LUMIN EDUCATION
Lumin Bachman Lake Community School (BLCS) offers an approach to parent outreach and education incorporating Montessori principles and serves over 200 recently arrived immigrant families. Programmes include weekly or biweekly home visits from bilingual parent educators, developmental screening, leadership training for community parent educators, field trips for families, as well as mental health, dental, and medical services for families.
Lumin Bachman Lake Community School (BLCS) is a parent education programme funded by grants from the United Way of Dallas, federal and state programmes including MIECHV, and Early Head Start and multiple private foundations.
Located in the heart of a high need neighbourhood, the programme originally operated out of apartments in two large apartment complexes where many recent immigrant families live. Since May 2016, Lumin BLCS, through an in-kind donation of facilities from the Zero to 5 Funders Collaborative, partnered with other agencies serving families in the same area and has relocated to a common family centre housed in portable, temporary buildings. Through private donations, Lumin Education purchased and owns the land upon which the centre operates, but the centre and program is now its own charitable organization, operating under the name, Bachman Lake Together. Individual partner agencies, such as Lumin, must raise their own support for their individual programmes. Lumin BLCS offers an approach to parent outreach and education that incorporates Montessori principles and concepts.
The programme includes:
- Weekly or biweekly home visits from bilingual parent educators to provide information about the child’s development and help with parenting skills
- Two toddler Montessori classes serving children 18 months old to age 3
- Periodic developmental screenings
- Group meetings, information sessions, and leadership training for parents
- Field trips and family activities
- Health, dental, and mental health services
Television news broadcast of Bachman Lake Community School and the 2011 Educateurs sans Frontieres Assembly in Dallas, Texas.
Currently, students who leave the Lumin Bachman Lake Community School programme at age three, or for a limited number, age five, can compete for an enrolment slot at one of Lumin’s two other campuses far across town where school programs include primary and elementary Montessori classes through age nine; 370 students were served in these classrooms in 2018-2019. Future plans call for Lumin Education to build a school on the current Bachman Lake Together site that will serve this neighbourhood more fully continuing an over 41 year record of addressing the education needs of a diverse population.
“In the Bachman Lake neighbourhood, less than half the entering freshman graduate as seniors in high school. Our experience in East Dallas documents that children who attend our Montessori programme through the third grade have increased high school graduation rates of 96 % with 89% of those graduates attending college.”