By Mark Hansel
NKyTribune managing editor
The Notre Dame Urban Education Center kicked of its sixth year providing afterschool services for low-income children in Northern Kentucky with an Open House at its Covington facility Wednesday.
Bishop Roger Foys of the Diocese of Covington welcomed the crowd with an opening prayer and Mayor Sherry Carran proclaimed August 26, 2015 Notre Dame Urban Education Center Day in the city.
The Notre Dame Urban Education Center is sponsored by the Sisters of Notre Dame. It serves the children of Covington and Northern Kentucky during the school year through individualized tutoring, cultural enrichment and supervised indoor physical education and recreation.
Mary Gray, volunteer coordinator for the Urban Education Center, said the goal of the facility is to help children succeed as students.
“Our primary mission is to get their homework, studying and reports done, so that when they get to school the next day, they are ready to go,” Gray said. “You can really see the difference in the kids’ attitude toward school. The confidence, the self-esteem, and they really have a positive outlook as far as school is concerned.”
Most of the participants are from the Covington area and the program includes children from both public and Catholic Schools. Children are generally referred through the school they attend but there are also word-of-mouth referrals form people in the community.
The center staff includes a handful of part-time workers but the tutors are all volunteers. The program is limited to about 60 children per semester and more than 110 volunteers participate.
“We want to keep it one-to-one, so 60 is really about our limit,” Gray said. “These kids do not get a lot of that kind of attention, so they thrive on it.”
The purpose of the Open House was to introduce the community to the center, but also to encourage volunteer participation.
“We are always looking for volunteers and we usually limit it to one day a week, because that is a big commitment of time and we want people to stay for a semester,” Gray said. “When the children come in they want to see who they have working with them and if they don’t have the same person they want to know why.”
Volunteers participate once a week from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Thursday and Gray said some volunteers have been there since the day the center opened.
Bishop Foys said the center has been a tremendous asset to the community.
“The Urban Education Center is a blessing to this area and to all of the children and adults it serves,” Foys said. “It’s really meaningful that the Sisters of Notre Dame began here in Covington and now after all these years, they have come back to fill another need.”
To supplement the after school activities for children and encourage participation, the center launched a Family Program in February 2013.
The program is designed to provide support, life-skills training on a variety of topics, and coaching on how parents can help support the academic success of their children.
The center is supported through the Sisters of Notre Dame with private donations and grant funding.
Edward L. Metzger III, an attorney with Covington-based Adams, Stepner, Woltermann & Dusing, was among those attending the open house. He said it is important for the business community to get behind programs such as this in Covington and throughout Northern Kentucky.
“As a business in the city, we want to support what is going on in Covington and for me personally, I want to support Catholic education,” said Metzger III.
The center also offers a summer program and is modeled on the national evidence-based program 21st Century Community Learning Centers. Each volunteer tutor spends a minimum of one hour per day working with each child providing homework assistance, reading support, and educational skill building activities.
The program also provides enrichment activities that directly involve each child in art, music, dance, theater and physical education.
The center collaborates with outside organizations, including the Taft Museum, the Carnegie, and local libraries, to provide additional activities. PricewaterhouseCoopers even has an outreach program to teach the older children about finances.
In addition to tutoring support, and an hour of cultural enrichment, children also receive a healthy snack each day and participate in one hour of physical education and creative play.
Because the children come from lower-income families, many don’t have the tools or the structured environment at home that will allow them to flourish academically.
Gray said most of the children that come into the program remain in it unless family circumstances make that impossible.
“Obviously because of the unfortunate circumstances of a lot of our children with parents (moving frequently), some do leave the program,” Gray said, “But because we have been around for a few years now, we have some children who, once they have graduated, come back to volunteer.”
Carran said it is encouraging to see a program that relies so much on community support be successful.
“We have a real need within the Covington School system with the mentoring of our kids,” Carran said. “We have a lot of single-parent families and parents who are working multiple jobs and the kids need that extra support. When you see the ratio of volunteers to students, you know those kids are getting a lot of attention and love.”
For more information about the Notre Dame Urban Education Center, which is located on East Eight Street in downtown Covington, click here. To become a volunteer, email Mary Gray at nduecvolunteer@sndky.org
Contact Mark Hansel at mark.hansel@nkytrib.com