Summer program targets Daly, Neelsville students

County police, school staff and parents join forces to raise drug, gang awareness in time for vacation

The program is aimed largely at the scores of Latino families who live in Middlebrook Mobile Home Park, near the Fox Chapel Shopping Center, the county’s only trailer park. Police officers Marcus Dixon and Luis Hurtado and Daly staff development coordinator Sharon Clem and Assistant Principal Holly Hill put the program together quickly in order to reach families before summer vacation.

Dixon and Hurtado will run drug and gang awareness programs at Plum Gar. Teachers and school staff will volunteer as supervisors, and the hope is to eventually add an academic component, Principal Nora Dietz told about 30 parents at a town hall forum in the school cafeteria last month.

‘‘We can’t offer you much but those two hours a week,” Hill explained to the parents in Spanish. ‘‘What we have, we will give you, but we need you, too.”

The program is a springboard into several initiatives envisioned for next school year, Dietz explained in an interview, such as a study circle for Latino students, a math night to help parents help their children with homework and a reading night to reinforce the importance of literacy.

Lockheed Martin has donated money to help with snacks and incidental costs, Clem said. The program will be tailored to the expertise of the teachers who are volunteering and the needs of the children who attend, she said.

School administrators say that by taking these first steps, they can begin building a broader understanding of the unique needs of the school’s Latino population, which over the last 10 years has grown from 11 percent to 34 percent of students, by far the school’s largest racial group.

‘‘We’ve found that in a lot of our families, the children aren’t in very structured environments, and they need that,” said Dietz, who is wrapping up her first year at the 557-student school. ‘‘... If we don’t work with our children now, in their elementary years, then when they get to middle school and high school, it’s all been done. You need to do the work here.”

And for parents like Oscar Giraldo, it opens a bridge into the broader community as families adapt to a new country, sparking parents’ confidence to be more active in the school and more involved in their children’s lives.

‘‘Sometimes you need to be shook up,” Giraldo said. ‘‘With programs like these, it gives us an opportunity to keep them from falling into that hole of delinquency and shadows.”

For more

Capt. James E. Daly Elementary School and Neelsville Middle School are launching a free summer program for teens and their younger siblings at the Plum Gar Community Center in Germantown. Permission slips are going home with students this week. Parents are encouraged to stay and help out.

For more information, call Daly Elementary’s Sherri Clem at 301-353-0939.