We catch up with a six member team of young adults helping education efforts in Jones County.
A team of young men and women from around the country are helping to make Jones County and the town of Trenton a stronger community by helping out around the town and in a local school. The group is part of a national government organization called AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps that engages young adults ages 18 to 24 years old in team-based community service projects throughout the US. Mikaela Murillo is part of a six member team called Delta 4.
“Somebody from the county will go and send an application saying ‘we need help with this.’ So our, it would be a site supervisor, that’s what we call them, was Darlene the mayor of Trenton and Mr. White, the principal of Jones Middle School and they basically sent a request saying they needed help in the area.”
AmeriCorps NCCC approved the application and sent Delta 4 to Jones County. Three days each week, the team is tutoring students at Jones Middle school. And the other two days they are involved in projects in Trenton.
“We go into rural areas and we help doing a wide range of things, so we’ve done environmental projects, construction projects, right now we’re working in a school.”
Jones County Middle School Principal Michael White is an alumni of the National Civilian Community Corps program himself. He says this is the second team of NCCC members to come to the school.
“They just offer a different light to our kids. They’re very positive. They come from everywhere, but no one is from North Carolina, we haven’t had anyone from North Carolina yet. It’s pretty neat… (the kids are like) you’re from where? Is it… They want to know about Oregon, they want to know about Texas, so it’s actually bringing in the country to our kids as well.”
RohanChaudhary, a member of the Delta 4 team, is helping out in an 8th grade math class. He’s originally from Cincinnati, Ohio.
“They’ve gone through rational and irrational numbers and they’re learning some square roots and some basic math concepts related to that. And I’m sort of going around, making sure people are taking notes, understanding the concepts.”
Not far from the math class, another Delta 4 team member is working one-on-one with a student on his writing assignment.
“so, I just add an ‘and’ here and take the comma out?” “well, you can leave the comma and put ‘and’, but then you have to … explain ‘it does what?’ Cause I don’t know what it’s doing.”
“Francis Barerrais helping an 8th grade student out with an essay that is talking about uniforms in schools. And they’re going over his writing and what he can fix, what he can add.”
Even though the National Civilian Community Corps members are only at Jones County Middle School for a couple of months, Murillo is experiencing firsthand the impact they’re making.
“There was a student I’ve been working with, Tywan. He is in eighth grade and he’s been working on his multiplication. And I just did a chart for him, because like, I just went back old school to how I learned it and then he was actually getting it. So that was fulfilling.”
Delta 4 will be in ENC until December 2nd. Jones County Middle School Principal Michael White says the results have been so successful that he’s applied for another team to come in March 2014. He says they hope to know for sure by January.
Organizations interested in hosting NCCC members must first submit a request. If approved, AmeriCorps will send an application form to be filled out. When the application is returned, it could take a couple months to know if your organization is selected. For more information on AmeriCorps NCCC, visit our website, publicradioeast.org. I’m Jared Brumbaugh.
For more information, click: http://www.nationalservice.gov/programs/americorps/americorps-nccc
