Parents and several dozen young children have filtered into the HOLA Ohio Hispanic Community Center in Painesville on a Wednesday night in late February as a small crew of volunteers gets busy.
Some of the volunteers pull out worksheets and pencils, while others place pitchers of vividly hued hibiscus tea on tables and are busy preparing food. On the menu: quesadillas with steak or chorizo, rice, beans and homemade salsas.
The HOLA Ohio Community Center opened in 2022. It was long a dream of Executive Director Veronica Isabel Dahlberg, who herself is a child of immigrants from Hungary and Mexico. She’s watched as families have immigrated to Painesville from Mexico for work at the nearby tree nurseries for three decades, swelling the population of English learners at the Painesville City School District.
"We were just meeting under a canopy in the park and didn't really have a space," Dahlberg said. "But I was watching the state of Ohio school report card for the Painesville schools and the very dismal rankings. And it really worried me a lot. And so that was one of the driving factors behind establishing the community center."
The school district has the highest percentage of Hispanic students and English language learners in all of Ohio, about 57% and 27% of the student population respectively, according to the district, and many of those students are struggling academically. The district approached HOLA Ohio last year, asking Dahlberg if they could partner to create regular math tutoring nights during the school year, said Wendy Camper, director of curriculum at Painesville schools.
"Actually, we're lower performing in math than we are in literacy, which sometimes, it's hard to believe as a country," she explained. "But it's true. And statistically, children drop out of high school not because of English language arts, science or social studies: it's because of math."
Getting to work
After dinner, it’s time for students and their tutors to get to work. Tables are organized by grade level, where volunteers like Monica Garza are helping students with basics, like counting using dinosaurs and fake coins. Garza, president of the Spanish club at Mentor High School, is working with first grader Nathaly.
"She likes to count coins," Garza said, laughing.
The tutoring nights rely on volunteers like Garza.
"It's just really sweet that it's basically trusting in yourself that you can help other people, and that these people will benefit from your help," Garza said.
Nathaly’s parents Brenda Cordova and Alvaro Medina have been in the U.S. since last year, when they immigrated from Guanajuato in northern Mexico to Painesville for work. Nathaly is behind in learning English, but is trying to get caught up, Dahlberg said, translating for Cordova and Medina
"She should be in second grade. But because they had to go through this process with immigration and the pandemic she got behind. And so she's actually in first grade," Dahlberg shared on behalf of Nathaly's parents.
The growing number of English learners like Nathaly has created challenges for the school district. Superintendent Josh Englehart says students are entering school behind, and the pandemic didn’t help; plus, absent students are a big problem. Painesville schools' chronic absenteeism rate - defined by the Ohio Department of Education as a student missing more than 10% of the school year - was 39% in 2023, compared to about 22% overall in the state.
"We have a lot of families who every winter return to Mexico with the kids," he said. "So that that's where that kind of transiency challenge really comes in. A lot of times annual trips in the middle of the school year out of the country."
Dahlberg said HOLA Ohio has partnered with the school district to create a "four-star" parent committee to start sharing facts with parents about how harmful it can be to students' academic progress to miss even a small amount of school. Englehart said the school district has actually seen a decrease in the number of students absent since then, and several other interventions have been put into place.
On the academics front, the district is doing what it can: translating communications to parents; assigning bilingual staff at each school; hiring English as a second language-certified teachers; and providing intensive language instruction several times a week, when students aren’t doing core subjects like math.
But that alone isn’t enough, Englehart says. The school district needs the partnership with HOLA Ohio.
"What Veronica provides us is, she has trusting relationships with so many people in the community," he explained. "She can have very frank and direct conversations with families in the community without insensitivity or offense. And she can turn people out (to events)."
Providing more than just tutoring
Back at the community center, as kids’ attention starts to wander, the Legos and other toys come out. That’s Daniel’s favorite time; he’s in first grade, and likes to play with K’NEX. He says he likes science and math – which the games are meant to encourage - but when he grows up, he wants to be a barber. Does he think he'll use science and math as a barber?
"Yes, yes, yes," he said.
Why?
"Because I'm smart and... I'm beautiful," he explained.
HOLA Ohio does much more than host the weekly math tutoring nights. On top of helping with immigration cases and other advocacy for recent arrivals to Painesville, the nonprofit has a high school program for Hispanic girls in STEM - science, technology, engineering and math, a summer reading program and helps people get their driver's licenses.
Veronica Dahlberg, the executive director, says assessments are showing students starting to improve after the tutoring. But the stakes are high; test scores, graduation rates and other markers on the Ohio State Report Card remain stubbornly low for the district, which serves a large number of students in poverty across all races.
"We have the lion's share of the poverty and economic disadvantage in the county," Superintendent Englehart said. "We're the center of that in the county. And so we have always had massive gaps to close with our kids."
Meanwhile, HOLA Ohio can only do so much. It's hard to find enough volunteers at times, especially when - on an especially busy tutoring night - 60-plus students could show up. And funding is limited, Dahlberg said, with HOLA Ohio relying on community partners to donate money to cover the cost of food, for example. Finally, busy parents sometimes need prompting to bring their kids in. That's at least something that Dahlberg said the students don’t need.
"I know the kids love to come," she said. "The parents tell me, 'they say, is it Wednesday?' One kid, (his) mom told me that he doesn't want to go to school anymore. He wants to go to school at HOLA. Oh, I thought that was so cute."
