Denton ISD students get bilingual homework help, thanks to a UNT project that formed during COVID

And by students, she means all of the students: Denton ISD students in kindergarten through 12th grade, as well as the students in the UNT anthropology and teacher education and administration departments and the Texas Woman’s University students who volunteer to help them every week.

The homework “helpers” are online between 4 and 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, offering everything from help with algebra to listening as a Denton ISD student reads a passage of an assigned novel aloud.

“There’s no boundaries, and so I love how we may have a challenge, and we all jump together to try to figure things out, and things get done,” Nuñez-Janes said. “I’ve never worked with a group of people where you don’t have to ask. Everyone just sort of volunteers. Like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do this,’ or ‘I’ll take care of that,’ or ‘I’ll look into this.’ It’s really organic.”

A fast start

Nuñez-Janes said the idea for the project grew out of a need and Denton’s wealth of energetic educators.

“We didn’t dream it up,” she said. “It was the pandemic in the spring of 2020, and Denton ISD, like many other school districts, had gone completely online.”

Some educators at UNT and TWU already had connections with Denton ISD — having children in the school district, or having collaborated with Denton ISD, especially in bilingual and ESL education.

“And so we connected,” Nuñez-Janes said. “And essentially, we asked, ‘How can we help you? What are your needs right now?’ And that led to a series of conversations.”

The conversations led to a lot of coordination and, finally, the Juntxs Project, which is the official name for the homework hotline and translates to the “Together” project.

It wasn’t easy, Nuñez-Janes said, but the idea was simple: Use the Zoom account Denton ISD had set up for virtual classes and staff communication and plug student volunteers from UNT and TWU into a time slot. The volunteers would sign on to a special Zoom meeting and get ready for students to sign on through an operator.

There are clear rules to keep Denton ISD students safe. The helpers have to keep their cameras on, and the students have to keep their cameras off. Once a helper is connected with a student, they talk about where help is needed.

Zach Prater, a second-year master’s student in applied anthropology, started volunteering with Juntxs last fall. He said the project forced him to think back to his own school days for some sessions.

“It would be like, ‘Oh, hey, we worked on quadratic equations in class, and I do not know what’s going on. Please help me,’” Prater said, explaining that he had to remember how to solve quadratic equations. “And so we figure it out together. Some of them, it’s like, ‘Hey, we’re working on this other math concept in class I feel pretty comfortable with. Can we just go through it?’ It just kind of depends on the day and the student, I think.”

For Jenn Castillo, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in curriculum and instruction who just completed her studies, joined Juntxs in spring 2021. She arranges UNT volunteer shifts, leads orientation sessions and attends organizer meetings. She said she saw how much difference the university could make just one year after the pandemic shuttered schools and businesses.

“When the pandemic hit, I was in the classroom. I was a dual-language and bilingual teacher, and so we also had that missing piece of that outreach for our students during that time,” Castillo said. “Just because there was a lot going on, a lot of uncertainties. And it was nice that the universities had those resources and those extra hands, and extra people, that could come in and help.”

Covering more ground

While the project focused on students who speak, read and write English as a second language and understand Spanish as their first language, the coordinators and helpers lend a hand to students where they need it. The helpers don’t have to be bilingual, but those who are get tapped to help students who need help in their native language. Or if they need the help of, say, a native Spanish speaker who can help them understand and work on concepts in English.

Castillo said that while Spanish and English are the primary languages for the hotline, there are other languages requested, including Arabic, Mandarin and American Sign Language.

“The way that it works, we’re really student-centered,” Nuñez-Janes said. “The the type of help, the language we use, it’s all dependent on the student’s preferences. So they tell us, ‘I want help in English,’ or ‘I want help in both,’ or ‘I want help in Spanish only.’

Castillo said the hotline led to a satellite project: a Spanish and English book club, and she was the host.

“I was hosting with a few of the newcomer students in the Denton ISD, and so they had been in the States about two or three years,” Castillo said. “We would practice our reading comprehension in both languages, so there would be days where we would be reading in Spanish and writing in English, or vice versa. And then days where we would be doing both.”

Nuñez-Janes said some bilingual helpers found that students’ needs stretched them, just as Prater found himself going back to grade school subjects in hopes of helping as much as possible.

“For our pre-service teachers, I think it’s good preparation in terms of academic content in different languages, because you might be bilingual in English and Spanish, but you might not be bilingual in fourth-grade math or calculus, right?” she said. “So we’ve had to develop a lot of tools, with the help of a lot of our helpers. Zach is currently involved in a project and helping us understand our helpers’ needs. We have used our helpers to help us develop tools for the helpers. We have a dictionary of terms in English and Spanish for math, and to be able to develop some of that academic language in the content area.”

Prater is working on a research project, an elective in his anthropology studies, that could help the hotline recruit and train more helpers.

“I’m kind of doing some qualitative and quantitative anthropological research with the volunteers,” Prater said. “I’m having them fill out surveys at the start of the semester versus the end of the semester to kind of gauge their comfort level and their comfort level and proficiency and things on the hotline, and how that’s changed over the course of the semester.”

Outcomes and answers

Now that the homework hotline has been running for several years, Castillo said she has gotten a lot of feedback from families.

“It’s mostly come from parents telling us that they’ve noticed that their child has gotten much more confident in the subject they’ve been getting help with,” Castillo said. “And parents have told us that their children have gotten more confident in general with school.”

Castillo coordinates between 80 and 85 volunteers for the homework hotline. It’s been a lot of work to juggle as she completed her doctorate, but she said it has been rewarding to see university and Denton ISD students grow through the program. She and Prater said they have also noticed that the younger siblings of the Denton ISD students have sometimes dropped in. Students have mentioned their little brothers and sisters and casually introduced them to the tutors.

“I’ve definitely heard some little voices in the background,” Prater said.

Nuñez-Janes said the hotline has benefited from university students who have lent their talent and skills in unexpected ways. One UNT doctoral student developed an AI bot that helps the tutors access Denton ISD academic information.

“He has made some just tremendous, super innovative stuff that none of us would have thought of, and maybe some of us would have been a little bit hesitant to use because AI is so controversial,” she said. “But you’re able to train this bot based on the questions and the needs that our helpers have, so that the bot is able to break down answers in ways, and it’s able to provide help.”

“For me and a lot of volunteers, it’s giving to the students,” Castillo said. “But then, also, the students kind of give to us a little bit — whether it’s experience or just, you know, we all kind of learn together.”

Growing the hotline has been a challenge, but the student leaders and Nuñez-Janes said they are proud of the grassroots, organic town-and-gown project. For Nuñez-Janes, that the program grew between the school district and the universities gives it a strength and purpose that might not have emerged if it had been a top-down project, or a program that was created by the universities and then offered to the school district. For her, Juntxs Homework Hotline is an example of community building and educational success.

Prater said the biggest compliment came from a student who still didn’t totally understand how long a student usually stays in college.

“I think my favorite interaction that I had with a student on the hotline. I think it was a either a third or fourth grader. I helped them a couple of weeks in a row with — I think we were working on like Pythagorean theorem or some math thing,” Prater said. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna be honest. It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at this, so I’m gonna have to figure it out with you, but that’s OK.’ And it went from them being very anxious about learning this math thing to, by the end of it — it was really cute — but like asking me if I would still be at UNT when they got into UNT.”

Prater decided not to disappoint the student.

“They have seven years until they graduate from high school, but it was just really cool seeing them go from being so stressed about it and not believing in themselves to being like, ‘Well, see you when I get into college with you!’ And that is a pretty tremendous change when you think about it.”