Sarah is a long-time Alaskan resident originally from Fairbanks. She is in her second year of AmeriCorps in Juneau. This year she is serving at Harborview Elementary School, working to improve child literacy. Sarah graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics. She aspires to someday be a speech-language pathologist. There are many reasons why Sarah has chosen AmeriCorps, but the strongest reasons for her are that she wanted to help people, and she wanted to move back to Alaska after four years Outside. AmeriCorps has been an avenue that helps her in both of these goals. In her free time, Sarah enjoys hiking, reading, and the snow.
In addition to Sarah’s commitment to AmeriCorps and the work she is doing within the Juneau School District in her role as an Early Literacy Specialist, she has generously given her time to other volunteer causes including participation in the statewide Academic Decathlon and Pentathlon as a reader/scorer, she trained and took on the role of "Coach", coaching her own team at Harborview Elementary this school year. She has organized and participated in many “family fun nights” hosted at the various schools as well as giving her time to volunteer on litter-free clean-up day, Juneau’s Maritime festival, and participated in activities with the Black Awareness Associations annual event during Black Awareness month.
In Sarah’s own words:
"It’s been gratifying to see the progress being made with the sight words in the various intervention groups. Even though the words are often challenging (“sight words” means the kids just have to know them by sight, since they don’t follow the rules of pronunciation in English), they have persisted in learning.
One of the kindergartners has had a lot of difficulty focusing on his writing, though he's very bright. Since there were a lot of other adults to help with the other children on this certain day, I was able to focus on this kindergartner in particular and helped him write three sentences, which was a big deal for him. This would be an example of a positive impact. I'm not sure how much he recognizes me as opposed to the other adults, but I've grown very fond of him and tend to help him refocus or calm down fairly often in the classroom.
As mentioned, I can see some effects my tutoring has had on the accomplishments of the students with whom I work. More generally, I am also trying to be someone the kids can rely on for support."
This is Sarah’s final year at AmeriCorps. She’ll be sticking around pursuing other interests for a bit so if you happen to run into Sarah within the community, take the time to acknowledge her hard work and efforts she has given to the community of Juneau over the past two years.
