The nonprofit organization Moving Dorchester Forward, based in Cambridge, started as a group of local leaders concerned about the holes in the resources and services available to the community. They chose to concentrate on three areas: early learning, workforce development, and community engagement. The task of getting area citizens involved in what MDF was doing began with Community Engagement Coordinator Shay Lewis-Sisco and her team holding events to create awareness of MDF.

While they were out there, the team asked people what the community was missing and how MDF could connect them to vital resources. It quickly became clear that money, activities, personnel, and action planning (among other things) were sorely needed, so MDF decided to be the conduit to those services. One of the questions the organization asked themselves was, “What are the capacity-building skills for parents?”

Fortunately, they learned about the Parent Encouragement Program from Kevin Beverly, Moving Dorchester Forward’s board president. Beverly, who lives and works in Montgomery County, knew of the PEP group that has been active there for twenty years, meeting with parents and caregivers of children ages 3-18 and then teaching them skills in cohort-based environments.

“A lot of them are parents sitting there going, ‘How do you talk to a teenager, and how do you get them on regular routines’ and all that fun stuff,” explained MDF director Chris Wheedleton. “Particularly for folks that are working two jobs and maybe single-parent homes and all these extra challenges for them from a parent standpoint.”

PEP wanted to work in another community besides Montgomery County, so they came to Dorchester with a grant and the Family Resiliency Program, which helps families learn how to communicate with their children and generally balance the things in their lives.

MDF decided to conduct two pilot programs. Though PEP’s model typically relies on virtual classes, Wheedleton and his team chose to begin theirs in person. The first session of the initial cohort was held on February 7 at Delmarva Community Services Intergenerational Center, with Lewis-Sisco and another community engagement staff member as facilitators.

“We wanted to do it in person simply because it’s about building relationships, and it’s hard to build relationships when you’re doing that in a virtual environment,” said MDF Coordinator Nancy Shockley, who oversees PEP. “We were willing to do the structure and set up whatever we needed to do in terms of the food, in terms of the daycare and facilitation and stuff like that.”

Parents were able to take their children to the in-person session, where the kids were placed in groups by age to work with the community engagement staff while the parents focused fully on their own group. But, there were also challenges with everyone meeting in one place: the time of day they all could gather, activities parents needed to accomplish at home or elsewhere, and the difficulties of transportation.

So, MDF gave the attendees the option of having the sessions online, and the next time they met it was on Zoom, which turned out to work well. The second cohort ran from April to June and was fully virtual. It was offered in two groups of sessions, on Thursdays and Sundays. Any parents who wanted to participate but didn’t have the necessary equipment were provided with it by MDF.

The topics for the eight weeks of sessions, outlined by PEP, were very relatable and included helping a child manage change, raising more motivated and cooperative kids, knowing when to set limits, and responding to a child’s strong emotions. The facilitator would show an instructional video that presented simple tools parents could implement within their families. This would be followed by some specific questions, and the group members would hold a discussion about such things as how their own parents responded to them during difficult incidents of their childhood. There were talks about the three parenting styles–permissive, democratic, and authoritarian–and why the democratic style was the preferred one.

Then there were the discussions of mental health, which children need support with no matter their age or stage of development. Because of generational differences among the parents, there were some for whom the normalizing of mental health was a challenge.

“I will say that, in one session, I felt that culturally, specifically around mental health, there was some tension at times,” said Lewis-Sisco. But, it was her job to set the tone of the conversation, and she made sure everyone knew each session was a safe, confidential environment for difficult dialogues. “As a facilitator, you have to be intentional to make sure that, no matter what the culture is or race that’s present, they have the space to be able to share their experience. And I often say, in facilitated conversations we need to attack the problem, not the person.”

As the group members talked and realized that everyone was being open and transparent, they were willing to continue the engagements and connect on a whole new level. The parents found themselves looking forward to the sessions as their own form of mental health support. While the facilitator would play videos and ask the hard questions, it was up to the parents to provide each other with encouragement. Some of them even learned to be leaders themselves.

“And then from there, we’ve actually been able, through the first cohorts, to identify additional facilitators,” said Shockley, “because the whole idea of using that PEP model is that parents who go through the program can potentially become facilitators of the ongoing groups, which is really just building the capacity and giving parents sort of that peer sort of network opportunity of working together.”

When the cohorts were finished, MDF brought the parents together for a family fun night event at Cabin Fever in Downtown Cambridge. They were able to meet with author Joy Thomas Moore, mother of Maryland’s governor, for some family engagement activities and discussions.

“Both groups that went through said, ‘What’s next? We’d like to keep going,'” said Wheedleton. “And we just met with PEP recently and they said, ‘We’ve got additional funding to actually do eight more cohorts next year.'”

He and Shockley are now planning that with Lewis-Sisco, who will take the lead on the structure of the ongoing Family Resiliency cohorts to commence in the fall. At the same time, they are able to offer the parents other programming focused on such subjects as mental health, first aid, and finances.

“So many of these families are working two jobs and are struggling to make ends meet,” said Shockley. “And that makes parenting even more difficult because of the ongoing stresses of trying to pay the bills and meet all of those things. So, we’ve actually had a number of those parents sign up to participate in some of our other work around generational poverty and how to kind of take the next step and move on.”

For more information on PEP’s Family Resiliency Program or to sign up for the next sessions, contact Shay Lewis-Sisco at [email protected] or 443-440-5370.

In October of 2021, the John & Janice Wyatt Foundation introduced Dorchester County’s version of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, a collaborative effort by various entities nationwide to ensure more children from low-income families experience educational excellence. It has three metrics for success: grade-level reading proficiency by third grade, readiness for kindergarten, and a decrease in chronic absenteeism. As director of programs for the Wyatt Foundation, Dr. Jymil Thompson has led Dorchester’s campaign, and he was eager to tell The Spy about the progress of their efforts.

With an eye toward tackling the campaign’s second metric, Thompson and the Wyatts looked seriously at implementing PreK-3, which posits that a child with two years of quality pre-kindergarten will be prepared for kindergarten. Then they collaborated with Dorchester County Public Schools on a pilot program at Sandy Hill Elementary School. According to Thompson, DCPS has been very cooperative with the PreK-3 program, though the foundation had to get the school system to trust that it would do what was promised. Eventually, DCPS realized PreK-3 wasn’t just a fad that would fade away.

“I think building that trust and fostering a good relationship was what was needed,” said Thompson, a member of the Talbot County Board of Education. “And I think, once we built that and we showed that we’re truly invested in the community by doing the PreK-3 pilot program, by doing the various other things that we do in the community, that bought us some trust.”

The Wyatt Foundation’s initial hope was that the first PreK-3 pilot would lead to others in the school system, and DCPS did just that once they had seen the value in the program. A second pilot was initiated at Hurlock Elementary, and two more were planned—one at Maple Elementary and the other back at Sandy Hill.

“This upcoming school year will be the first opportunity for those kids that started our PreK-3 pilot program in 2021 to take the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment,” said Thompson. “And then we should be able to see how effective two years of PreK is for those particular students.”

Regarding the third metric of the campaign, the results so far have not been as encouraging. The level of absenteeism this past school year did go down a couple of percentage points, but there is still a long way to go with chronic absenteeism. Various schools have had pockets of success, but others require new ways to help improve attendance. Thompson has been working with school system leaders to think of fresh incentives, which won’t have the same level of impact with all students.

“You have programs that will increase the attendance as a whole,” said Thompson, “but then you have other students who are chronically absent that require something a little bit more individualized. Giving them incentives isn’t going to work. They need something else more systematic and strategic just for that particular student.”

The attendance rate for DCPS stood this year at 85%. 90-95% would be preferable, but the school system wants to keep the base stable and not let it decrease while shooting for that higher aspiration. Unfortunately, the results are not broken down by the type of absence: an excused absence is still counted as an absence. And DCPS and the Wyatt Foundation need partners in the community to help figure out why those with continual unexcused absences are out so much. According to Thompson, it could be mental health, bullying, or the home environment. Once the reasons are established, plans can be developed to remediate or eliminate the problems keeping the kids out of school.

At the same time, Thompson has had much more tangible success with another initiative. Ready for K is a parent-engagement tool that sends text messages to area families, offering ideas for helping kids with academics and dealing with emotional issues.

“That’s actually been pretty good,” said Thompson, who sends the messages to 1,861 families, up from the early number of 1,400. “It’s been good because we extended that to the private daycare centers.”

Additionally, he and the Wyatt Foundation are no longer struggling so much with getting the word out about their program.

“I think that we have made tremendous progress as it relates to people or the community being aware of the foundation,” Thompson explained. “We’ve been able to bring in more partners, we’ve been able to do more marketing. We have a billboard on 50 [by McDonald’s], and we’ve been able to engage more businesses.”

He presented at the Hurlock Town Council and at the Lower Eastern Shore Mayors Association meeting. He spoke with the Cambridge City Council. He and the foundation have worked with some of their partners—such as the Boys’ and Girls’ Clubs, YMCA, Empowerment Center, and Dorchester County Public Library—on a summer reading challenge under the collective banner “All Together Now.” They even ordered T-shirts bearing that slogan.

“We’ve still got work to do, but it’s definitely moved farther along,” said Thompson.

Another collaboration important to the Wyatt Foundation is that between DCPS and the community, which Thompson and his colleagues facilitate. The campaign sponsors hold four meetings per month, covering school readiness, out-of-school time, attendance, and the activities of the steering committee. During those meetings, representatives of the various partner organizations discuss everything that’s going on in the community.

And, no doubt, they talk about their goals for the campaign. Thompson’s primary goal for the next school year is finalizing an initiative in which the University of Maryland will develop curriculum for PK-3. They’re also talking about doing teacher coaching and long-term assessment to see how effective the program can be for the private sector (kids who don’t start out in DCPS). The Wyatt Foundation will be helping to fund and implement these endeavors over a period of several years.

Thompson also wants to work on improving the cohesiveness of DCPS’s curriculum and the activities of out-of-school-time organizations. The idea would be to have the reading strategies of the providers be at least thematically similar so that it will be easier to identify the children’s educational deficiencies.

“That’s where I think the alignment is crucial,” said Thompson, “because you have two different entities that see the same group of kids, but their messaging may not be the same. You don’t want the message to be opposite.”

So, the Wyatt Foundation has made significant progress with its Campaign for Grade-Level Reading this year. But there is still much work to be done, and Dr. Jymil Thompson is untiringly passionate about it.