An education center has opened for children and parents in Harlem Heights, a low-income neighborhood south of the Fort Myers city limits. Now families have help in seeking brighter futures.
Thirty percent of the people in Harlem Heights live below the federal poverty level. Of the 1,930 residents, 1,200 are Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census.
Harlem Heights Charter Community School is a tuition-free public school off Gladiolus Drive in Lee County. The school is in its seventh year, with classes ranging from kindergarten through fifth grade. The school addresses challenges faced by kids who are growing up in poverty, who are growing up in families with limited educational exposure, and who are not native speakers of English.
The Harlem Heights school used to be primarily African American. Now the school is only about 18% African American and almost 80% Hispanic.
Valeria Miguel Pedro emigrated from Guatemala, coming to Harlem Heights in 2018 with nothing but her two children, Domingo Elicio and Maria Cristiana. Pedro is celebrating five years since she arrived in the U.S. and her children have attended Harlem Heights Community Charter School since their arrival.
In Guatemala, people speak a dialect and learn Spanish. Now Valeria Pedro and her children are learning English simultaneously.
“When my children started here, they didn't speak English, or Spanish, at that,” Pedro said. “In Guatemala my education stopped when I was 6. I had to work hard to get where I am so that my two children can have a future and get the education I never got.”
Ena Fuentes, an English as Second Language (ESOL) teacher and parent liaison at the school, focuses her lesson plans on ways that children can get what they need while still having fun.
“Since this is an English-speaking country, we must teach them, especially those from Guatemala, it’s triple a language barrier,” Fuentes said. “So, I'll speak to them in Spanish, but I will also teach them the proper English they need to be striving citizens.”
“We use I-excel, and I like that program because it has phonics and pronunciations,” Fuentes said. “It's important for the kids to learn the sounds and how to put the words together.”
According to Fuentes, she focuses a lot on hands-on projects.
“We'll take kids around and bring in the real world, so for example, we'll go to the playground and name each item on the playground,” Fuentes said. “Just to make it fun for them, you know, because they can't sit here all the time.”
“One day, we’ll do computers. It's only once a week that I'll do that. But we do a lot of cutting and pasting and then writing to focus on sight words and vowel sounds,” Fuentes said. “We do a lot of cute little things with them, something catchy so they can pick it up.”
According to Fuentes, practice makes perfect, and most importantly, it’s important to take it one day at a time.
María Angélica Cruz Hernández, with a son at the school, came from Mexico to Fort Myers months before Hurricane Ian hit Southwest Florida.
“My son's name is Michael Muñoz Hernández, and my son has autism,” Hernandez said. “He's learned to communicate in English here, so now he speaks more English than before. However, we speak Spanish at home, and he loves to teach me some English words he learned at school.”
She added: “I'm thankful for all the work the school has put into my son, not just with his speaking skills but to make him a better person and to give him hope for the future."
The school’s vision is to create a small community with focused and individualized instruction where all students are valued, supported in developing core academic skills, and encouraged to pursue excellence.
“Our biggest challenge, especially early on, was getting the kids to unlearn the narrative that they had been sold,” Debra Mathinos, the director of the charter school, said. “They had been told explicitly and implicitly that their future was limited. Why? Because they're poor. Because they're people of color. Now increasingly because English isn't what's spoken in your home.”
Mathinos said that only 40% of the kids who live in Harlem Heights get to go to the charter school while the rest are spread out to other schools such as Heights Elementary School.
The School District of Lee County receives an annual allocation of Title I funds to provide interventions for students, professional development for teachers, and family engagement activities designed to help students succeed academically.
Title I is the largest federal program supporting elementary and secondary education. It is funded entirely by the federal government under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Title III also provides money. It’s also part of the federal education act. This allows states to help migrant children overcome educational, cultural and language barriers.
Mathinos said the school has small focus groups to target a child's needs. Then, with services such as ESOL, the school can better prepare the child to do well in American society.
The charter school also has English classes for the parents.
“The children and the parents are what make this place as wonderful as it is. They do. They love to come in, and they learn because, to them, it's all about building a family,” Mathinos said.
This story was produced by Democracy Watch, a news service provided by Florida Gulf Coast University journalism students. The reporter can be reached at vmamador2491@eagle.fgcu.edu