Gary Robertson - Adult Literacy Advocates

Show Notes

A conversation with Gary Robertson, Executive Director of Adult Literacy Advocates, about teaching reading to adults.

ALA website: https://www.adultliteracyadvocates.org/

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A show highlighting diverse perspectives in Louisiana and the work of those who serve to better their community.

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EE: This is The Sunshine Bridge. Here we highlight the work of those working to make their community here in Louisiana better and have conversations to share and understand the different perspectives of the people who live and work in the state. Thanks for hitting Play. I’m Elizabeth Eads.

A couple of episodes ago, I talked with the great folks at Volunteers in Public Schools Baton Rouge, or VIPS BR. We had an in-depth discussion about teaching kids to read, and it left me wondering about adult literacy. So I got in touch with Adult Literacy Advocates here in Baton Rouge(They’re across the street from the Main Library if you didn’t know). It was Gary Robertson with whom I spoke. He had so much to share about his experience teaching reading to adults.

Gary Robertson: We work with adults 18 and over who need to improve their literacy skills, whether it's working on basic reading or preparing to take their HiSET test, to guarantee their equivalency diploma or somewhere in between. We also have a program where we work with students who, for whom English is not their native language, our ESL program, English as a second language.

EE: How many students would you say, um, are in the ESL versus just people who are coming in?

GS: Right now, I would say about 40% of our students are ESL in our ESL program.
And about 60% in our, other programs.

EE: What is your, um, I guess, what is your experience with illiteracy in Louisiana? Especially like at the adult level, because you know, I've been talking with the people at VIPs, Baton Rouge, they're talking to me about, you know, childhood literacy and encouraging that. Do you know, any kind of statistics or any of that, how that, how that looks in Louisiana and Baton Rouge, here on the ground, kind of what's your experience?

GS: One of the issues with statistics is several different agencies do them or organizations will do them. And so you have to look at - Okay, they said this and someone else said this and kind of figure out where, where it really needs, it hits.

EE: Right.

GS: Nationally, the estimate is that there are probably around 15% of adults who are, have literacy issues, whether that's basic reading skills or new number skills, numeracy issues around 15% are…. And the way they'll define it, define having issues with it is they’re at about a sixth grade level or below.

EE: Okay.

GS: And the state that number increases to about 18, 19% somewhere between 18 and 20. And parish-wide, you're in east Baton Rouge. It increases still more. So it’s…figures in east Baton Rouge. I've seen as high as 25 as low as 23.

EE: So somewhere in between there any kind of, um, discrepancy, I guess, between rural and urban areas, is that one of the reasons why maybe there’s… do you have any, I guess maybe is there any sort of reasoning why you think maybe there was more in East Baton Rouge Parish versus the rest of the state?

GS: Well, I don't know that we're. I don't, I, I don't think we are the highest in the state in terms of adults lacking literacy skills. I think that there are other areas that are higher than us. Um, and I'm, I'm not quite sure how the rural versus urban comes into play. I'm sure there's an impact there. One of the biggest indicators is the impact of a family on a child's literacy level. Um, it is not unusual for us to have students coming in whose parents also did not complete high school and dropped out at some point. Um, we see that over and over again, and the studies have shown that, that one of the biggest indicators of a student's potential to attain that high school equivalency diploma or that graduation rate. It's going to be what they're learning at home. And their parents emphasis on that their parents help with them helping them with their reading skills and moving along. You see a lot of cyclical issues that come into play there. And one of the things we do is we, when students come to us, we ask them why they left school when they did. And the answers have been very surprising.

EE: Really? Like what kind of answers do you get?

GS: I come from an education background. I taught high school for 26 years and retired and then began, got into adult education. So just the, the common thing you assume that many people I speak with will assume it just, well, they just, they didn't want to do it. They didn't want to put forth the effort. They didn't want to try.

EE: It got too hard or something. And that was just the end of it.

GS: Yeah. Yeah. And that does happen for some and they will be… they are very honest about it. One would tell me, they'll say, “Oh, I just, I screwed around. I messed up. I didn't take it seriously.” But that really ends up being a small percentage.

The majority of them have stories that are as different as they are. You have students coming in who left school because they were the only child in the single parent family. As one told me, “I was a junior in high school, my mom had cancer and was dying and somebody had to go out and get a job.”

EE: Right.

GS: “There was nobody, but me.” Others will say they were the oldest and needed… their parent needed help with, with bringing in some extra money to take care of the younger siblings. And they did that. I have some who have left because a job opportunity opened up. I remember distinctly when one guy who came in, he was early twenties. Dropped out of school midway through his senior year. And I go, “Why? You, you were….

EE: So close.

GS: … like, you, you were like one semester away. And it wasn't because of poor grades or anything like that. He said, “It's really kind of simple.” He said, “My dad was in the military. By the time I was in the 12th grade, I had been to nine different schools. Starting new each time. And I just didn't have it in me to do it a 10th time.”

EE: Wow.

GS: And that's why he left. And you and I can sit and say, “Oh man, you should've stayed. You should have, you know, it would have been worth it.” But for him at that time, that was what he needed to do.

EE: Right.

GS: And they will admit to you. They admit…. Every one will say, “I should have stayed.
I should have done it.” And. It doesn't do any good to go over the issues as to, you know, to brow beat them over why you did or didn’t. That's not the reality now. So we got to take them where they are now and say, “Okay, let's see where we can go to make things better.”

EE: Yeah. That’s kind of, uh, you know, I mean, like if I think of all the things that I did or should have done in high school, or, you know, around that age or something, I could come up with a list for sure. Yeah.

GS: Yeah. We all could.

EE: (laughs) Yeah. We all could. If you look back, like if you were to take me and put me in a time machine and send me back there, I'm, I'm sure that there were circumstances for each and every one of us that, well, there's a reason why it happened that way(laughs).

GS: Yeah. That's, that's it. We had our reasons and situations that came up, that looking back on it, you know, from, you know, hindsight being 2020, we go, “I should've just done this differently or whatever.” And the same with them. But it's. And I have some of our older students who were growing up in very rural areas. And have me, they were part of a large family and by the time they were in third or fourth grade, it was time for them to leave school and to help their father in the fields with whatever crops they were raising.

EE: Yeah.

GS: To help with that. And so that's why they left and never went back.

EE: That’s kind of wild because you start to hear what some of, I guess the source problems are and there does sound like there is kind of this common theme of - There was some family stuff going on. I had to deal with that. Can't deal with school and family at the same time.
One thing had to give, or another thing had to give. And at the same time, your organization really needs to focus on the one thing, which is the reading. I guess are there any sorts of things that, that you guys do or try to do to support any of the source stuff or, or how does that kind of work and kind of come to play with you guys?

GS: We’re really not equipped to deal with the source issues that are there. There are other agencies that are better equipped and more knowledgeable in dealing with those. We can kind of identify them. If you know, some issues come up - and our students will come to us and talk about different things, issues that are coming up, you know, who should I speak to about this or whatever.
And we, our policy is we never give them specific advice or recommendations on what to do. We will refer them to other agencies and say, “Okay, here's who you can call.” One of the ones that we use most often is we refer them to the 211 number that United way has and say, “Okay, they will be able to tell you who you can get in touch with,” because I want us to deal with the issues that we feel qualified to deal with, and then let someone else handle those others.
But we try to put them in touch with the people they need to get in touch with.

EE: What is the age group that you usually wind up having?

GS: The majority of our students, I would say are late twenties through late thirties.

EE: Okay.

GS: If we were going to look at a curve on there, most of them are fitting in that area.
We get some who are at the upper range. Um, we get some who come in at, you know, 18, 19.

EE: What brings somebody in from the upper range? You know, because I would think that by the time you're a little bit older, you say, well, this is, this is what I know. This is what I'm gonna, you know?

GS: We have some, and we have a special class for them. We call it our Senior Scholars, Group where it's for people 55 and older. They're not interested in getting their equivalency diploma. In fact, some of them already have diplomas. But as one guy, one of them told me, he said, um, when he was going through school was many years ago. He said, “I was good at sports. They passed me. They gave me a diploma. Nobody cared whether I could read or not.”

EE: I was wondering that I was thinking, how can you pass high school if you are having literacy issues?

GS: And that's exactly how it happened.

EE: (laughs) That says a lot about our priorities(really laughing too much, but this is life, and I’m not going to edit it out).

GS: It does. And he is, you know, he is older, he's in his sixties now. Um, And he just wanted to read, he wanted to be able to do it. And it's been a long process for him. Um, but he gets really excited. He is one of the ones who a year or so ago spoke to one of our instructors, and he said…. He was so excited because he was finally able to read his own bills when they came through in the mail and handled them himself instead of having to depend on someone else to do it for him.

EE: It's really nuts because, you know, when you, when a person is an adult and is having literacy issues, it's kind of amazing just how much compensation can kind of happen for, you know, if a person can't really read very well there's, um, you know, and I, I've personally known some people in my life that, you know, and I go, I didn't learn so much later that they didn't know how to read and I go - wow. I never, you know, really whip smart, you know, whip smart for getting around some other stuff too. And that compensation really….

GS: The methods and techniques they've come up with to compensate for that are just amazing. And it's one of the things I tell them, frequently. If I get one who says, “Oh, I'm just, I I'm dumb. Or I just can't learn.” I go, “No, you were smart enough to be able to figure out how to do that. You're very intelligent.”

EE: Right.

GS: It's just, we just need to teach you these things.” We had one student, uh, one of our seniors, um, he was in his eighties. And if you watched him with the newspaper, you would not have a clue that he couldn't read. He would like, look at, look at an article, look at it for a while and maybe turn a few pages kind of rapidly and then stop and pause and look again. And he was basically looking at the pictures and seeing what was there. He wasn't really able to read anything, but he had watched people read the newspaper and saw how they did it in terms of, you know, the speed and the techniques they used.

EE: And. Wow. Wow. I wonder how much he picks up from the pictures.

GS: Surprisingly enough. He many times could figure out a good bit of what was going on.

EE: Wow. That’s really cool. Um, so when someone is an adult and, and you are trying to teach them how to read, how do you, how do you go about it? Because it's really different from teaching a kid, I would assume.

GS: One of the challenges that we have with taking adults from all different age groups is through the years, as they've been in school, different eras have been exposed to different methods of teaching. There are those who came along about the time I did elementary school in the sixties. Where it was all phonics-based. So we’ve got some of them who know their sounds. They're not able to put them together and words, but they know their sounds. We have others, younger ones who came along in later eras where…whole reading.

EE: This is like sight words or something, right?

GS: They would just, the idea was you get them to read and they have much more, they're better at, at sight word recognition. They look at words and they can recognize it in terms of like a new word and sounding it out. Not so much as someone who has the phonics. So we've got in the classes, we have a blend of some who learn through kind of more phonetically, some who learn with sight reading. And so we just kind of have to work and blend it together. And figure out - All right. Let's, let's make it work and figure out what's gonna work best for everyone.

EE: Okay. What, uh, yeah. What, what in your experience works better? Or do you have a preference? Because you're telling me, you know, the people who learned with phonics, they can, they can sound a different word out, but someone who learned more reading on-sight, if they run into something, they don't recognize it's a bit more troublesome. So it sounds like. Sounds like phonics is better, but it sounds like that's not where things are leaning at the moment.

GS: If you had asked me before I ever got involved with this, I would have said, “Absolutely phonics. That's how I learned to read. That’s the best way.” After working with people who have learned it through the whole reading idea and getting their sight words down, I can see advantages to that for them.

EE: And so what are the advantages?

GS: They're able, in some cases they're more fluent. Because they recognize the words and can just read along rapidly.

EE: Because it pops that quick.

GS: Right. But then when you hit, when they hit a different word or a word they don't recognize, then they have an issue there. Uh, where someone who has more of a phonetic approach will be able in most cases sound it out and figure out what they're going to do. Where I used to be a total phonics all the way, I could see where the benefits came in from doing the whole reading approach.

EE: It sounds almost like there's a greater dependency on the dictionary if you're doing the site thing, like maybe you have to know, you actually have to know what the word is. You have to be, you actually have to be familiar. You have to dive into the reference of what, what that word is.

GS: Yes. Yes.

EE: So the dictionary.

GS: Yeah.

EE: That's interesting.

GS: Also. Not having been a language arts instructor, especially at the lower grades. I've kind of had to learn a lot of that as I've gone along too. And I don't, I don't claim to be an expert by any means.

EE: What did you teach when you taught?

GS: When I taught, I taught high school, social studies and English.

EE: Okay.

GS: So I was doing some language arts, but it was more higher level. I was dealing with the juniors and the seniors in high school level. So in terms of like working with the lower grade levels where you're actually teaching them these things. I didn’t. I've had to depend on a lot of the instructors I've had who have worked with them and the research that they've done, and a lot of it is trial and error. And a lot of it ends up being what works with that individual student.

EE: So while I was talking with VIPs, you know, when you're working with kids there, there were like all these little games that you can kind of play, and learning to read as a child is one of these things where you can make a game out of anything. Do you do games, you know, or is it just, you sit, you sit with the book? How do you pick the book? You know, what kind of books are appropriate?

GS: We try to do a blend. Okay. There are some series of reading instructions that are put out by different places. Uh, one of the ones we use is from a place called new readers press, and they are geared towards the different levels with different activities in there. You can work kind of work your way through it with them. Um, there's some readings and vocabulary, some phonics as you move along. We also, um, in every class we try at some point to bring, we’ll find a book that's at their level just to get them reading and kind of do it as a class section where we read it together.

EE: I’d think you’d have to be really interested in what you're going to read if you're going to read it at all. So, like a Dick and Jane book isn't going to hold.

GS: No, no. And that's one of the critical things we do and one of the foremost things is we don't teach down to our students. We don't give them little kid activities or materials to read because I just, we just, we're just not going to do that.

EE: Right.

GS: We think it's kind of demeaning to them.

EE: Of course. Yeah. So….

GS: So we make sure…and when you start looking into it, there are hundreds of things out there that are designed for adults with low level reading skills.

EE: Okay. What are the topics usually?

GS: There could be…there will be topics about, you know, things that happen at work.
There could be family issues. Um, you know, or family situations that that are described or, you know, travel or descriptions of places. We can find things just about any topic area that we want to go with. And we, we use those in many cases to give them some content instruction in other areas. I'll give you one example that I use: Right now I am filling in and teaching the HiSET class temporarily. Um, and as you know, the HiSET is the, the new GED. The end result is the same. You get your equivalency diploma, but the tests you have to pass to get that is called the HiSET now instead of the GED. The GED is still used in some states, Louisiana changed over, I think 2014. One of the things I like to use with my HiSET students, they're called “every day edits.” So you could find them. There's an online site that does it, and they'll do for each month. There will be like 15 or 20 different ones. It's a short paragraph. Uh, some of them about science, some about history, some about geography, and the basic format is: There are 10 errors in this paragraph or in this selection - grammar, punctuation, usage, capitalization, whatever. The idea is you go through, try to find the 10 errors and correct them. It's good. And it gives us a little bit of language arts practice with them on the grammar and stuff without, as I said, without beating them over the head with it. We'd go through and, "Okay, let's talk about this. This is why you would do this here.” And then we talk about it. We move on, but then it's a way of bringing content in.

Uh, I did one last week that was on, um, on the seasons and how we were entering into the winter season and how, you know, why we have seasons and how the tilt of the earth impacts that. And so we did a little science and geography with that because there's no way that we're going to be able to teach them everything they need to know about say history or science to prepare for their HiSET, but a lot of what they get is going to be using skills.
So we work with them on developing these skills, reading charts, reading graphs. Reading this paragraph and remembering what it's about. So you can answer these questions and then giving them those little content areas, bringing that into it to keep it interesting.

EE: Okay. And then, so how long does it take, how long does it take for, for the course to, to go through for a student to complete a course?

GS: That is probably the question I get asked most often by potential students. They go, how long will it take? And I will tell you what I tell them. It all depends. Our, our courses, we have continuous enrollment so that we don't have a specific start stop time on like a semester or anything like that. The reason we do that is because for some students, even people in their thirties and forties, it takes every last bit of courage they have to come in and admit they need to do this. And for them to do that. And then for me to say, “Oh, that's great. We will have a spot for you next semester. I'll, you know, just hang tight for two months and I'll let you know.” The likelihood of them coming back is going to be slim. So we take them in as soon as we can and get them started.
EE: So as soon as somebody says, “Hey, I just need help reading.” You say, “Great! Come right on in!”

GS: Exactly. We get them started and we start doing it. It is difficult for the instructors because you've got a class, you know, you've been moving class along doing things, all of a sudden, boom, here's this new person that you kind of in some cases are starting from scratch with, but it works out. We're able to make it work and keep it going.

EE: How do the students interact with each other. I would imagine they probably try and help each other out.

GS: They are amazingly helpful with each other. That that is one of the things that warms your heart to see them. Just helping each other, and at all levels they will do it. And so we just, we, we bring them in, we get them started and they back to your original point about how long it takes, once we get them started, it all depends on how consistent they are with being able to come to class. How far they went when they were in school. And how, how much time they have outside of class to do some independent work. Um, how consistent they are about coming it's they need to be here every class period if possible so that they can keep the continuity going. For some of them it's difficult, you know, if they will have sick kids, their work schedules will change. And we understand that. If it's a student in their twenties, who has no, no children, has a job situation where it's pretty much a regular schedule and they have the time to do it, they can move through fairly quickly. But if I've got like a single mom who has a full-time day job and has four kids at home that she's taken care of, it's not going to happen as quickly. And I try to be very honest with them when they come in and talk about it, because one of the hurdles they have to face is some will come in with an expectation, oh, I can get this done in six weeks or six months. And I go, “You gotta be realistic.” And we talk about. And they kind of go, I say, “You just, the big thing is you just don't give up. You keep trying.”

EE: Is it the HiSET test? That's what says, okay, I'm done and I don't need to come back anymore… for the ones who aren't even trying to do the HiSET test, you know, the seniors, how do you determine, okay…?

GS: For the seniors. We just, again, we have that continuous class going on. We try to continue to give them something to practice on with their reading when they come through. Um, one of the things that we've been very fortunate with is The Advocate has allowed us to participate in their Newspapers and Education Program. So we get newspapers delivered.…

EE: Oh, nice.

GS: …um, each day we have classes that our students can use and especially, it's especially helpful with our basic and our senior students, because it's a practical thing for them to do. And in some cases, something as simple as teaching them how to read the weather forecast, you know, where it is, and this is how you read it, and we're going to check that out. Or one of the things we learned early on, we don't assume anything. You assume - well, they're going to, students will know how to put something in alphabetical order. Not necessarily.

EE: Yeah.

GS: Or we assume you're going to know how to find like, you know, in the newspaper section A or section B. I would say, “It’s in section, it's in the B section, on the third page. And they don't have a clue that it's arranged in sections. So you go, “Okay, let's talk about that and work through it.”

EE: Yeah.

GS: And it's great when we have students who move through the program, pass all five parts of their HiSET tests. They've got their equivalency diploma. Many of them we see move on into jobs or into college. Several of ours are currently attending BRCC.

EE: That’s gotta be really exciting to see that.

GS: That’s exciting, but it's also exciting when it's the basic student who comes in all excited and says(and this is a 40 year old man), “I was driving the other day and I passed by a sign that said, ‘Tom Drive’, And I read the sign. I knew it was Tom drive because I travel it, but I looked at that sign, and I could read the words.”

EE: Right.

GS: That’s exciting too.

EE: You know, that is kind of a funny thing because if I, if I were to try to imagine what it might be like to have a literacy issue or, you know, to just struggle in that arena. I would, I would picture it as being in some sort of foreign country where yeah, I recognize it's a stop sign because you know, you know what a stop sign looks like, and it has some funny squiggly marks on there that probably says stop, but that's probably about as far as it goes. So there, there are, there are certain markers throughout the world that you kind of know, and they're a little bit universal and you have an idea of what it is. You know, when you go to McDonald’s…well, McDonald’s has, uh, has the pictures of the menu and you you've had a big Mac.
So you know what a big Mac is. You can just go up there and, you know, no one even reads the menu when they go to McDonald's. So, you know, you can kind of navigate and in all of these other kinds of ways. Um, strange the idea of it unclouding suddenly.

GS: It is. And it's. I am constantly amazed at how much I still take for granted.
Um, I'll give you one good story. I, this has been about five years ago when our office, we were located downtown, and I had a student who had scheduled an appointment to come in. We do an intake interview and a placement test to get an idea of what level they're on as they come in. And she called asking for clarification on the directions. She called back twice more. And I told her again, and you know, she's running by this time almost an hour late, and I'm getting a little frustrated here. And so she calls again and ask one more time about how to get there. And I asked, I said, “Okay.” I said, “Tell me where you are. And I will tell you how to get here."
And she said, “Well, I'm on the corner.” I said, “What? Which corner?” She goes, “Well, there's a green house here.” I said, “Yeah, I know there's a green house, but yeah. What did the street sign say? So which streets are you on?” And she's got quiet for a second. She goes, “I don't know. I can't read them.”

EE: Right, yeah.

GS: And I felt about an inch tall at that point.

EE: Oh, yeah.

GS: Cause here I was getting all caught up. and she's trying to find her way around. And she can't even read a street sign. And so luckily the more she described the stuff around me and I said, “Tell me if there's a store there you can see.” And there was, and when she told me that I go, “Okay, here's what you do.” And we worked it through. But it's, it's one of the things having grown up in a family where reading was emphasized and we learned early and our whole family read. It was like, it was not unusual for us to spend Sunday afternoons, everybody's sitting around reading. That's just, that's what we did.

EE: Sure.

GS: To think about not being able to do that. It’s just, it’s almost incomprehensible for me.

EE: So, now we have smartphones. How do you think that will have kind of an impact on things? Because there's so much that you can do. Like that situation at a certain point in time, um, you can find that to be a really disconcerting, really kind of a frightening situation for her maybe. But today, I don't even have to… all I have to do is just hit the microphone on, on my smartphone and say “Adult Literacy Advocates.” And it takes me there. I did that actually, as I came here(laughs).

GS: And I think for some of them that, that is a good thing and they they're able to do that. But what we have also found over the last several years is many of our students have smartphones, but aren't really sure how to use them…other than just make your basic phone call. And the way we, we found out about that is we always ask them to put their phones on silent or vibrate. One student, uh, in the seniors class, his phone continually was going off and we'd always have to ask him, you know, “Turn, turn, turn the volume down or turn the ringer off.” And finally, one day he said, “How do I do that?” And that's when we realized that he doesn’t know. Or we would say, “Now you can look this up,” you know, a website or something, “you can look it up on your phone,” and we would watch. Nobody was really sure even how to go about getting on, on the internet with their phone to check things. So we've, we've tried to work with them on that in terms of what their level is and show them just a few things.

EE: With the amount of media consumption that there is today…. You’re right. You know, to hear, okay. We have a smartphone now. Big deal. I don't, I don't need the smartphone. You know? I don't, I don't need to know directions in the same way that somebody… I can, I can just use the GPS and it's no big deal. At the same time, it’s not just television and radio that people are consuming. There is an awful lot of reading consumption that happens. Much more than happened before. Now, a lot of messages… you can't get away without text messaging at this point.

GS: Exactly.

EE: You can't get away with, uh, without, uh…well, I mean, maybe you could with, with the microphone and the, uh, the read-to… speech-to-text or whatever function, but outside of that, you really do have to…. You have emails, you have, um…. Yeah, there's all sorts of stuff that that's out there. Just, if I want to look up something on Wikipedia, you know.

GS: Right. And even, you know, for some of them, especially some of our older ones, you know, getting text messages from their pharmacies or their doctor's offices or whatever, you know, there are, there are those things coming up. And we have them asking us, you know, “Can you tell me what this says?” And we, we, we don't really like to get involved into their medical issues, whatever. We, we just kind of feel like that's a privacy issue for them. But we try to help them as best we can, showing, “Okay. There you go and here's who you can ask about this.

EE: Do you think with more cell phone use that maybe there's a greater impetus to, to come in? Do you think that more, more students want to come in because of this? You know, have you ever seen, I guess, have you ever seen any kind of fluctuation in people coming up. And do you have any kind of reason why you think maybe that’s the case?

GS: I haven't really seen any correlation between it, you know, the increased availability of their, their cell phones and, and smartphone use to, to coming in. Um, our, our numbers stay…. We show some years, we'll show increases. Others, they’ll, they'll dip a little bit, but by and large, they stay fairly static. And part of that is with just logistically the numbers of students that we're able to provide services for. Um, it's, you know, it gets back to… we're nonprofit.
So financially there is only so much we can do with the money that we have. And so we try to stretch it as best we can. Um, but in terms of, of the students calling us and coming in, I don't really have, I haven't seen that correlation with, with the rise in the, you know, smartphone usage and that kind of stuff.

EE: Okay. Just curious. Yeah. Um, COVID have you seen anything change with COVID, or how did it, how did it affect you guys really may be a better way to ask?

GS: Throughout it all, my basic outlook has been - I would rather err on the side of caution, I'd rather look back at it and say, “Oh, we did too much. We didn't really have to do all that,”
than to look at it and say, “Oh God, we didn't do anything. We didn't do enough.”

EE: And then people got sick…

GS: And people got sick.

EE: …and then terrible things happened.

GS: I’d rather, I'd rather be, I'd rather be known for that than the other.

EE: I understand. If somebody does want to come in, if somebody wants to donate to you guys, if somebody wants to just support you in any other way, how can people go about that?

GS: Absolutely. Um, first, if someone wants to come in is interested, they just need to give us a call. Our number is listed 383-1090. Area code 225. Um, the odds are I'm going to be the one who answers the phone, and we set up appointments for them to come in and for that intake interview and that placement test, and that's for… whether it's basic ed or whether they're working for HiSET prep or want to get into our ESL program. And then once we have that done, then we, we get them into our classes and get them going. If someone's interested in volunteering, just give us a call, go to our website, send us an email. There's a link it’s [e-mail]. It's easy to find. And if someone wishes to donate, we always accept donations(laughs). We appreciate it. And, um, on our website, adultliteracyadvocates.org. Uh, we have a donate now button, and we appreciate any donation that we get. And I will be honest about it. The donations that come in that are substantial, we definitely appreciate those, but I also appreciate those people, and we've had several do this, who they are monthly donors to us, and they donate $5 every month. And over the course of a year, that adds up. It’s enough for us to be able to do something with. And for me, it's very humbling that they think enough of us and what we do to give us that kind of support. And so anything anyone does it's, it's greatly appreciated. And we…basically, our exp- our biggest expense is our instructor salaries, because that's what we do. We, we provide instruction. Uh, I was asked that one time about, well, you know, “Why do you spend so much on salaries?” I go, “Because that's what you have to spend it on is if you're, if you're, if you're teaching.” So, we do that and we, we continue to offer in-person instruction.

There are other agencies in town who offer the virtual instruction. There are some who do more of an independent where the students are working, you know, online themselves or out of the textbook themselves. And just kind of call someone over if they have an issue or need some help. And I always tell anyone who asks me about that, “If that method works for you, that's fine.” But if that doesn't work, and you need a small group learning environment with a teacher with an instruction there, that's what we offer. And that's where we come in and can kind of fill in that, that niche.

EE: That's where you guys come in.

GS: Exactly. And have been around um, this past November was our 55th anniversary or 55th birthday.

EE: Congratulations.

GS: We have been around since 1966.

EE: That’s amazing.

GS: So, um, We, we hope we're going to be around for another 55.

EE: For sure. Gary Robertson, director of Adult Literacy Advocates. Thank you so much again for stopping by and talking with me today.

GS: Thank you, Elizabeth. I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

EE: Thanks for listening to The Sunshine Bridge. At the beginning of the show, Gary gave a few statistics about literacy rates. We were mostly having a casual chat, but I did go back to confirm his numbers, and they were about right. The percentage I found at www.worldpopulationreview.com showed about 84% of Louisiana as literate, which leaves about 16% in the state as struggling with literacy. So the numbers he gave were what I also found online.

This show is only a couple of months old. So if you have questions or comments, please email the show at [e-mail]. Show music is by Arnav Srivastav. Special thanks for this show goes to Jessica. Thanks for all of the fun reads. I’m Elizabeth Eads. Thanks again.