Barbara Nemko, Sara Sitch, Asha Levert-McDowell, representing the Napa County Office of Education (NCOE), and Debbie Baldwin, representing the Napa Valley United School District (NVUSD), are in charge of their Expanded Learning Program. This team will be supporting the volunteers for the NCRC program.
Students will return to class in mid-August, and teachers will need a few weeks to assess each child. These assessments will determine which students could benefit from one-on-one assistance from an NCRC volunteer. NCRC volunteers will be asked to attend one – two-hour training sessions the week of September 22nd, and the pilot program will begin the first week of October.
Shearer School on Elm Street will be our pilot site and focus on 2nd and 3rd-grade students. The plan is to see if 15, 20, or 30 minutes/child is best for working with the students depending on their attention span. (We are hoping that each volunteer will commit to a minimum of one hour per week.)
NCOE staff will receive a three-day literacy training program from Aug. 5th to 7th provided by Chartwell Schools. This program, which was developed using the Literacy for All components, is an ongoing county training program. NVUSD uses the LTRS program to train its primary-grade teachers. The programs are quite similar.
Volunteers will be encouraged to have a basic understanding of the methodology, which they can obtain by watching a few YouTube videos. A good introduction is a video by Heggerty, which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT_CQw0MdmE. There are many more on YouTube that you will find helpful.
We will reassess the program during the winter break and plan on expansion in early 2025.