ePromotora

Advancing America, LLC was created to improve parental involvement and student academic outcomes using the successful healthcare Promotora model of engagement, where parents are recruited from within specific communities and trained to support other parents in their own communities. The use of promotoras has been documented as an effective way to change health/literacy outcomes in vulnerable populations. The goal of the company is to provide the training and resources needed for the academic success of the rising generation.

The advantage of the Advancing America “ePromotora” approach is that its reach and scale matches the growing population of the state, regardless of language spoken, literacy levels or income level. Existing social and peer networks are leveraged to provide a long-lasting, sustainable, culturally appropriate framework for advancing education. The curriculum has two audiences: One is for the Spanish only speaking parents who have school aged children and who are new to the US educational system. The second audience is for parents who speak English and have school aged children.

The early-stage intervention provided by the ePromotora program engages parents from low socio-economic areas and provides PreK students with a strong start as they begin their education. Preliminary research by the Advancing America Foundation revealed the following for parents who had completed the program:

• Parents understood that they were responsible to teach their children the alphabet, shape and pattern identification before their child begins school.
• Parents obtained a public library card and read to their children on a regular basis.
• Parents knew the year their child would graduate, and began actively considering their child’s graduation from high school.
• Parents started becoming involved in their child’s school.

The ePromotora PreK program targets the 6 literacy skills. The 6 essential literacy skills are: vocabulary, print motivation, print awareness, narrative skills, letter knowledge, and phonological and pre-math skills. These 6 early literacy skills become the building blocks for later reading and writing. Research indicates that children who enter school with a strong foundation of these skills are better able to benefit from the reading instruction they receive when they arrive at school.

The ePromotora curriculum stresses all of these literacy skills:

• Vocabulary: Lessons for parents to develop children’s vocabulary. As parents work with their children to experiment with words, they begin to focus on the individual speech sounds within them, breaking words into their sounds and blending them back together again.
• Print Motivation: Parents learn and make matching books and games to teach their children how to find a similar picture on a page or in a book. 
• Narrative Skills: Parents are trained to create a world of words, where children are encouraged to talk, to ask questions, and to explore their understanding in new ways. Parents learn how to tell the story of a daily activity in the life of a child. E.g. preparing for bed, preparing a meal or dressing for the day. As an example for “dressing for the day,” the parents use a rich vocabulary to describe the color and type of clothing as well as number of socks, shoes, pants and shirts. They describe the order of getting dressed as well as the pattern: First the undergarments, then the pants, socks and finally, the shoes.
• Letter Knowledge: Parents are trained to teach the ability to recognize and name letters out of ABC order and to know the associated sounds that go with each letter.
• Phonological and Pre-Math Skills: Parents are trained to teach their children to develop an understanding of what numbers are, how to count to 10 and what numbers do. Parents learn how to teach children to develop an understanding of patterns and how objects relate to each other.
• Print Awareness: Parents are trained to teach their children an awareness of print in their everyday environment. Children learn an emerging understanding of the concepts of how printed language works.

The ePromotora program was designed to address these issues using culturally appropriate techniques for engagement and retention. As a result of the ePromotora program, parents confirm that they now understand how to prepare their child for school and they know how to reinforce what their child is learning in school with activities that support their academic achievement.

The curriculum for the ePromotora PreK program stresses teaching the parents the year that their child is going to graduate from high school and go on to college. Every mother/father has to identify the year that their child is going to graduate from high school and has to create a photo-montage that provides a visual testimony of the child’s future graduation. Many parents have that photo proudly displayed in their family living areas. In addition, every curriculum stresses the economic benefits of graduating from High School (a million dollars in life time earnings), the benefits of getting a college degree or certificate (another million dollars in life time earnings) and the importance of learning English as fluently and as quickly as possible, while retaining their Spanish. Different careers and job types are introduced in the course work to the participants. The importance of educational attainment that results in being able to have jobs that support your family well are stressed throughout the class.

Parents learn how to support their child at school in addition to preparing them with the PreK skills. Parents learn about how a school day is organized and how they can volunteer in their child’s class, at the library and in other programs, such as PTA. AISD research corroborated PreK teachers’ findings that students whose parents were in the ePromotora program improved their math, literacy and socio/science skills by two or more levels. In addition, students’ vocabulary increases as their parents incorporate more language in their daily activities.

Parents that complete the ePromotora program know how to support their child with specific actions. Before taking the ePromotora program, many parents know only how to emotionally support their child in school by asking them about their school day. After completing the ePromotora program, in addition to emotional support, the parents know how to academically support their child with specific instructional activities, games and actions that reflect and support what the child learned in the classroom. Parents learn how to use staple food items, such as rice grains or uncooked beans to form letters or to create counting games. To expand vocabulary, parents create a simple theatre production making a “costume/mask” for every family member to illustrate a story from a book that they checked out (for free) from the library.

A core concept of the ePromotora program is to teach parents to use material that is freely accessible to them as teaching materials and is also available in their homes. For one of the science projects, they use table salt and pepper and a balloon to demonstrate static energy. At meetings, participants are supplied with construction paper, scissors, colors, pens, pencils, glue, manila file folders and a “carrying case” (extra large Ziploc bag.) They are then taught to use readily available material like flyers from the stores where they shop to construct instructional activities. Participants create books and instruction on shapes, colors, numbers, the alphabet and short stories about their lives.

Participants also create educational games using recycled or readily available material. Two popular games to promote vocabulary building are the matching game and bingo. Parents create notebooks that become the learning centers for their young child’s activities. Parents use these notebooks, filled with learning activities at home, on car trips or when visiting family members.

Advancing America excels in serving ELL students. The curriculum is in Spanish and English. There are culturally appropriate activities as part of the curriculum; e.g. Bingo in English, Loteria in Spanish. Advancing America has served over 600 Spanish only speaking parents in its two years of existence with exceptional results. The trainers are fluent in academic Spanish and academic English. The trainers have been trained to be culturally sensitive and supportive of ELL students and their families. The material is in English and Spanish.

Advancing America staff does a significant amount of organizational work in preparation for each session. Advancing America trains its staff on the curriculum prior to every academic year. In addition, best practices are shared with all the different trainers. The trainers spend time in classroom training where they review the curriculum. The trainers are evaluated on how well their classes are run, how their students perform and the feedback from each school administration.

Training sessions are held on how to address problems that might arise: attendance issues, cultural sensitivities, how to support a parent with no levels of literacy, how to engage the public library system. The trainers are taught how to access resources and supports for their class so that the parents can continue to teach their families after the course is completed. In addition, the development plan for the trainers includes how to increase the parental involvement in a child’s school. They are taught to encourage PTA involvement, classroom involvement and general volunteering in a school.

Advancing America has run successful programs in Manor ISD, Austin ISD and Round Rock ISD schools. It uses trainers that go to the schools, which makes it easier for the families to attend the sessions. Most of the parents prefer for the programs to be run during the school day. We have held classes at night for the schools where parents worked during the day and wanted to attend the classes at night. Classes are held twice a week for two-hours per class. Classes are created for a target audience of up to twenty parents.