Raising a community: Corners Academy’s Early Learning program lays a strong foundation for educational success
When four-year-old Samuel’s mother learned about Corners Academy and its Early Learning program from another mom in her apartment complex, she called Pilar Garcia, the program’s director the next morning.
A few days later Samuel showed up with his grandmother for their first class.
“He was just eyes wide open, so excited to be in a classroom,” Pilar said.
Samuel’s grandmother was working with him some at home while his parents worked, but Pilar said even on his first day, she could tell he was hungry to learn.
Corners Outreach, the organization that encompasses Corners Academy and its Early Learning program, seeks to help people out of at-risk and poverty situations by addressing common issues including education and employment.
Corners’ Early Learning program addresses gaps in children’s educational foundations by feeding their natural curiosity for learning while introducing them to a classroom environment. This helps equip them with the basic skills to be kindergarten-ready. A parent or other caregiver attends too so they can continue working with their children at home.
“We really want the parents to become their child’s first and best teacher, because we believe that no matter how much time you spend with us, that learning is also going to need to happen at home,” Pilar said.
Pilar said she saw changes in Samuel even after his first class.
“And this is just two hours later,” she said. “I can’t imagine seeing how much more he grows.”
For Pilar, this program is just as much about helping prepare children from birth to five years old to start school as it is about building community, her community. Most of Pilar’s life revolved around one street in Norcross, and in some ways, still does today.
“My husband’s parents still live in that neighborhood,” Pilar said. “I actually met my husband there. We are literally from the same cul de sac.”
The Gwinnett County location of Corners Outreach is only a few minutes away from that street.
“The families that are at Corners now, families that we even provide transportation to, that’s where I was from,” Pilar said. “I’m very proud of where I work because it’s pretty much my roots.”
Pilar was born in Atlanta but moved to Mexico for a few years with her mom, Gloria, and brother when she was a year old. Understanding how important early education was, Gloria and a few other women in their small town started a pre-kindergarten program from scratch. Not having a place to meet, Gloria and the others even found building materials and constructed the walls and roof themselves.
But when she came back to the U.S. — that cul de sac in Norcross — Gloria didn’t know how the school system worked and struggled with English at first.
“I think my mom would have loved to have had a program like we do in Early Learning now,” Pilar said. “There’s an academic benefit, trying to build that great foundation for our students, but it’s also about the community that’s being built within our moms.“
Pilar said through the Early Learning program she’s watched bonds form between the moms as they make plans to meet up outside of Corners — grabbing a coffee or lunch together, meeting for park playdates and going to each other’s houses.
Even at Corners’ DeKalb County location, which is more transportation-reliant than the Gwinnett County location, she’s seeing families living in the same neighborhoods and apartment complexes forming bonds.
“It’s just an amazing community that’s being built within one another,” she said.
Corners Academy’s Early Learning program started in 2020. Previously, Larry Campbell, Corners Outreach’s executive director, had partnered with the Atlanta Speech School’s Cox Campus to provide occasional workshops for a program they developed called Talk with Me Baby. The program encourages foundational speech skills through parental interaction and teaching at a young age.
Larry wanted to bring that concept to Corners full-time and tapped Pilar to lead it.
“We just saw that there was a huge need for early learning,” she said.
Corners Academy first started as an after-school tutoring program for first- and second-graders in underserved communities to get to a third-grade reading level, which is a good indicator of academic success. However, the staff noticed that they needed to intervene earlier; the students they were serving were already behind when they came to Corners.
Corners leaned into the existing relationships it had with Gwinnett County schools to partner with them on their Play2Learn program for children who haven’t reached school age yet. The partnership allowed Corners to develop assessments to track kids’ progress.
The philosophy shared between the school system and Corners is the same.
“Whether it’s talking to your child as much as you can — talking to them in the bathtub, talking to them while you’re changing their diaper, telling them what they’re doing — helping them make expressions in a mirror, helping them hold a crayon — everything you can think of that we do in our classroom, we want you to continue that at home,” Pilar said.
The Early Learning program’s focus is to empower the parent to start being involved as early in their child’s life as possible, no matter the language spoken in the home.
“That home language is what’s going to build that child’s foundation,” Pilar said. "Once they go to school and they do start learning English, they’re going to be ahead of the game because you’ve already invested in your own child’s education, and you’re already completely involved. The sooner the parent gets involved, the sooner the child can be helped and can succeed — because children need that help, that foundation and that confidence from their parents that they can do it.”
Early Learning classes start off with free play for the children. Then there’s a circle time for announcements for upcoming events. The last part of the class is the connection portion where the parent connects with their child one-on-one in an activity — like writing letters or practicing vocabulary words — things that build a social and emotional relationship between the parent and child and that they’re encouraged to continue with at home.
Pilar said she is seeing results that the program is working.
“There has definitely been positive feedback from the parents, but the best evidence that I have is straight word of mouth from the families saying that their child is doing better, their child went into school more prepared, their child is succeeding, their child is making friends, their child is able to talk to a teacher,” she said.
Another aspect of the Corners Early Learning program is their summer camp. This is a program that children three to five years old can come to independently of their parents and spend the day learning the skills they need to be kindergarten-ready, helping bridge another common gap.
“A lot of our community doesn’t know that pre-K can be free if you apply and fit certain requirements, so a lot of our families don’t send their children to pre-K,” she said, “With that, you have a lot of kids who enter kindergarten not being able to spell their name or count to 20. These are things that you have to know how to do by the time you enter kindergarten. The teacher can’t fully move forward if everybody’s not on the same page. That’s when you have students that unfortunately get left behind or struggle more because a teacher does eventually have to move on.”
For Pilar, the most rewarding part is watching the program grow in the community she has lived in and been invested in most of her life. The Early Learning program started with just a few families and has quickly grown. This school year, it serves more than 240 families.
And it’s the community that’s helped it get to that point — from word of mouth, to parent ambassadors attending community events to spread the word, to Corners staff and teachers.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve done,” Pilar said. “Corners is really making a difference in people’s lives.”
To learn more about Corners Academy’s Early Learning program, visit cornersoutreach.org.