BOSTON — Lynn volunteers are among more than 1,000 AmeriCorps members who kicked off a statewide year of service Friday with local participants dedicated to reducing dropout rates in Lynn schools.
The 20 members from United Way’s North Shore AmeriCorps team, including Salem volunteers, were sworn in with other AmeriCorps members at the Reggie Lewis Center in Boston. AmeriCorps is a national volunteer program that engages more than 80,000 people nationwide annually in helping out at 20,000 locations across the country.
Lynn volunteers including Tiffany Walker and Dru Sottnick will serve in the Marshall Middle School, Breed Middle School, Classical High School and English High School and Lynn Vocational Technical Institute, Lynn Housing Authority & Neighborhood Development (LHAND), Girls Incorporated of Lynn, the New American Center, Lynn YMCA, Gregg House, and Children’s Law Center.
United Way in a press release stated the AmeriCorps members will work alongside Salem and Lynn educators and nonprofit workers to provide tutoring, mentoring and academic support services to immigrant students and their families.
The goal of the partnership is to help immigrant students overcome barriers and challenges to learning and improve their academic outcomes.
Last year, AmeriCorps members supported 400 students in Lynn and Salem with academic and social-emotional interventions both during school and in out-of-school-time programming, according to the United Way statement.
The volunteers’ commitment included spending 90 minutes with each students over a two-week period working on comprehension, vocabulary, fluency and providing mentoring support. At the end of the year, 89 percent of students responded with either “agree a lot” or “mostly agree” to the question “Working with an AmeriCorps member has helped me with my academic English.”
The statement said United Way selected Lynn and Salem because of the city’s concentrated immigrant populations.
In the 2016-2017 school year, according to United Way, English language learner students made up 19.9 percent of total students in Lynn, and the dropout rate among these students was 29.5 percent, the highest dropout rate of all reported groups in Lynn.
