Written by: Aaron Shires, July 2024
MacFarland Middle School at 4400 Iowa Ave NW in the Petworth area.
On my first day volunteering at MacFarland Middle School in Petworth, I navigated through the metal detector and labyrinth of halls before opening the door to a humanities classroom full of kids who reminded me of my little brother.
My brother is the kind of person you can’t help but smile around. He always manages to make you laugh and comfort you when life gets hard. He is a sweet, smart, funny, good kid. But he started to fall behind in elementary school, and, the longer time went on, the farther behind he fell.
By middle school, he had given up. He stayed up all night, slept through his classes, never did his homework, and barely did any classwork. There was so much weighing him down at home and in his life that school just didn’t seem important.
He was the first person I ever mentored. In high school, I sat with him and helped him with his work, teaching him what a verb is, how to make outlines for essays, and where to find academic sources. With patience and encouragement, he started to do great! He went from barely passing to getting A’s and B’s on all of his work. Now he’s even studying to become an English teacher, but he couldn’t have done it alone. He needed guidance and help.
As I looked around that MacFarland humanities classroom, I saw kids who—like my brother—had been left behind and hesitated to ask for help for fear they might seem stupid. They needed someone to sit next to them, tell them they were smart, and encourage them to at least try to complete their work.
At MacFarland Middle School, 76.9% of students are reading below grade level and 89% of students are behind in math, according to their annual state testing scores from 2022-2023.
Yet the MacFarland motto is “never give up, never give in!”
“When things get tough, we don’t lie down [and] we don’t back off,” Edgar Novoa-Marcano, manager of strategy and logistics at MacFarland Middle School, said. “We meet those challenges head on, we struggle through them, and we always make it to the next day.”
Ms. Laura Martinez-Garcia on the left and Ms. Terra Jones on the right, teachers at MacFarland Middle School.
The staff at MacFarland go out of their way to provide students with the tools they need to be successful, but with over 500 students, they need help. This fall they are looking for volunteers to tutor kids in humanities, STEM, and English as a second language.
“We’re always looking for folks that are willing to help fill [our students’] cups, bring love and joy to them, and help them out academically, socially, and emotionally in our spaces,” Novoa-Marcano said.
The kind of support these kids need requires patience and effort. We have to build rapport and trust with the students so that they will feel comfortable reaching out for help.
“It will never be instant,” Moniqua Sawyer, a mathematics teacher at MacFarland this summer, said. “It’s not like you’re going to do a magic trick on the day that they show up and it’s like ‘okay, everything’s good. Now I get it. Now I love it.’”
Like all middle schoolers, the students at MacFarland are still growing and discovering who they are. They need guidance and support, and volunteers are essential in providing that.
“Sometimes volunteers can make kids feel more comfortable than teachers or administrators,” Sawyer said. “But I think it has to be a relationship that’s built and sustained before they’ll trust you…it really has to be a commitment because the kids who probably need it the most have already experienced enough abandonment [and/or disappointment]… So it really is a sustained commitment.”
“They’re beautiful human beings…they’re just as awesome as any other kids anywhere else.”
Volunteers have to invest time into connecting with the students. Based on my own experience, though, I can assure you that these kids are worth putting in the effort for.
“[Our kids] are awesome,” Novoa-Marcano said. “They’re brilliant, they’re cool. You know they are middle schoolers, so they’re going through a lot of different changes so sometimes they’re moody. But at the end of the day, they’re beautiful human beings…[and] they’re just as awesome as any other kids anywhere else.”
Just like my brother, these kids don’t deserve to be given up on or forgotten. They need your help. These are good kids who need guidance and patience. They need someone to give them the necessary skills to be successful. YOU could be the person to sit with them and hold their hand so they don’t get left behind.
If we had enough volunteers to give each child the one-on-one attention they need, we could have a huge impact on their ability to succeed and create a brighter future for themselves. Help us help these kids by signing up to volunteer at MacFarland Middle School this fall!
Their fall program starts August 26, but you can sign up now by going to dcTutorMentor.org or calling the DC Tutoring & Mentoring Initiative (DCTMI) at 202-688-1261. DCTMI can walk you through the brief background check process, answer any questions you may have, and provide you with training resources to help you get started. Just an hour of your time once a week can quite literally change a child’s life.
Be the person that believes in these kids, and help us make this world a better place—one child at a time—by becoming a volunteer today.
