NORTHAMPTON — When Margie Riddle moved from Iowa to western Massachusetts years ago, she wanted to volunteer in the Northampton schools. “I had been a teacher, and I had young children,” she said, but when it came to volunteering in local schools, she found “there wasn’t any way to do that.”
So, Riddle and others decided to invite community members to lend a hand — in 1981, they founded Volunteers in Northampton Schools (VINS). The nonprofit, now in its fortieth school year as an official organization, matches volunteers with schoolteachers and is adapting to support educators amid the pandemic.
“Basically, the way VINS operates is that we say we will try to get a volunteer to do anything that a teacher can envision that the teacher is not able to do by herself or himself — anything — the requests, they are just all over the place,” said Riddle, a former teacher in the district who went onto become the principal of R.K. Finn Ryan Road Elementary School. Now retired, she is president of the VINS board of directors.
In addition to helping teachers with classroom tasks, such as putting up bulletin boards, VINS volunteers may work with students on developing reading and writing skills. One volunteer at Bridge Street School helped students look up words in the dictionary. “The children became attached to them. It was really sweet,” Riddle recalled. “The kids would say, ‘Is it my day with the dictionary lady?’ As a teacher, can you possibly get kids that excited about the dictionary?”
Sometimes, VINS volunteers come into classrooms and talk about an area of expertise — say, geology. “There’s something, I always say it’s kind of magical, about having someone from the community come in and talk about something that they have direct experience with,” Riddle said. “The teacher may not have those contacts to be able to invite them. For the kids, it really makes this connection to the real world. To me, that’s the power of VINS — the kids are having a connection to the real world about the knowledge they are learning in school.”
During the pandemic, volunteers can’t go into the schools. As a result, their work this year includes delivering materials to students’ homes, helping teachers assemble materials and supporting kids in their remote learning, via telephone or by mail, such as being a pen pal.
Pre-pandemic, volunteers played games, read with students and helped with math problems in Diana Ramsden’s first-grade class at Ryan Road. “Just forming that connection and having another adult connection is very helpful,” Ramsden said.
Now, students are learning remotely. “The challenges are reaching all the students,” Ramsden said. VINS helps with that.
Pixie Holbrook retired about eight years ago from her 40-year career in teaching, including working in special education in Northampton, and started volunteering with VINS in Ramsden’s virtual classroom this school year.
“I don’t know how to turn off the teacher switch … I just can’t,” Holbrook said. “My heart just aches for what they are going through.”
“I was aware that we were going to be heading toward remote learning, and I was really concerned about the at-risk kids,” she said, explaining her motivation to volunteer. Several mornings each week, she works with the first-graders in Ramsden’s class on reading skills, such as phonics and recognizing sight words, over the computer.
In working with students remotely, there are sometimes glitches. “Of course we’re all stumbling with, how you do a breakout room?” she said. One student was struggling with Zoom on Friday, and “then our smoke alarm went off. It’s a fun day … The kids are going, ‘Whoa, what happened?’”
Susan Martindell also volunteers in Ramsden’s classroom through VINS. She taught for 33 years, including in Easthampton, before retiring in 2006. Then, she saw an ad about volunteering in the Gazette about eight years ago. “I saw the article for the schools, and I said, ‘That’s for me,’” she recalled. She has been volunteering in Ramsden’s first-grade classroom since.
Going to Ryan Road, she said, “It’s like going home — it’s where my kids went.”
“My main reason for volunteering in first grade is to make sure that children have a good background in language arts as they move up,” Martindell said. “Sometimes that seems to be where they struggle. It seems to be more difficult, and I just want to make sure they have a good background in reading and writing before they move on.”
In the past, Martindell has read with students and helped them with writing. Now, amid the pandemic, she’s helping Ramsden with paperwork.
The board of directors thought about taking the year off, Riddle said. “It’s hard for us to fundraise in this pandemic. But then, we also said we think kids and teachers need us more than ever this year.”
She added, “We were really concerned — particularly about children for whom this is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. How could we help them? It’s already a go.”
To learn more about Volunteers in Northampton Schools, visit sites.google.com/site/northamptonvins.
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.