Jumpstart

Three preschool-aged students sat at a 6-foot-long, newspaper-covered table, eager to begin… Three preschool-aged students sat at a 6-foot-long, newspaper-covered table, eager to begin their painting adventures. Wearing paint-spattered smocks that hung down to their knees, they dug into the colors with enthusiasm. Rather than paint pictures, they decided to combine various colors — blue, green, red, yellow — into their own unique tints.

“Look at my hands,” four-year-old Johnny said, raising his closed, green-paint-covered fists in the air. Johnny walked around the classroom repeating his line, imploring everyone to look at his hands.

“Don’t touch anything, because everything you touch is going to turn into green,” Jumpstart member Selena Holtz said. “Because you’re the Hulk,” she added, playing along with Johnny.

It was December, and Holtz, a Jumpstart member, was seeing Johnny for the last time before she left for winter break. As a Jumpstart member and Pitt student, Holtz dedicates about three hours a week to tutoring and playing with Johnny at Mount Washington’s Children Center.

The Jumpstart program at Pitt has another 65 college students spread out among seven daycares and preschools, also dedicating their time to mentoring children. The program, which serves more than 40 communities across the nation, is run and funded by AmeriCorps, the domestic Peace Corps.

It focuses on tutoring children in reading, but also teaches “social and initiative skills” by allowing the children to play and interact with their peers and the Jumpstart members, according to Debra Peduzzi, Pitt’s Jumpstart site manager.

The children are all from lower-income families and areas, and often do not have the opportunities and advantages that a middle- or upper-class child might have, Peduzzi said.

With Jumpstart, each child is matched to one member, so that he or she can receive one-on-one tutoring and attention, said Peduzzi, who asked that the children’s names be changed to protect their privacy.

The children also participate in “circle time,” a time when all the children and Jumpstart members form a circle on the floor and read a story, sing songs, or merely talk about what they did during the week.

“It’s structured,” Peduzzi said. “It’s the same routine for the children each time.”

But it’s less structured than a classroom, Jumpstart member Erin Jackson said. Jackson, who tutors and mentors Tim at the Mount Washington center, said the children are not forced to participate in circle time, although they usually do.

If children choose to go off by themselves and read books, they are not discouraged or punished, she said.

“We don’t tell them what to do … or how to draw a picture,” Jackson said, adding that many times, children in other classrooms are told how and what to play. And during one-on-one reading, the child chooses which book or books he wants to be read. After circle time, children have “choice time.”

Although the children can go off by themselves during circle time, they can’t be loud or disruptive and are limited in what they can do, Jackson said. Choice time broadens their opportunities to play. They can play computer games, play with dolls, and generally be more active and noisy.

“My child, Tim, likes to play with the blocks,” Jackson said. “I just crawl around on the floor with him.”

Jackson, who wants to be an elementary teacher, said she enjoys the “relationship you gain with the one child you work with.”

Jackson said one of her favorite parts of the program is when the volunteers first walk through the doors and the children run up to their Jumpstart member and hug them.

But it can be hard leaving the children after the school year is over or for winter break, she said.

“They don’t really understand,” Jackson said, describing how the girl she worked with last year cried when she left.

Indeed, it seemed as though all the Jumpstart members had a hard time explaining why they would not be back for another month.

“We live at school,” Jumpstart member Brianne Renz explained to her child at Mount Washington while washing the paint off of his hands. Renz tried to explain to a sad-looking Alex that during Christmas, all the college students go home to visit their parents. She added that they would be back in January.

And as Dan Irzyk packed his backpack with the children’s books he had brought to the daycare that day, his child cried out, “Not goin’, not goin’.”

“But I have to,” Irzyk said.

The children develop a close relationship with their Jumpstart member, Renz said, because they feel as though “someone cares about them specifically.”

She said she feels as though she develops a closer bond with her child during the one-on-one reading time, “because they never get the chance to have someone read just to them.”

“Trying to get the family involved is a big challenge,” Renz added, even though it is an important goal of the Jumpstart program.

Renz said she had not even met with the mother of her child.

“She doesn’t seem too interested,” she said.

At the daycare, Karen Ricco, the Mount Washington team leader, flicked the lights on and off three times.

“What’s that mean?” Krystal Reid asked her child, Jennifer, as they sat around a table playing with dolls.

“Clean up; clean up. Everybody, everywhere,” everyone around the table chimed in a singsong voice as the Jumpstart members and the children started picking up dolls and puzzle pieces and putting away the paints.

But some children were a little harder to persuade that it was time to settle down and get ready to go home.

“No running,” Holtz told the no-longer-green-fisted Johnny as she tried to get him to put his shoes back on. Instead, Johnny stopped in the middle of the carpeted floor and started spinning around in circles with his arms, bent at the elbow, sticking out from his sides.

“Are you the Hulk?” Holtz asked.

“I’m the Tasmanian Devil!” he cried in glee, smiling, but never skipping a beat, as he continued to spin around in a circle. The Spiderman-shirt-wearing Johnny did not seem to feel any loyalty toward any particular superhero.

Several feet away, Irzyk was sharing a more relaxed parting from his child, Nick, as he squatted down to receive a goodbye hug.