By Elizabeth Laughlin, Director of Operations & Development for Literacy Lubbock
At Literacy Lubbock, we help people reach their literacy goals through programs like our GED and ESL classes. Many of our students seek out our services because of their children. They want to inspire hope, perseverance, and, perhaps more than anything, want to provide for their children, to give them security and comfort. In many ways, children and the future are the two defining factors that constantly drive our students.
We wanted to help with the almost paradoxical struggle many of our GED students find themselves in: how can I better my education so that I might provide for my kids while dealing with the time committments necesarry to raise my kids? It’s one of the most common reasons a student leaves, despite the time and effort they’ve put into studying. The responsibility and time commitments of raising a child prevent them from putting extra time into studying. Disheartened, they eventually stop coming to classes, despite being so close to achieving their goals, because the time crunch between raising their children and studying becomes too much to handle.
Realizing this need, Literacy Lubbock partnered with Early Learning Centers of Lubbock's Vanda location to address this struggle. While Early Learning Center provides childcare, the tutors from Literacy Lubbock are available to help their parents study for the GED. The Lubbock Children’s Health Clinic recognized the good such a partnership could achieve and offered space for our GED students to work. With the Vanda Early Learning Center and the Lubbock Children’s Health Clinic so close to one another, it revitalized the partnership. Now parents are able to drop their children off, and less than half a mile away, they can study for their GED with our excellent tutors.
Literacy Lubbock and our wonderful partners in this collaboration understand the value of literacy and education. They understand that our students put in monumental effort to work, support their children, make ends meet, and then tack on studying on top of it all. They understand the drive, the determination to improve, and as such, Literacy Lubbock and our partners strive to match that effort, to meet our students halfway and give them the push that they need to keep going. Our goal is to strengthen these partnerships and reach even more parents struggling to find time to study. And eventually, to erase the childcare roadblock many of our students face when trying to pass the GED.
We want everyone to succeed. We want to improve the lives of our Lubbock neighbors, their children, and our future. We want to change lives through literacy—one person at a time.