Southeast Academic Center, Grand Rapids
“It was ‘The Seven Wonders of the Modern and Ancient World’ by the explorer Richard Halliburton. I couldn’t put it down – still have it at home,” recalls Jim, who’s 66. “It really kind of turned things around for me.”
Jim hopes for a similar impact on his little pal Yusef, a second grader at Southeast whom he meets every Tuesday for a half hour of reading, a spelling drill and just chatting.
“We try to make it more fun than just ‘let’s run you through your lessons,’ ” says Jim, who began with the reading program last year.
Yusef, a smiling little boy, pays Jim handsomely with a burst of enthusiasm every time he arrives. “He’s really good,” Jim says. “It surprises me the words that he knows. It’s like my grandson, who was reading at a really early age. These kids are doing the same, but they didn’t have the preschool or help at home. Our coming appears to help.”
That would be a major understatement, according to the teachers and staff at Southeast, who welcome busloads of Alticor volunteers every Tuesday and Thursday throughout the school year in what has become a well-oiled ritual. It’s a half-hour ride on the company van from the Alticor World Headquarters in Ada and a half-hour back for 25 to 30 volunteer tutors per day.
Sandwiched between those van rides is a lively half-hour of attention lavished on the kids, one-on-one, spread out in two or three classrooms at tables or desks. It’s on these visits that Alticor employees’ “adoption” of Southeast and its predecessor school in the building, since-closed Sigsbee Park Elementary, 17 years ago is most on display. The tutoring trips to the kindergarten through grade eight school are only a part of the story, however.
Second graders meet their mentors individually, kindergartners sit in a circle to be read to as a group, while 7th and 8th graders are taught a weekly Junior Achievement course in basic economics and personal finance for eight weeks by rotating Alticor volunteers such as Katie Born of Alticor’s Corporate Finance department.
“We are truly blessed. The Alticor people have been wonderful,” said Lesley Mayer, a reading specialist and 31-year teaching veteran – all at Southeast. “A lot of times our kids don’t get to speak much at all to adults because their parents are away from home working so much. Just speaking with them really helps them learn, as does all the personal help with reading skills, and the opportunity to be read aloud to.”
Besides tutoring, the company sponsors a variety of other activities during the school year. A partial list: Penpals, which matches 3rd through 6th graders with 200 Alticor employees to exchange monthly letters; fun-filled “incentive trips” three or four times a year for 6th graders who behave, finish their work and have good attendance; Career Day for 7th graders who visit Alticor and learn about different kinds of jobs; Job Shadow day for 8th graders to get an even closer look at the working world; and Santa’s Secret Workshop, a fun holiday event enabling students to buy quality presents for their family and friends at low prices.
“I can’t count the ways Alticor’s partnership with Southeast helps the school,” said Principal Lynda Walker. “The letter writing, the personal contact. The students feel they have mentors, somebody who cares. It gives them a reason to do reading and writing – they just beam on the day their visitors come in. It’s their special person. For some of them, they’ve never seen an adult male up close, so they even get to see what a working male looks like.”
The extraordinary thing is that the partnership dates to 1989, when Alticor employees committed to helping out at Sigsbee Park Elementary School, which occupied the same building as Southeast. When that school closed in 2003, the program never skipped a beat and resumed with Southeast, a K-8 “school of choice” whose students gain admission only if their parents sign a compact pledging to be involved with the school. It’s also a school where many students are eligible for free or reduced-cost lunch programs.
Cal-Neisha Owens, 13, an 8th grader, has lots of great memories of Alticor and her friends from there. Skating parties, trips to hockey games, job shadow days, spring all-school picnics, learning to balance a checkbook in Junior Achievement. She learned about exchange rates, imports and exports in that class as well – and then visited Alticor and saw some genuine exports on the warehouse conveyor belt headed to all parts of the world.
Most special of all was a science project to chemically analyze the antioxidant, anti-aging properties of green tea under the supervision of Dr. Amit Chandra of Alticor’s Analytical Services laboratory.
“No more than two cups a day!” she remembered the lesson with a laugh – and how the whole experience with the gentle Dr. Amit encouraged her to keep alive her dream of becoming a pediatrician.
A voluntary effort like the Alticor partnership with Grand Rapids schools could never last 17 years without a strong dose of passion, says Dawnlynn Suttorp, Alticor coordinator of the program for most of its existence.
Many of the volunteers stay late at work to make up their time off the job, or eat their lunch on the bus or at their desk. Others go out of their way to remember their children’s special days and holidays – and include the whole class in gifts and treats. The Penpal program, she noted, started out with just third and fourth graders but now includes 5th and 6th graders because neither side of the relationships wanted to give them up.
All told, some 295 Alticor employees volunteer at Southeast.
“I hope that the people who volunteer feel really good about what they do,” said Dawnlynn. “I think they come out of it as richer people because they learn a lot more about society in the process. I think it really opens your eyes to do this. We all kind of live in our own world until we spend some time with people from different cultures and economic levels.”
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