VACACIONES ÚTILES Catholic Charities Provides Academic Intervention Over Summer BY RE G AN M E YER
When Ana entered kindergarten after her family came to the U.S. from Guatemala, she consistently tested at a lower academic level than her peers. As a native Spanish speaker, Ana also struggled to communicate with her teachers. Fast forward to this summer, and Ana is enrolled in Catholic Charities of Southwestern Ohio’s (CCSWO) Vacaciones Útiles summer program. According to her instructor, Ana speaks English in complete sentences and excels in all her assignments. This is Ana’s first year at Vacaciones Útiles, and, because of the global pandemic, her experience has been anything but typical. For more than a decade, the eight-week, day-long summer program focused on retention of English language skills with guest speakers, field trips and themed programming. Now, COVID-19 has forced the program online. Su Casa Education Services Supervisor Karri O’Hara said that the focus of the program is much more academically-centered than in previous years. “It’s [much] more of an academic intervention,” O’Hara said. 1 6 | NEWS
“These kids haven’t been in school since March. What we do every year is important, but it feels more important now.” Rather than grouping them by ages, Vacaciones Útiles is now split into different classes of students for an hour at a time. Instead of being grouped by age, the classes are divided by reading level. Vacaciones Útiles teacher Marisa Giglio has four class sessions each day. During those sessions, she teaches phonics, reading and math. While the transition to online learning has been an adjustment, the Su Casa team had some experience from moving their adult English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes online in March. They knew from that transition that access to technology would be a bigger barrier to the success of the program than anything else. According to Giglio, only five of her 45 English as a Second Language (ESL) students at Cincinnati Public Schools had access to computers when they moved to remote learning in March. Thanks to a generous donation, Su Casa was able to provide brand-new Google Chromebooks to all 54 of its Vacaciones
