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Challenge Learning Services is an adult basic education program supported and run by the Tacoma Rescue Mission. The program operates from New Life Square.
Adult basic education and computer training are available to everyone in the community. The Learning Center conducts a community orientation meeting every Tuesday at 1:00. Following placement testing, a person may begin working with instructors and tutors to design an individual learning program.
Students are taught reading, writing, math, effective life skills, GED prep, college prep, and employment preparation. Transportation is available for those in other Mission programs that need assistance.
There is never a charge for the services, and qualified teachers are always on duty.
Vicki escaped from bondage to get her GED
Vicki came to the Mission's Challenge Learning Center some years back. Her goal was to pass her GED. She was reading at a 3rd grade level, writing at approximately the 7th grade level, and her math skills were low. She couldn't remember what she read and refused to do math at all. "I hate it and nobody can make me do it." She was 28 at the time with an eight year-old daughter.
It wasn't long before Vicki began sharing her personal journals, as well as her poetry. She needed help with sentence structure and punctuation. Through her journals we learned that her two-year-old son had recently passed away after a lifetime of struggling to breathe.
Vicki dropped out of school at age 12, and lived with a man twice her age. He wouldn't allow her to leave the house and sometimes locked her in the bedroom for days without food or water. She was terrified by his threats that if she escaped, he would track her down and kill her and her family. She lived in fear every day until Although she was finally able to get away and move into her own place, the fear never left. Was he looking for her? Would he find her? Eventually, the nightmare faded, and she was no longer in jeopardy.
Years passed and Vicki realized she couldn't even help her daughter with her homework. She wanted to be a good role model, to show her daughter that even Mom could go to school and change her life. In the phone book she found Challenge Learning Services.
Working with Vicki was fruitless at first. Trying to find reading materials that "interested" her seemed impossible. Many of her comprehensive scores were low, no matter how easy or fun the material. Also, it simply didn't make sense that she could write so much better than she could read. A real breakthrough occurred when she was asked to do a report on a newspaper article that she liked. She came back with two pages of good questions proving she had the skill for comprehension.
In a staff meeting, it was suggested that if she was only "interested" in the GED, why not try that? If this didn't work, we were taking a big risk, with her self-esteem on the line. Her score was adequate for her to take her first GED test in literature. She passed with flying colors, and from then on, she began to study the GED books. She took work home every night, and quickly began taking more tests. There was still the matter of math, but by then we had built such a rapport, that she forced herself to be tutored, working with a determination seldom seen.
Vicki tells the rest of the story in her own words. "In June of 2000 a miracle happened- I completed my GED. Thanks to Challenge Learning Services, I'm off to college. I now have self-esteem, friends, and I can help my daughter with her homework. When everyone else had given up on me, the staff at the Learning Center welcomed me with loving arms, smiles, and a lot of patience. It's the greatest school out there. You're never too old to go back to school, anyone can do it. I did.