimes we gave as many as 3–4 suspension slips in a day.

The parents, of course, were not happy about the suspensions given to their kids, but worked with us to improve their kids’ behaviors. As time went on, all the kids got used to the new rules and routines. And the suspension slips slowly became a rarity.

What was really neat was seeing the transformation of the kids after the hard six months of culture change. Before the culture change, kids would go straight to the playgrounds and not even say “Hi” or anything to the coaches. But, after the hard six months, some kids would come running in to say “Hi!”and give us big hugs. They got so attached, they would follow us around and sometimes even pass on free time just to hang out with us.

Their willingness to help improved as well.

They were helping each other out with homework.

They were helping us out with supervising younger kids. They would voluntarily offer to help us clean up after themselves. We were like a big family. The Thonotosassa park family.

Along with the better attitudes, behaviors, and manners came a few big surprises.

A lot of the kids’ grades were improved.

For some kids, school suspensions went down.

Kids’ behaviors at home also improved.

Parents thanked us over and over again when they started seeing their kids behaviors change.

Slowly, we started seeing an increase in enrollment for our after school program that spring. Apparently, word got around and we had earned a really good reputation in the community. And that summer, we also had a record number of kids attending the summer program at the park.

Door-to-Door

After working at Thonotosassa park for three years, I embarked on a new journey. A few of my friends and I got an internship in Texas to sell educational books door-to-door for a whole summer. We worked over 72 hours each week for the whole summer. It was the best summer job experience ever, except the time when a deer was trying to hitch a carpool ride in my car :)

Throughout the summer, I sold education books in many different economic neighborhoods ranging from low-income to upper-middle class. I got a chance to talk to thousands of parents from different racial and economic backgrounds.

What I learned, regardless of what area they lived in, was that they always wanted to make sure their kids have the best education opportunities possible. However, what I saw was a huge discrepancy in the opportunities and environments among the different income levels .

The higher the income level of the neighborhood, the more opportunities for learning that was available for those kids after school. They had access to tutors and more organized extra-curricular activities, while the low-income neighborhood kids did not.

What’s even more troubling was the disparity of the structure, discipline, and manners that the kids displayed. Not only did the kids in the better economic neighborhoods have more learning opportunities, but they were provided with better structure at home. They also displayed better discipline and manners than the lower income neighborhood kids. Sometimes the difference was drastic.

While all the parents I talked to understood the importance of education, not all of them knew how to go about giving their kids the best chance to succeed in school.

I found that most low-income neighborhood parents didn’t know how to improve their kids’ grades and relied heavily on schools to teach their kids the proper habits and discipline to succeed. And without the proper habits and discipline, those kids had all the free time they wanted after school. As a result, most kids didn’t do their homework, while kids in the higher income neighborhoods were home doing their homework or going to organized extra-curricular activities. A lot of the parents in the higher income neighborhoods weren’t home to answer their doors in the afternoons due to taking their kids to these extra-curricular activities.

You can also read about the discrepancies between different economic families in a recent NY times article here.

Lessons Learned

1. Having lived in a low-income high crime neighborhood throughout my high school and college days, working at the community park for three years, and selling books door-to-door I saw a repeating pattern. Success in learning or school is dependent on having a good structure in place consisting of routines, habits, and discipline. This is the area where the low-income and under-resourced families needs help the most.
2. Good structure and discipline over time shows kids that you care about them. Kids love tough love. They appreciate when good boundaries are set, properly communicated, and enforced. I’ve asked many kids that I supervised if we were being too tough on them and their feedback was surprising. They not only thought it wasn’t tough but a lot of them liked it. And some even expressed that they needed it after the tough six months period was over.
3. Kids, like anyone else, will hate when a change is being implemented, but overtime they get used to new habits. Once they start seeing positive changes and progress, they get really excited.
4. All parents wants the best education for their kids, but many of them just don’t know how to provide the best structure, habits, or discipline for learning. Many of the parents from the park and the homes that I visited were really worried about their kids grades. They asked me for advice on how to improve their kids grades and were excited to implement the suggestions.
5. There are many kids in all neighborhoods that are doing bad in school, but parents in lower income areas have less money and resources to get proper help.
6. If kids are failing or doing bad in school, they know it. They want to improve. They are hungry and ready for positive changes. I have never ran into a kid that didn’t want to do well in school. Some of them just don’t know how to ask or have been burned by asking, so they end up not asking for help. So we must reach out and sometimes help them without their asking.
7. The more badly behaved the child, the more time is needed to get to know them to break down their wall. There’s a wall there for a reason. You must spend time to get to know them so they can trust you. You will find that they are good kids with bad circumstances and/or environments.

This is the end of the lessons I have learned. Below are the plans for how Mentorem and Community Centers will work together and how you can help.

So the question is… How do we help kids and parents who are in the low-income or under-resourced neighborhoods?

Kids need to be in an environment that is optimized for learning by providing the proper structure and discipline. We can provide that by running a Mentorem Academy in each Community Center.

Mentorem Academy Summary

Mentorem Academy is an after school and summer school math program for kids 4th — 7th grade.

• We help students learn and MASTER the basic fundamentals of learning. We provide structure, routines, habits, and discipline for students. Our program is based on research for sleep, learning, and memory. We also incorporate individual and team sports elements into learning to make it fun, effective, and build their intrinsic motivations.
• Kids will need to MASTER their basic fundamentals for learning and math skills of addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication before moving into the summer school program. This may take 2–3 months and can run into the summer.
• Summer school math program will get kids to MASTER most of next years math curriculum. We follow common core for its standards and use free resources like Khan Academy.
• With your help we will find, train, and employ local coaches to work with students. We would need at least 10 kids for each coach in each location.

Community Centers

a place where people from a particular community can meet for social, educational, or recreational activities. — Google

There are already existing community centers everywhere like Churches, Park and Recreational Centers, YMCA, Libraries, Apartment complex, and etc.

We would love to partner up with existing community centers and bring our coaches in.

For areas where students don’t have access to existing community centers, we just need a room anywhere that students can go to. Wherever the kids are at, we want to be there.

We will work with community leaders to raise money or run a crowdfunding campaign to fund each location.

How we will work:

Culture change is extremely tough for groups or individuals. It’s not easy, but it is simple.

If a community center wants us to do a culture change for the whole park, like what was done for Thonotosassa, all the existing coaches MUST buy in. Most importantly, the big boss must buy in.

If you just want us to work with a select set of kids, then we just need a room for our self to work with the kids.

We need your help

Imagine the transformation that was done at the Thonotosassa park combined with the Mentorem Academy program. We can have that in a neighborhood near you. We will work with you to build strong and resilient learners so that it doesn’t matter what school they are attending, what zip code they belong to, or what economic neighborhood they are living in.