T H E T U S C A R O R A R E V I E W 2 0 2 2 4 1 I asked Michelle how long she’d been with the program. My question was met with a slight smile and glance to the ceiling as decades of information filtered through her mind. Her story with adult education started roughly thirty years ago, after she left her job teaching German to high school students. She found her passion through working with adults which quickly led her to ESOL. Michelle, “a teacher at heart,” chose to move into the intake assessment role from the instructional specialist role as she felt a lack of contact with the students: “I felt I could support the students more intensively than I was in that role and more directly.” She moved into her current job in 2014, three years after the ESOL program left FCPS and came to FCC. For Michelle, her dedication to the program is all about teaching and has been since she first studied education. With such a long career, one would think Michelle has seen it all, but she told me how often her students surprise her: “I think in good ways it always surprises me what students are capable of. I really believe in students, and I believe that they’re capable of many things.” When the pandemic hit, Michelle worried that the extra barrier made success “really far out there and difficult, but students prove all the time what they are capable of. Assumptions are never good to make and don’t belong anywhere in education… [The students’] tenacity is amazing. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by that but sometimes I don’t know if I could keep doing it for that long.” The tenacity of the students in the ESOL program was a common theme in our conversation, and the longer we spoke about the number of barriers these students faced, the more I understood why Michelle was amazed by her students. By the end of the interview, I was in awe of them too. This fiscal year, there are four hundred and seven students enrolled in basic ESOL. Among those students there are sixty-five countries represented and thirty-seven languages spoken. The top three languages are Spanish (hundreds), French (dozens), and Burmese. Chinese recently has moved to a very close fourth. Michelle believes these statistics to be a reflection of the current Frederick community. Her seasoned career in ESOL gives her a unique insight to these numbers as she has seen them shift and change over the years. She stressed to me however that every program in every county is different, but she doesn’t believe it’s an exact match of the communities. As Michelle said, “We’ll take everyone. We want to see more of everybody.”
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