Jessica Reynoso is a bilingual paraeducator at Whitson Elementary.
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As a bilingual paraeducator at Whitson Elementary, Jessica Reynoso has a lot on her plate. She works with English-Language Learning (ELL) families, fostering relationships with both students and their parents, to make sure that Spanish-speaking families have all the opportunities that English-speaking families do.
It’s normally a lot of work. Between helping students with their homework, keeping families in the loop, and meeting with kids to check that they’re on track, Reynoso always has her hands full.
That increased tenfold during the pandemic.
In the spring of 2020, when COVID-19 first shut down the schools, Reynoso found herself having to scramble. In the beginning, nobody really knew what was happening or how long it would last, so it felt like everything was up in the air.
“At first we were like, ‘Oh, you know, it’s gonna be fine, we’re gonna come back soon, it’s just going to be however long,’” Reynoso said. “I think, first we started with six weeks, and then it just got longer.”
For the first six weeks, Reynoso said they packed paper and pencil schoolwork for students, as a review of what they had been learning.
“I helped get all those ready, and made sure that all of my ELL families were able to come and pick them up,” Reynoso said. “And for those that work very late, where the office was not open, I would drive (the packets) down to their house to make sure they had them.”
While she was there, Reynoso said she would also make an effort to answer any questions the family had. She would also make home visits as needed to help students with the packets if their family wasn’t able to.
Of course, her job didn’t end there. She also called families and made sure everyone knew what was going on and what to expect for the next six weeks. At the time, the thinking was that they would be back in person in the fall. That didn’t happen.
By the time the fall rolled around, the school had worked out how to do Comprehensive Distance Learning (CDL), which meant another change in Reynoso’s duties. Now not only was she doing everything she had before, but all her meetings were through Zoom, which, in many cases, meant teaching families how to use Zoom.
“I would FaceTime a lot of parents to help them get on Zoom,” she said. “I would be like, ‘Okay, you click on here, this is where the volume is, click on here’, if they were having any issues trying to log on.”
Because students had school Chromebooks, she had to coach them less, since they could just open them and log in and the Zoom app would be right there. Even so, there could be confusion, which would sometimes mean individual help or even a safe, masked home visit to guide them through it.
Reynoso said it was essentially her job to make sure all of her families had the tools they needed to ensure their students could succeed. It wasn’t an insignificant number of families Reynoso was taking care of either. She had somewhere around 20 or 25 families that she assisted.
“Not all of them needed as much help,” she said. “But sometimes they would need maybe … communication with a teacher that they can’t get a hold of, or maybe they would have a simple question about maybe a food service, or maybe a Chromebook. Sometimes I would have to take them a new Chromebook.”
Reynoso also gave her students and their families her personal number so they could get a hold of her if they ever needed anything.
“I was myself once an ELL student,” she said. “And so I wanted to make sure that these parents, if they needed anything that they could call me right away and I would try to help them the best that I could. And so anytime they needed help, they would call me.”
Reynoso said that because of this, she was able to become close with many of the families. They knew they could trust her and she said that relationship even carries through now.
“I got so close to these families,” she said. “I mean, I had families reaching out to me, I would do home visits, you know, they would open up. I got to meet grandma, grandpa. Now they know they can call me in for anything. I had a parent call me yesterday asking me, ‘Can you help me sign up my son for basketball?’ Absolutely. I reached out to the board. I said, ‘I have this family’ and I signed him up, got a scholarship. And he’s on his way to play basketball for the first time.”
Reynoso said though the last year has been incredibly hard, getting close to the families has been worth it. She said it’s been incredibly rewarding, especially now that they’re back in person and she can once again work with her students face-to-face.
“I’m so happy that I can see the kids every day,” she said. “And I can see it in the kids that they are so happy too because it’s like they’re shining. They’re so happy that they’re here, and I’m so happy that they’re here too.”
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