Population Served:
66,033 Project Contact: Anne Watts Project Title: Boynton Beach City Library and Women's Circle Literacy Project Partnership Project Description:The Boynton Beach City Library has partnered with the Women’s Circle of Boynton Beach to encourage participation in literacy and ESL classes by providing library experiences and reading materials to program participants. The Women’s Circle offers basic literacy classes multiple evenings each week. ESL classes and individual tutoring are also offered during the day and on Saturday. |
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The Library has hosted programs and provided reading materials for students to have a home, sharing with children and other family members. The grant is also providing each student with a magazine subscription of their choice to encourage participation in the Women’s Circle classes.
Notable accomplishment, promising practices, or human interest stories: Our accomplishments reflect the goals in our grant application. First, all students have library cards and some use them on a regular basis. Second, all students have reading materials (books and, shortly, magazines) in their home to use and to share. Third, interest in the Women’s Circle program remains high and we have new participants in the basic literacy classes almost every week. Attendance is hard to quantify because students more from class to class depending upon their schedules and family situations.
From the Library’s perspective, having students visit and use the Library, independently, is a notable accomplishment. The students were shown the Project Director’s Office on their tours and now stop by with questions or to visit. Our Spanish speaking students stop by the most often while our Creole students seem more reluctant visitors. This may be because we are located in the middle of the city’s government center. Individual stories of interest include one literacy student who operates a restaurant in “restaurant incubator” prior to establishing her own Haitian restaurant. We have worked with several ESL students who have had careers prior to moving to Boynton Beach and who would like to resume those careers after improving their English.Key lessons learned: We have learned three basic lessons in our work on this grant. First, we have many more people in need of assistance than we had anticipated; second, we need to find resources for a long term commitment to this literacy and ESL project; and finally, we need to develop economies of time in the selection of materials.
Recently, the Census Bureau released American Community Survey data for Boynton Beach for the first time since the 2000 Census. The population of Boynton Beach has increased from 59, 951 to 66,033 since 2000, while those over five years of age who speak a language other than English at home had jumped from 19.7% to 32.3%.
We often feel that we are only beginning our work with the Women’s Circle. Scheduling visits to the Library, working with classes and individuals, and most important, establishing relationships of trust with students takes more time than we have had.
Finally, the process of ordering, receiving, and distributing materials, especially for our basic literacy students, has taken a great deal of time. We need to develop a “basic package” of materials for literacy students and spend more time with the ESL students who have developed personal goals and have individual needs that reading materials can meet.
Advice for other libraries serving adult English language learners: We learned three large lessons in our project. First, plan your work with collection differently for literacy and ESL students; supporting community literacy/ESL efforts is a staff effective way of working with literacy/ESL students; and count on change.
We planned our program for literacy students, largely Haitian, and our ESL students, both Haitian and Spanish speaking, in the same manner. We would suggest modularizing the literacy program selection and spending individual time with the ESL students to customize the selection of materials for their use.
Second, the Women’s Circle does a wonderful job of accommodating classes and schedules. They are critical to the success of literacy/ESL efforts in Boynton Beach, especially when library staffing does not permit extended in-Library programs. Projects outside the library means that staff need the flexibility to attend classes when they are held off site. Some weeks the Project Director made four visits to the Women’s Circle.
As with many programs in libraries today, count on change. We anticipated the need for change and it was essential. The Project Director had to accommodate change in her schedule and both the Library and the Women’s Circle were willing to change in order to find solutions to our few roadblocks.