02-06-22 Education - Flipbook - Page 6
6 The Baltimore Sun | Sunday, February 6, 2022
Student expertise
Volunteer service
The schools featured here all require
volunteer service of their students as a
way for them to again experience in their
field and to give back to the community.
At UMBC, students studying economics and other majors take the time to learn
how to prepare taxes for low-income clients. It is a large investment of their time
but besides learning about taxes, they
learn skills that are transferable to many
types of employment. The clients served
also become familiar with the university
through this service.
The University of Maryland School of
Nursing requires all prospective nurses to
participate in a community health clinical.
By using Early Head Start centers around
the area as their base, they are able to
bring needed services into communities
that might otherwise not have access to
them. Their services now extend to the
whole family, as well as small children.
At Towson University all pre-service
teachers are required to do classroom
teaching under the guidance of faculty.
During COVID the College of Education
developed a system to match underserved students in grades K-12 with
student teachers through online teaching.
Although they will soon be able to meet
with students in person, the program was
such a success they plan to continue it.
A service to the community
By E. Rose Scarff, Contributing Writer
E
veryone gains when students looking for hands-on experience can
use their skills to help members of
their community. At the University
of Maryland, Baltimore County
(UMBC), students have been helping lowincome people with their taxes for the past
six years through the Volunteer Income Tax
Assistance program (VITA). During COVID,
they created a way to serve their clients 100%
virtually, even though many of their clients
lacked good internet connections and had to do
their tax returns over the phone.
“We figured out a way to have people take
pictures of all their tax documents and securely
upload them to us,” says Trisha Wells, assistant
vice provost of administration and finance in
the division of professional studies at UMBC
and coordinator of the program. They used a
special phone app that was encrypted and safe.
The volunteers worked in a dedicated desktop
environment to keep the information secure. In
2022 they will offer both in-person and online
tax help.
Students who volunteer to participate in the
program have about 10 to 15 hours of training,
and then must pass an IRS test as well as an
ethics test before they are allowed to prepare
tax returns. The CASH Campaign of Maryland
helps with this training.
Although they learn a lot about taxes, Wells
says, “I think our students learn even more
about soft skills.” They work with clients from
different backgrounds, learn confidentiality, active listening, how to ask open ended
questions, and how to explain tax concepts
to an untrained person. “There is so much
that a student can then take to their first job
that has nothing to do with taxes,” says Wells.
Through her volunteer work with VITA, Nivi
Mariappan, a senior economics and biological
science major, learned that she loved working
with all kinds of people, both clients and fellow volunteers. “It did help me narrow down
my options into doing something that's really
people focused,” says Mariappan. This spring
she is the VITA Site Coordinator and President,
in charge of recruiting volunteers and coordinating the program.
Part of the nursing degree requirements at
the University of Maryland School of Nursing
is a community health clinical. Set up in Early
Head Start centers around the area, clinical
instructors oversee two or three nursing students at each school. “It is much the way
a school nurse might operate if she had to
cover more than one school,” says Laura Allen,
clinical instructor and program director for the-
Sumayyah Mahdi prepares a tax return for Romy Hübler as part of UMBC's tax assistance program.
Community and Public Health Environmental
Initiative (CPHEI) at UMD School of Nursing.
At the Early Head Start centers, they are able
to do well child examinations and make sure the
children are up to date on all their shots. During
COVID many children fell behind because the
nurses were not able to see them in person.
But the students were very creative by creating
YouTube videos, offering a “Ask a Nurse” email
service, and making phone calls to keep in
touch. Now they are playing catch up with inperson screenings and updating shots.
CPHEI also helps the centers obtain and
keep the Eco-healthy Child Care Program designation that was developed by the Children's
Environmental Health Network. A center has to
pass at least 26 of the 30 criteria for the designation. Currently CPHEI is working on providing
a chart so that COVID protocols can be seen at
a glance.
Most recently they have branched out into
a larger form of service. “We’re working with
a family support center in Annapolis that will
begin hosting students in the spring,” says Allen.
This is a different model from the Early Head
Start centers. At the family support centers the
parents have to be with the children during the
day. While the children are being educated their
parents can participate in job training, GED
classes, parenting classes and other activities
to enrich their lives. “For us it's a really great
opportunity to work with the whole family,”
says Allen. “We'll be able to provide some nursing services and screenings to parents as well.”
The COVID pandemic upended the way
pre-service teachers gained experience teaching. “But it was a great opportunity to match
the needs of faculty and students and serve the
community,” says Laila Richman, Ph.D., associate dean in the college of education at Towson
University. At the beginning they were overwhelmed by the response from the community
for needed help, but they did what they could.
With the help of a Governor’s Emergency
Education Relief Fund grant, they hired a director and formalized the process to coordinate
tutoring between Maryland families and university students. “It’s essentially getting everybody's availability and making sure that it
matches up,” says Tyasia Velines, virtual based
experiences project coordinator for the college
of education at Towson. She is the point of
contact between faculty, the families and the
pre-service teachers.
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students the learning opportunities
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Learn more at:
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For example, if a family needs third grade
math help and their only time slot is from five to
six p.m., that’s when the student team is scheduled. The virtual sessions are recorded so the
faculty member can observe how the student
has developed a lesson plan and conducted the
teaching session. The students work in pairs or
sometimes trios, so that a time slot is always
covered.
The program tries to serve underserved
populations as much as possible. “We work with
a community liaison for our English language
learners,” says Velines. The liaison is able to
translate important information and communicate with the families that have English as a second language. “That has been a help in building
trust and also getting the needs of our English
language learners met,” says Velines.
“The entire program is evidence based and
faculty supported,” says Richman. “It’s a great
opportunity for aspiring teachers to be able to
work directly with families.” This is not the case
in a traditional classroom program. Getting
to know the families and getting feedback on
the teaching sessions has proved invaluable.
Although started to fill a need during the
pandemic, Towson is planning to continue the
program. Teachers now need to be able to teach
online as well as in the classroom.