On the piece of paper is a paragraph explaining what termites are. Ten-year-old Sajith Suraweera of Herndon reads the explanation, with his volunteer tutor Barbara Sorenson guiding him, as he exercises his advanced reading comprehension skills.
"This here, ‘termites live in damp wood,’" said Sorenson, a former teacher from south Los Angeles, as her finger followed the sentence on the page.
"So they could be living in my house right now and I wouldn’t know it?" asked Suraweera, wiggling a pencil and leaning over the table.
On the other side of the makeshift classroom, fitted in the Herndon Neighborhood Resource Center, a non-descript unit among a line of supermarkets and barber shops on South Elden Street, 8-year-old Nizam Khan, is working with volunteer tutor Robert Searle as the two flip through addition flash cards.
"This one here, what do you think," Searle said, holding up a card that read "8 + 4."
"Um, 12!" the young boy shouts out quickly. "Did you see? I didn’t even count! I think I got it now!"
THE TWO STUDENTS are just a couple examples of the hundreds who, over the course of the last 10 years, have come through the Homework Assistance Program of Vecinos Unidos. The free neighborhood tutoring group pairs local students with volunteers for homework help four times a week, according to Sorenson, the group’s president.
The program has so far been a boon for Nizam, the Hutchison Elementary School third-grader who started coming to the after-school program last week, said his cousin Saloman Khan, 12.
"He doesn’t do his homework at home, so he comes here and gets help," Saloman said. "He’s doing a lot better than just from school … they give him more attention."
Saloman, in seventh grade at Herndon Middle School, has been coming to the tutoring sessions for one year and has watched as his math grade has risen from a C to a B-plus over that time, he said.
THE ALL VOLUNTEER-RUN program recently has featured Safe Haven, a year-round after-school and summer option for young students of the Park Ridge Garden Apartments funded by a grant from the Eisenhower Foundation. It started as an outreach effort to the newly burgeoning Hispanic community of Herndon in the mid-1990s, according to co-founder and former Herndon police officer and vice mayor Daryl Smith.
"We were looking for ways to improve community relations and provide residents with a positive service, so I thought, why don’t we attempt … to assist with the children and their education?" said Smith, now chief of the Purcellville Police Department. So in the spring of 1994, a group of volunteers headed by Smith, local Hispanic business leader Jorge Rochac and late community member Les Watts started the Homework Assistance Program in a conference room at the Dulles Park Apartments.
"Two [students] were there the first night, but by the end of the week, I remember we had 17," Smith said. "By the end of the second week there was so much word out that we had 50 kids and we outgrew the conference room."
As the group grew, so did its resources. It began to operate out of an extra three-bedroom rental unit in the apartment complex and eventually moved on to establish itself as an official non-profit organization with the help of attorney Mike O’Reilly, Smith said. Rochac came up with the name "Vecinos Unidos," Spanish for United Neighbors.
Its official non-profit establishment date of April 17, 1997 was celebrated as its 10-year anniversary last week.
NEVER DIRECTLY supported by funds from the Town of Herndon, Vecinos Unidos relied on the help of volunteers and independent donors. It established itself as a hub for young Herndon residents whose parents work late to get help with homework and advice from positive adult role models, according to Smith.
"When you have a lot of young people who don’t have a lot of their questions answered, their parents are busy working … they sometimes need some assistance with homework or to reinforce those positive values they have learned at home," he said. "A lot of it is good positive adult contact, and if they don’t get it from us when their parents are gone, where are they going to go?"
The program and the presence of the volunteers has worked to effectively steer several children away from gangs, drugs and violence, said Smith, who remembered seeing gang members at one of their first meetings. Smith recalled two young people in particular who backed away from a path that would have led them to gang membership had it not been for Vecinos Unidos.
And the effort began to have effects reaching past solely the children and Latino community, Rochac said.
"We had teachers coming in and social workers talking to people and nurses doing [physical] examinations," he said. "We had the whole shebang, all races, all colors, everyone was in there together."
In time, the group began to grow and be known, and volunteers began to meet with parents, a foundation of trust was formed and the results became more apparent.
"It's what should have been happening in the community, people all working together," Rochac said. "It gave the kids a thing to do in Herndon."
Vecinos Unidos even began to sponsor local soccer teams for children from all neighborhoods of Herndon to play together in local leagues, according to Rochac and Smith.
"When we started meeting the parents we saw a higher level of trust associated with them," Smith said, "that’s when we really started to see the better grades."
THOSE SAME RESULTS are still being pursued by Vecinos Unidos, a group that has doubled its number of core volunteers over the last five years and has seen an increasing number of students flocking to its new location at the Herndon Neighborhood Resource Center in recent years, according to Sorenson.
"We have such a high demand now [for assistance] that we have stopped advertising," Sorenson said. It is for this reason that the group is constantly searching for new volunteer tutors for its Homework Assistance Program, she added.
A growing level of interaction with the parents and teachers of regular program attendants has allowed the group to achieve a higher connection with the students and their personal progress over the years, according to Sorenson.
"These 10 years have been about getting to know these kids, helping them with their studies, giving them confidence, letting them know that they’re bright," Sorenson said. "It’s about having a positive impact not just for a day or two, but long-term."
For Smith, the most positive effects come when he sees Vecinos Unidos students volunteering at polling places during local elections or receives requests for letters of recommendation for entrance into police cadet training.
"The objectives haven’t changed. It’s still good people sitting down with young people and helping them out," Smith said. "And it’s paying big dividends."