Ten More
From the desk of Alice…
Ten years ago, Hope and I were thinking about starting a business that would help educate parents so they could effectively be their child’s first teacher. At that time, Hope and I both had small children and many of our friends were wrestling with sending their kids to school. We found ourselves in many conversations about academic issues that come along with school aged children and we wanted to be a true resource so students (and families) could be successful. We decided to rent a space on Fourth Street in Winston-Salem and started with a few parent workshops in the evenings and on Saturdays and we started doing some contract work with schools related to literacy instruction.
In the beginning, ERG offered traditional stand alone workshops and we were very open to a variety of projects because ERG was so new. Within the first few years, it became apparent that job-embedded coaching not only got results by focusing on the application of information, but it also was our favorite kind of work. We could be in classrooms with real teachers and students who were in the act of learning. It was exciting and rewarding in many ways! We still did a few stand alone workshops, but we really started to get focused on making job-embedded coaching the heart of our services.
When the Great Recession hit around 2008, it helped eliminate the workshop model for ERG. Schools no longer had money to send people to events and principals did not want to pay for subs for people to be out of their classrooms. Once again, the job-embedded approach was a perfect service for the teachers and the students because it was on-site and in classrooms…NO substitutes needed!
As our job-embedded coaching work grew, so did our organization. ERG went from being just Hope & Alice to including 30 consultants who were located all over North Carolina. ERG changed from being the “guided reading” company, to a company that can work with PreK-12th grades in a variety of projects. In the past school year, ERG participated in over 4000 classrooms and lessons across North Carolina and beyond.
September 1st will mark the 10th anniversary of ERG. When I look at the time, it feels short and long, just like it does when raising children. I cannot believe it has been ten years and at the same time, I feel like those early workshops were a lifetime ago! Thank you to everyone who believed in the vision of ERG, the passion of increasing student achievement via teacher efficacy, and our ability to grow a company without a business degree of any kind. Here’s to ten more!
Hope & Alice in the first year of ERG!