The purpose of the Education Action Group is to support city public school children’s achievement and work to ensure children at risk have a fighting chance of making a success of their lives.
Current activities
- As CAAG’s major project, WCC provided a volunteer and funding commitment to a multi-sensory kindergarten tutoring program in an inner city school. Tutors worked with individual children throughout the year to help them learn to read, write simple words, expand their vocabularies, and comprehend simple stories, so they can become good readers by fourth grade -- a strong predictor of their staying in school. In fall of 2021, tutoring afterschool began.
- Analysis of educational issues and recommendations for the Board of Trustees to take action (to support a levy, for example, or an issue on the ballot, or to oppose legislation before the Ohio State Assembly).
- Presentation of forums on educational topics, often in collaboration with other organizations.
What committee members do: Under the leadership of Linda Wihl, and making use of her literacy tutoring program, Making Sense of Language Arts, members served as tutors and testers at Winton Hills Academy. Linda retired in 2023, and volunteers now run the afterschool program.
After being trained (a commitment of a few hours annually), tutors continue to use multi-sensory learning techniques like songs, touch, games, visualization of stories, and movement to help the children gain the ability to express themselves through language arts. Over the course of the school year, each tutor meets with the same child after school for an hour of intense one on one interaction that includes learning sounds, letters and vocabulary words, and reading simple stories. Tutors follow an easy-to-use lesson plan from the basic curriculum but adapted each week to meet their children's learning styles and progress.
Children eligible for the program are selected through the Kaufman Survey of Early Academic Skills administered to all kindergartners at the school by volunteer testers.
More information on the tutoring program at http://www.makingsenseoflanguagearts.com
How to get involved: WCC members and friends interested in tutoring and to obtain more information: Contact Linda Wihl at 513-477-3428 or makingsenseoflanguagearts@gmail.com.
Achievements:
Most children have the capacity to learn. However, many children lack expressive ability for a variety of reasons, including those associated with poverty (lack of parental time to read and play with their children and funds to buy toys and books, etc.). All of the children who enter our tutoring program begin with below-average language arts skills. Each year, 80-100% of the children have left the program with average or better language arts skills. The improvement in expressive ability and letter and word skills has been significant, to very significant! Because literacy skills are often a determining factor for children in school and career success, the program can changes their outcomes for a lifetime.
Other achievements:
- Held “Gatherings for good” two or three times a year.
- Analyzed educational issues and made recommendations for action. Most recently, the EAG analyzed Ohio House of Representative Bills banning decisive topics, which the WCC Board of Trustees adopted.
- Presented forums on educational topics, often in collaboration with organizations: programs presenting school board candidates, a panel on Cincinnati Public Schools community learning centers, and a forum on Ohio charter schools. In the fall of 2021, WCC held a forum, "Teaching the Truth: Our Kids Deserve It," about the initiatives to ban critical race theory and related topics from being taught in publicly funded schools and colleges.