Shady Spring Elementary ESOL Teacher Creates Group that Supports Spanish Speaking Families

Emily Tucker, a teacher of ESOL at Shady Spring Elementary School in Rosedale, is also the founder/facilitator of Community Parent Outreach (CPO), which provides services for 40 non-native English speaking families whose children are enrolled at the school.

Along with the Shady Spring ESOL team, Tucker works with families in such areas as navigating online learning systems and parent/teacher conferences, discovering and participating in community and summer programs, completing required school paperwork, and supporting the social, emotional, and academic development of bilingual children.

“During back-to-school night in 2017, I saw a huge deficit in our ESOL families’ ability to navigate the school system,” says Tucker, who is in her second year at Shady Spring Elementary.  “Many families badly wanted their kids to succeed, but they didn’t know where or how to begin.   My past work with LASOS, which is a non-profit that provides services for non-English speaking residents in Harford County, prepared me to serve as an educator and advocate for these parents, and I’m happy that our ESOL team can deliver the guidance, explanations, and insights that they need.”

A resident of Bel Air, Tucker is a 2013 graduate of North Harford High School in Pylesville.  She attended Salisbury University and graduated in May 2017 with a B.S. degree in Elementary Education with minors in ESOL and Spanish.  She hopes to continue her education by pursuing a graduate degree this year in Educational Leadership.

Along with her daily teaching job at Shady Spring Elementary and her twice per month evening meetings with CPO, Tucker recently joined the newly launched Sylvan In-Home, which provides personalized one-on-one instruction for kindergarten through high school students. She’s a math, reading, science, and homework support tutor​ for elementary school students (both English speaking and ESOL) who live on the east side of Baltimore County and in Harford County.

“The SylvanSync digital adaptive learning platform is an engaging way to support learning for struggling students,” says Tucker. “The assessment given at the beginning of the program helps to target a student’s specific needs and the curriculum is then tailored to meet these needs. My students are excited to explore the platform’s interactive features and activities.”

In the same way that she strives to offer solutions to her Shady Spring students and the families in CPO, Tucker enjoys when her tutored students begin to see results from their efforts.

“When my students experience that ‘light-bulb moment’, that’s exactly why I got into teaching,” says Tucker. “The harder we work to achieve those moments, the more rewarding it is for both the student and for me.”

About Sylvan In-Home

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