Mission Learning Center and Reading Partners have been working closely together for the past year, integrating much of our accounting and fundraising back office work through a management services agreement. We are now officially merging, with enormous opportunity for benefit to the children served by both organizations.

You can read the official press release and the announcement in our newsletter, but in this post our executive director Alexis Filippini shares details about why and how Mission Learning Center has chosen to pursue this opportunity.

I can’t speak to all non-profit mergers, but as we enter into a merger with our friends at Reading Partners, it’s easy to say “yes – worth the hype.” MLC is excited about our new partnership, as you can see in this picture. Why?

Sustainability. Sustainability is a buzzword in the non-profit community, but what does it really mean? To us, it means being able to continue to serve the community we have served for nearly forty years with high quality programming into the foreseeable future. Like many small non-profits, the recent economic downturn inspired deep and serious long-term thinking about sustainability. After stakeholder inquiry, pro bono management consulting, and many, many conversations MLC decided that joining a larger non-profit with a broader funding base, deeper administrative expertise, and (a critical pre-requisite) shared values was the best way to achieve our sustainability goals. This opportunity allows us to do what we do best – teach children from disadvantaged backgrounds to read and write – hopefully for another 40 years.

Program Quality. MLC is known in the Mission and throughout San Francisco as a model of after-school programming that provides measureable improvements in children’s literacy. But there is always room for improvement! Reading Partners has provided 1:1 volunteer-supported reading interventions for ten years, and has recently begun piloting a full-service after-school program that focuses on literacy. Together, we plan to take the time-tested success of MLC with the fresh ideas of RP to build an even stronger program that supports today’s urban students. Both agencies use thematic learning to delve deeper into content, so students not only tackle basic reading skills but also grow in their vocabulary and comprehension. As we say at MLC, our students not only learn to read, they LOVE to read.

Meeting a Significant Need

MLC has served generations of Mission children. In fact, we have even had MLC students return to join our board in their successful grown-up lives. But we want to do more! Over two-thirds of the 3,000 K-5 students in the Mission District (69%) tested below proficient in language arts in 2010, indicating that roughly 2,000 of these students require additional support. While over two-dozen neighborhood programs provide after school homework help and a dozen provide additional literacy support, only half the students that need literacy support are in a program that provides it. And this is just one neighborhood. In California, only 54% of elementary (2-5) students scored proficient or above in the statewide English Language Arts exam. We have a lot of work to do, out-of-school time is a gift that can be used to ensure that students can receive meaningful, enriching literacy support to build a brighter future. Together with Reading Partners, we can use this gift more wisely.

Cultural Fit and Leadership

Both organizations attract energetic, dedicated, and forward-thinking educators. Our staff shares a commitment to student learning, and interest in connecting with families, and a passion for making change. MLC has become smaller and smaller in recent years, and while a touch nervous about meeting new faces, are overwhelmingly excited with the vibrancy that comes from having multiple thought partners.  In addition, through RP we have welcomed an Americorps member onto our staff in a much-needed role linking our after-school programs with the instruction that takes place during the day.

I will initially remain in the executive director role at MLC, gradually transitioning to focus more and more on staff development, curriculum, and other aspects of literacy instruction that will take me back to my professional roots. MLC will have representation on the Reading Partners regional board, giving a voice to our community. I have worked closely with RP’s CEO, Michael Lombardo, and the management team, and agree with Michael that "ultimately, this partnership is going to allow us to serve more children, and that's what matters."

What’s next?

This year (2011-2012) will continue to operate as “MLC” with little external change, but we will begin to engage in curriculum integration. That is going to be the really fun part! We will remain in our current location, and continue to be a part of the local groups and boards that we have participated in for years. We aim to launch a combined after-school program in the fall of 2012, and begin branching out to other schools that are interested in literacy-focused comprehensive after-school programs. Surely there will be a few bumps, but the horizon is bright and wide, and we are so excited to improve, grow, and continue to make change for as many children as possible.

 

Teachers often hear things like “no one is going to read this anyway! What’s the point in working so hard to write???” Here at Mission Learning Center we can honestly tell our students that YOU are going to read their writing. Not just their teachers.

The writing process from sentence strips ...

Day campers at the Summer Discovery Reading and Writing improved their reading and writing in a full day, six-week program that is a partnership between MLC and 826 Valencia. These 1^st – 6^th graders have a lot to say, and want to share their writing with the world beyond our walls! Please look for their posts on our blog and on Facebook and make some comments.

... to the world wide web.

We'll be sure to show students your comments when they return in the fall - and inspire a new batch of web 2.0 writing, hopefully!

~ Alexis Filippini, MLC executive director

 

Our students in the Goku group (they named themselves) are heading into 2, 3, and 4th grades.  Many of them had heard of Facebook, but only thought that it was for playing games and none of them had heard of blogging.  When we first started writing the students had trouble coming up with ideas and were apprehensive about showing their work. By the second week of our project, they were excited and full of ideas. They all love to type and really like the idea of people reading their writing.  We really hope that you enjoy their work.

~ Tara Sessa, MLC summer teacher

We play games and exercise with Coach Julio. Coach Julio lets us do yoga. We play games at Dolores Park.   He used to tell us   scary stories; now he tells us funny ones. This is because some kids don`t   like scary   stories.

At the park we get snack first to get our brains working and our bodies running.  We play soccer and wild   horses.  We do races.  Donavon likes to play tag and he often wins!  Some of the other favorite games are Steal the Bacon, dodge ball, and volley ball. 

When it rains we go the auditorium where we get to eat a snack first.  Our favorite games are mountains and valleys, wild horses, pop the bunny (where we pass the ball behind our backs), and red light green light. 

We love Coach Julio!

 

 

At Mission Learning Center, we believe that child by child, family by family, literacy strengthens our community. In this post, our executive director Alexis Filippini discusses some big ideas behind our educational philosophy. These ideas are grounded in the interactive view of literacy (see Lipson & Wixson, 2009 for a great reference book grounded in this view). The video clips are from April 2011 keynote presentation at the National Student Speech Language Hearing Association at San Francisco State University.

Introduction

Provides context for the full-length talk to speech/language pathologists who teach literacy skills to students with disabilities including autism, speech & language impairments, specific learning disabilities, and others.*

*To see the slides from the full talk, go to www.mlcsf.org.

A Sense of Urgency and a Vision

Shares compelling information about long-term outcomes for children with learning disabilities, 80% of whom have reading difficulties, such as dyslexia. At MLC, we think about our children's lifetime trajectory - not just their test scores at the end of this school year, but their happiness and success in adulthood.

Interactive View

Outlines a framework for thinking about literacy performance as an interaction between learner attributes and context. How an individual reads or writes is the product of not only their own skills and knowledge, but also of the context in which they are reading and writing. Context includes text difficulty or readability, interest level, format (e.g., print, audio, braille), and more.

What are some learner and contextual variables that are important for your teaching and learning of literacy?

Welcome to Mission Learning Center's first post to our new blog! (This is a cross post from the Stocker Foundation blog, All About Literacy.) Mission Learning Center is a 501(c)(3) organization in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. We provide out-of-school time literacy instruction to elementary school children who are reading below grade level. Nearly all of our students' family incomes are below the federal poverty level, the majority are learning English as a second language, and all are smart, caring, talented members of our community.

At the beginning of each school year, MLC students work together to develop a set of community agreements that will allow everyone, students and teachers, to learn and have fun. Using the principles of positive behavior supports (see, for example, Dunlap, G., et al., 2006), students work as a team with teacher guidance to develop a community contract that includes expectations, positive and negative consequences, and routines. Students responded to the question "What can you do to make Mission Learning Center a safe and happy community?" by writing ideas on individual fish. Here you see "I can use kind words" and "I can be respectful to our community." Within each of our two classes, students worked together to arrange the mulit-colored paper fish into a school (get it? a school of fish to represent a school of students!?)

Speaking of school, while we learn a lot here at MLC we don't do it in traditional, teacher-centric ways. Our lessons are student-focused allowing our students to practice literacy skills in a purposeful, authentic way.

Check out the SF Giants gear ... World Series Champs have been a hot topic for reading and writing lately!

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We build community so that we can build literacy. Tell us in the comments how you connect community building with literacy.