By Lacey Watt
MT. VERNON — Adult English classes hosted by the Vernon Township Public Library at Mt. Vernon Middle School started this week and will aim to help meet the needs of people with different levels of language acquisition.
Haley Frischkorn, coordinator for the English as a New Language (ENL) program at Mt. Vernon Community School Corporation, went to Melissa Loiselle back in February of this year with the idea of offering free classes to members of the community who need a space to practice using the language.
At that same time, Loiselle was applying for grants to include more adult programs from the library, so the timing had worked out.
“As one of the lowest-funded libraries in the state, we knew we would need a grant to afford to hire qualified instructors. I worked on getting the funding and Haley worked on organizing instructors and the structure of the courses,” Loiselle said in an email.
Funds for the program classes came from a grant given by The Community Foundation as part of its 2023 Annual Grant Cycle. Katie Ottinger, Community Investment & Grants Officer for Community Foundation of Hancock County, said that in the grant cycle The Community Foundation accepts funding proposals from public, tax-exempt organizations for charitable programming or capital improvements that benefit the county.
Ottinger said that they granted out just a little more than $141,000 this grant cycle, with $5,400 for the adult English classes.
“They saw an opportunity where they could step in with programming and fill that gap and really just provide a great benefit to our local families and their kids,” Ottinger said. “I’m looking forward to seeing the outcome of that.”
Frischkorn said that to their knowledge, there aren’t any other adult English classes offered in Hancock County, despite there being a need for them.
Frischkorn said that Mt. Vernon schools currently have 159 ENL students, which is a 400% increase in the past five years. Current ENL students speak a total of 23 different languages.
As of Sept. 5, there are about 20 people registered for the classes, with their goal being 12 sign-ups.
The two classes offered will consist of primary ENL licensed teachers from MVCSC, with a few teachers who work at other districts or activities helping. Every class will have two teachers and will rotate so that someone is in the class from the class before so there are never two new faces with the families. Teachers will rotate on a monthly basis with every other month having a new set of teachers.
Mia Bennett, ENL consultant and part-time ESL teacher for Fortville Elementary, and Elena Nae, ENL Life Coach for the district, were at Thursday’s class. Nae, being an English learner herself, saw the need to help educate the parents.
“Once you educate the parents, they are able to educate their children and this helps all of our community,” Nae said.
Bennett has been in the community for four years and said the diversity has grown in such a short amount of time.
“I think it’s fantastic that our community recognized a need to bring this program to our area because in four years we’ve grown greatly as a district, so just recognizing that need for programs to support our families and then actually making it happen,” Bennett said.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays is their Literacy class, which teaches English literacy skills. Students take a diagnostic exam and be grouped according to their proficiency level. Materials are used from pathwaytoliteracy.org.
On Wednesdays will be the Conversation class, which is aimed to be less formal. That class will provide a time for the students to practice conversation skills. Some weeks, the focus of the class will be topical, such as conversations about weather. Other weeks will focus on grammar such as when and how to use words like “should, would, could.”
Classes started Sept. 5 and will continue until Dec. 7, excluding the week of Oct. 10-12 and Nov. 21-23. Both classes will take place in Marauder Hall at Mt. Vernon Middle School.
“It’s important for our community members to be able to participate fully in the community, both with school and in general. We know our linguistically diverse families have unique skills and gifts to share and don’t want them to be limited because of their English proficiency,” Frischkorn said in an email.
