Delayna Earley
The Island News
Beaufort County School District (BCSD) Superintendent Frank Rodriguez recently traveled to Washington D.C., to speak about the program that he initiated to help students recover academically from the loss of in-person schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chiefs for Change, a bipartisan network of district and state education leaders according to their website, invited him to speak to Congress about the program “We All Want the Same Thing”: Community Partnerships for Learning in Beaufort County.
Rodriguez was in Washington D.C. for two days. He flew up on September 20, presented on September 21, and flew back to South Carolina that evening.
“It went very well,” Rodriguez said. “It was an opportunity to share with staffers [for legislators] at the federal government initiatives that seem to be working and providing progress for students in different school districts across the country.”
There were about six district superintendents and one state superintendent, according to Rodriguez, and Chiefs for Change sought to show a sampling of the programs, that are being funded by federal grants, that were established to help with the academic recovery of students from the pandemic.
“The extra dollars that have been provided to schools have been put to good use … and there are initiatives that have worked that they might want to continue funding, practices that have shown success,” Rodriguez said about the purpose of his trip. “They have identified ours as one of those.”
The program is a major part of Beaufort County School District’s pandemic-recovery work and is a former partnership that has established after school extended learning sites at area churches and other community organizations.
At the extended learning sites, retired educators and current educators who wish to work extra time are available to help students for three hours after school at extended learning sites to help bridge the gap and provide additional support to struggling students.
The program runs four days a week and students are taken to the extended learning site by a school bus, they are provided with a snack and then a school bus takes the students to their homes at 6 p.m.
The program was established in 2022 and uses federal COVID relief aid to cover the $32,000 per site that it costs to run the program.
Delayna Earley lives in Beaufort with her husband, two children and Jack Russell. She formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She joined The Island News in 2022. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
