Interview: Beyond Walls Urban Squash Twin Cities

In March 2021, I connected with Sammy Loeks-Davis, the Executive Director of Beyond Walls Urban Squash Twin Cities, to discuss how the program has adjusted to supporting students virtually.

-Rose Maney, Youth Virtual Tutoring Initiative Literacy Leader

Would you like to tell me a little bit about Beyond Walls and what it was like before and during the pandemic?

Beyond Walls is an education-adjacent after school program, started in 2012 and housed here at the University of Minnesota. We serve and support youth in grades six through 12.

We also support our alumni of the program for the first four years post-secondary. We combine academic support and enrichment, leadership and civic engagement opportunities and health and wellness, with a focus on coaching in the sport of squash.

Our program is a multi-year approach. We recruit students in their early middle school years, with the ideal that they continue in the program all the way to graduation. And then like I mentioned before, we help them the first four years post-secondary and that could mean college, it could mean trade school, it could mean jobs or apprenticeships. We just want our students and alumni to feel successful and content in the lives that they're leading after they leave high school and our program.

I’d love to hear more about squash!

It's kind of like racquetball or handball; it’s a really fun, racquet sport. We're part of a national organization to call the Squash Education Alliance. There are programs like ours all across the country and all across the world, so it's really great to have this network of people who are setting out to do the same things that we're doing in the same manner. We have a lot of resources and connections that way.

Do you partner with any other educational organizations?

We work with three different schools in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. We work with Washington Tech out in Saint Paul, as well as two local charter schools called Venture Academy and Northeast College Prep, which is a K-8 school.

We serve underserved or underrepresented students in our communities. All of our students come from school schools where 80% of students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch.

Beyond Walls Urban Squash has a strong mission to serve students of color and students of lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Right now in our program we serve about 60 youth with high populations who will identify as Latino, Korean, African or African-American.

Are you doing virtual learning, and how has that impacted your engagement with students?

Yes, we are! We track attendance and other forms of measurement so that we are able to understand if we are engaging students the way we need to be. We track student grades and talk with teachers, so we have intentionality behind working with very specific schools. We're able to communicate with administrative staff and teachers at the school so that all stakeholders in a student's learning process are built into our program. It involves students, school staff and families, and it has a multi-year, holistic approach.

How is your program structured?

Students are required to come to our program two days a week. Every other Friday, we provide transportation for students to and from our programs. We do not want transportation to be a barrier. Students spend about two hours in our program, and one hour of that is academic support and enrichment. We have original curriculum being taught to students as well that focuses on literacy, and also on social, political and justice engagement work. So we focus on things that students are interested in in our classroom.

The other half of our program is focused on coaching and health and wellness in the sport of squash. But we also look at nutrition, and we look at health and wellness in general, both of our physical bodies and our mental-emotional bodies. Our program sort of has this holistic approach, hopefully, with what our students are learning and growing.

How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted your organization?

We've had some transitions in our organization, because we were not immune, obviously, to the economic climate that happened because of COVID. Major fundraising events had to be postponed. Just different things happening impacted how we were able to support our students, staff-wise. Currently, I am the sole staff in our organization, executive director, and otherwise we are running virtual programming right now, as we have since last late spring, early summer 2020.

How does your programming vary seasonally, given that some of it is potentially outdoors?

In our summer program, we were meeting with our middle schoolers and our high schoolers one day a week. Middle school was Wednesday and high school was Tuesday for virtual meetups. Those were, for the most part, pretty casual. It was more to check in with students, their mental-emotional states, we did some in-home workouts together, we played games via Jackbox, things like that. It was really just a time to connect with students over the summer.

Once every other week, we were meeting in person outdoors for an activity of some kind, with masks and social distancing. We really wanted the students to be able to get outside, and that was a huge part of what our families were asking for as well. Summer was about making sure that we were engaging with families on a very regular basis, because we wanted to make sure that their needs were being met, anything that we could do to support them during some really difficult times.

That continued into the fall, where our programming became a little bit more academic-focused. Right now [March 2021] we have three days of virtual programming. Similar to where high school students meet on Tuesdays, middle school students meet on Wednesdays, and then we have a whole group in Richmond on Thursdays, when we've organized guest speakers.

What kind of enrichment and social-emotional support have you used in your program?

We've done some group games, we've done some outdoor activities together where everyone logs into the Zoom meeting. We've done scavenger hunts, played Jackbox online, and done video cooking lessons with kits I drop off. We sometimes have guest speakers. Thursdays are those enrichment days for us. We've also utilized our national network for those as well, so for example they just hosted a call on the COVID vaccine, and we have students and families join us for that vaccine call on Thursdays.

How does your program support upper-level high schoolers who are starting to plan and move towards their futures?

We're partnered with University of Minnesota tutors and mentors, who have been working with our students on homework help. And with our high school students, they've also been focusing on college readiness. A lot of our high school students are applying to four-year colleges right now. They've been helping with balancing schedules, because a lot of our high school students are working as well as attending school full-time.

It's been for the most part, obviously, challenging, but we've gotten some good engagement from students and our requirements on attendance and things like that have been a little bit more lax because we understand the many barriers that students face engaging in online learning at this time.

How many students total would you say you had working with you before the pandemic versus during COVID?

Before the pandemic, we had 60 students in our program, and then 11 alumni, so we were serving about 70 students. Now after the pandemic, we're sitting closer to 40 students.

I know you said you take students from three specific schools. Are they referred by teachers? Do you go to the schools and advertise? How do they find you?

A little bit of both. We do recruitment every September. Students come and they do what's called a “try it out.” It's not a tryout because we aren't looking for the most stellar athletes and we aren't looking for, you know, the A-plus students of the class; we’re looking for kids who want to try something new and who are willing to work hard and to work with lots of different people to accomplish something new.

Then, because we work with just three different schools, and the idea is to have touch points with teachers and administrators, we do rely heavily on their recommendations. In particular in the middle of the year, because sometimes at the beginning of the year, it's hard for teachers to give a recommendation because they don't know their students as well.

Did or do you rely on volunteers at all, pre- or during the pandemic?

We have a handful of those wonderful mentors. We also recruit more mentor volunteers from University of Minnesota classes. If there's any kind of community-engaged learning classes to reach out to, we have probably 10 to 12 volunteer mentors in that space at a time. We also rely on our squash community to help us coach the students.

We do have a paid part-time squash coach, and we usually have between two and five other squash community members, adults in the community who love squash and want to coach the kids.

What would you say your volunteer retention has been like before and after the pandemic? Would you say it's been about the same because you're using virtual tutors now?

With our literacy tutors, they obviously signed on for a year of service with us, and we're able to retain them for that full year. We have a reasonable retention rate of 50% of them that will reach out again to continue the following year.

Since those folks are predominantly working members of the community, our program hours after school can be challenging for people who are working.

I would say that student retention is hard to report on this year, because we haven't been able to meet in person with squash anyway. But I would say with our literacy mentors, we're probably at 50% retention.

Do you use a specific platform for virtual tutoring? Do the Minnesota mentors use one and then other volunteers use another?

We use Zoom for all of our meetings; that seems to be the most secure.

Do you have supervision?

For students doing virtual tutoring, their parents sign a waiver.

What does your security look like?

Since we were doing all of this virtually, we have documented verbal confirmation.

I'm always present during these meetings; I host them. We keep things secure, so no one's able to share their screen, there are no private chats, you can't change your name when you get in there, all those kinds of things. We follow the same protocol as if students were in person, which is we never have a mentor and a student in a breakout room by themselves. We always hold to that rule of three. We adhere to the rule that there's always two volunteers present during a meeting with the students. If we're doing any kind of breakout rooms, there's always going to be two mentors present. And then I'm hopping back and forth between each breakout room.

How long did it take you to pivot when schools started shutting down and things started going online?

We had some extenuating circumstances with our organization, just internally. I would say that our program closed middle of March, and then we opened for virtual programming probably at the end of May or beginning of June 2020. That was really in response initially to the George Floyd murder and the riots happening in Minneapolis in particular. We really wanted to support families through all of that and make sure that they were finding resources that they needed, housing, food, internet, all those kinds of things. So it was probably about two months to pivot. That was very common across our network with the Squash Education Alliance as we were working with other programs' leadership staff to discuss and think through the best ways to begin virtual programming with students. We definitely pivoted from less of an academic focus and more towards the basic needs.

What do your academic sessions look like?

I think I mentioned they're two parts. One part is our own independent curriculum work that we want to do with students, and it does predominantly focus in a literacy area, because a lot of our students are coming in either as English as a second language or they are a few grade levels below their reading and writing requirements. So although the material focuses on social-emotional development, or civic and real world engagement, it's literacy-based. There's readings, there's writings, things like that. That's the first part of the academic session. The second half is focused on homework help, which ranges, obviously, in topics and things like that. It's also a range of students who need that time for homework help. The original curriculum content comes into play for students who are maybe seeking to go above and beyond certain things, or they're seeking a challenge that we're able to help them at whatever academic needs that they are at at that time.

Do you have any information on the averages of how much students' grades have improved?

We see at least 80% of our students, by the end of the year, are up about 10% in their grade. So if it's a 70%, it's up to an 80%, and so on.

Do you use any other metrics to track student success?

We're looking at different reading and writing assessments that go into words read per minute, and that you are able to answer content questions after your reading. We do three of those types of assessments during the course of the year and compare those results with students. We also do our writing assessment, where we give writing prompts, especially for our high school students, to engage their understanding of language, punctuation, syntax, structure and things like that. These assessments happen three times during the course of the year, just to gauge students and student growth. We also, as I said before, track student grades. We really do pay attention to where students' reading-writing literacy grades are at and are in close communication with teachers with that as well.

Looping back to that resource question: for reading, do they use physical books or virtual resources? I've talked to people who use ebooks from the school or library subscription, and some people will find YouTube videos of people reading books.

We do use a lot of physical books. Right before COVID, we were looking into other resources, because, as you know, physical books can age a little bit. So we're looking to get more current reading material for our students. We were actually part of a program for a while that donated quite a few books that were advanced reader copies—in the final stages of editing and whatnot but weren't on bookshelves yet. We were able to receive probably about 100 of those books, so we have quite an extensive library here at our site. That was cool for students because they were reading books that weren't published yet to the larger public.

That is really cool. I've never heard of that program before. So how do you get them the physical books during the pandemic?

A lot of driving around and dropping books off. We did some learning kits as well. I hosted a cooking class and I dropped off the pasta and ingredients for the sauce and things like that to interested students. For some students, support meant helping them download a library app on their phone or whatever device they want to use. But yeah, lots of driving around!

Do you think that you're going to continue with any of the changes you've made to your program after the pandemic?

I think we will continue to really build on how we utilize technology, and how we are able to utilize some of the support systems that we have there. Like I said, maybe not driving around to individual homes, but the idea of kit learning or the ideas of how we use Zoom, or conference calling or other things to engage with other people in our community. But because of the squash component of our program, we really would like to get students back in a physical sense to our program.

Are you still doing in-person athletics with students?

Because squash is a close-contact sport, here at the University Recreation and Wellness Center
 they are only allowing one person on the court at a time. They're being pretty strict, which is understandable with youth coming into this.