April 20, 2006 | Read Time: 6 minutes
On a Tuesday afternoon, four students sat before a dry-erase board and tried to match a few words with their categories: person,
place, thing, or idea.
“Is ‘Olympic’ considered a place?” asked one student. The teacher, Marja Hilfiker, shook her head. “It’s an idea, because you can’t hold it in your hand,” chimed in another student.
The grammar lesson is typical for beginning readers, but the students — all adults — are not. Still, they come to class with pens and new notebooks, hoping to beat back the distractions of work and family to further their education at the Academy of Hope, an adult-literacy charity that has offered basic education and career assistance for the past 20 years to low-income Washington residents.
One student, an ex-convict, wants to attend technical school. Another would like to get hired as a dispatcher, a step up from his previous job, a truck driver. Their ambitions have plenty of company. Ms. Hilfiker, the charity’s co-founder, has watched the academy grow from serving one student to helping 400 last year. And around the country many people need similar help to improve their lives and livelihoods: Statistics published in December by the federal government reveal that 30 million adults have serious shortcomings in their ability to read, write, and calculate.
“Education is something that is so fundamental, we can’t afford to leave a part of the population behind,” says Ms. Hilfiker, a former high-school German teacher.
Nurturing Success
The academy helps students advance through small math, science, and English classes, and offers lots of extra support, including help with résumés and job-interviewing skills, individual tutoring, and computer training.
“We don’t want to push and prod you too much,” says Ms. Hilfiker at an orientation meeting for new students. “We want you to feel cared for so that you can grow to meet your goals.”
Each of the charity’s staff members has taught classes, including the office manager and the receptionist, and as they introduce themselves to the new students, the message for success is clear: Read every day, come to class, and don’t get discouraged.
“For most students, one term is not enough,” says Isaiah Thompson, one of the academy’s teachers. “Realize it might take longer than eight weeks to get where you are going and there is no shame in that.”
Words of motivation also appear in short biographies of academy graduates posted by the group’s front door. “Never give up on yourself when things seem impossible,” wrote one student. “The staff teachers and tutors never let the students give up on hope.” Or on attendance: When students skip class, the teachers track them down with phone calls.
Most students who attend one of the academy’s three daily class sessions want to pass the general education development exam. Many employers equate a passing grade on the exam with a high-school diploma. “Most places, if you don’t show them the GED, they won’t even give you an application,” says the aspiring dispatcher.
But it can be a long and difficult process to get there, says Ms. Hilfiker, especially for students like the ones in this afternoon’s class, who start with a fourth- or fifth-grade education. Some students, who have the drive but not the time to attend classes, find more success in the charity’s external degree program, where life experience counts as credit. After passing numerous small tests, students are issued a diploma from the District of Columbia public school system. In general, Ms. Hilfiker aims to help students raise their education to at least a ninth-grade level and to help them find their individual strengths.
A survey two years ago of academy graduates showed the charity’s approach is finding success. Before attending classes at the charity, 42 percent of the 78 respondents were unemployed; after graduating from the program that number dropped to 16 percent. In addition, before attending classes 26 percent of participants reported earning more than $15,000 annually. At the time of the survey, that number jumped to 73 percent.
Bake-Sale Beginnings
A native of Finland who met her husband while living in Buffalo, N.Y., as a foreign-exchange student, Ms. Hilfiker helped start the academy as a program of her church, the Church of the Savior, in Washington. In the early days, classes met in a room at a low-cost-housing development; the classroom’s $50 monthly rent was raised partly from bake sales. The group’s budget now tops $660,000, but Ms. Hilfiker still brings in homemade cookies at the start of each term. Students are expected to pay tuition, which amounts to $10 per month, to give them a sense of investment in the work and to help offset costs, but no one is ever turned away.
Grants from foundations, which now account for a third of the budget, have doubled in the past two years, mainly because of a $150,000 two-year commitment from the Fannie Mae Foundation, in Washington. The charity used most of the money to start its career-counseling services, says Kathryn Sommers, the group’s development manager. The academy can also count on other local foundations for assistance: The Rapoport Family Foundation, in Washington, gave the group $15,000 last year to upgrade its computer lab. “The better education you have, the better you can strive for the next level of accomplishment and income and make a better life for yourself,” says Andy Rapoport, executive director of the foundation. “It’s so encouraging to see people well past high-school age making an effort and being courageous enough to go back and finish school for themselves and for their families.”
Donations from individuals account for another third of the budget, and government grants account for 20 percent. The remainder comes mostly from corporations and tuition fees.
Another round of changes looms for the charity. A new executive director will be appointed soon, says Ms. Hilfiker, who prefers teaching to administrative duties. The group also plans to move from the top floor of a Baptist church into a larger space by the end of the year.
Back in Ms. Hilfiker’s afternoon class, after the four students puzzle over nouns, she assigns seven words to memorize for the following week. One student recounts how, at another class he took years ago, the teacher assigned 250 words the first day. “I guess he was trying to see who was going to stay and who was going to go,” the student says as he copies down the words, which include “violence,” “prepare,” and “concentrate.”
“We don’t operate that way here,” says Ms. Hilfiker. “We hope that everyone is going to stay.”
