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Foster grandparent Mary Corbitt of Snow Hill works with a child in the Greene Lamp Head Start program. Priscilla Wiggins, who serves as director of senior volunteer services with Greene Lamp, said the foster grandparents program is beneficial for seniors, children and educators.
Mary Corbitt has served as a foster grandparent in Greene County for 14 years. “The most important thing is showing love,” she said. “If you show love, everything will be all right.”
Foster grandparent Mary Corbitt of Snow Hill works with a child in the Greene Lamp Head Start program. Priscilla Wiggins, who serves as director of senior volunteer services with Greene Lamp, said the foster grandparents program is beneficial for seniors, children and educators.
Mary Corbitt has served as a foster grandparent in Greene County for 14 years. “The most important thing is showing love,” she said. “If you show love, everything will be all right.”
SNOW HILL — Mary Corbitt is a mother of six and grandmother of 17, but hundreds more children in Greene County call her “Grandma Mary.”
The 75-year-old Corbitt and the vast majority of those children have no family ties. The reason they refer to her the way they do is because for more than a decade, she has found time to be part of their daily lives.
She greets 3- and 4-year-olds as they enter their Head Start classroom each morning, helping them take off their coats and wash their hands before breakfast. She spends the next few hours the way the children do, singing songs, playing games and reading stories. After lunch, she helps them settle down for a nap, and then she heads home to take one herself. Such is the life of a foster grandparent.
“When people ask what you do they don’t understand,” said Corbitt, explaining that the AmeriCorps Seniors volunteer program is sometimes confused with foster parenting. “You don’t live with the children. You just go see them every day at school. You help them out, teach them different things.”
A retired nursing assistant, Corbitt has been helping teachers in Greene Lamp Community Action’s Head Start program for nearly 15 years. She is among 62 volunteers ages 55 to 88 serving as foster grandparents in Greene and Lenoir counties.
This fall, Greene Lamp is planning to extend the 57-year-old community service program into Pitt County. Funded was granted by the American Rescue Plan Act to help children recover from learning loss due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“There’s learning loss and developmental loss,” said Pitt County Educational Foundation Director Beth Ulffers, who serves as director of outreach and public relations for Pitt County Schools. “I think it’s going to take our community, across the nation, to help catch our children up and provide them with the extended learning opportunities they need to continue to grow and thrive.”
More than 40 volunteers are being sought, mainly to serve as support staff in after-school programs offered through organizations including Pitt County Community, Schools and Recreation, Boys & Girls Clubs and Building Hope.
“The children can gain so much from the foster grandparents,” Ulffers said. “To have these grandparents in after-school programs or in the classroom to provide extended learning opportunities and to just give them unconditional love and support, it’s going to be tremendous for our children.”
Foster grandparents commit to spending 20 to 40 hours per week of service in exchange for a small, tax-free stipend ($3.15 per hour), plus mileage reimbursement.
Those are not exactly the benefits that drew Corbitt to want to participate. Following her retirement as a nursing assistant at Lenoir Memorial Hospital, she was simply looking for a way to occupy her time.
“I don’t like just sitting around the house,” she said. “It gives you something to do. If you like working with children, it’s a good thing.”
As an educator, Priscilla Wiggins has seen the positive effect that foster grandparents can have. Although senior volunteers are assigned to work on-on-one with children with emotional or developmental needs, their presence has been known to affect the climate of the entire classroom.
“A lot of children these days don’t have that grandma or grandpa in their life,” said Wiggins, who serves as director of senior volunteer services with Greene Lamp. “I think, unfortunately, we’ve kind of gotten away from those seasoned adults being able to pour into our children and youth.”
She also sees the benefit to senior-adult participants, including many who live alone. Being a foster grandparent can be a social outlet.
“Just because their professional career has ended, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have a purpose anymore,” Wiggins said. “They’re still able to be involved and to be able to give back to the community.”
Wiggins, who spent years working in a Greene Lamp Head Start classroom, recalls how important the support of a foster grandparent was to her and other teachers. The foster grandparent assigned to her classroom continues today as one of the program’s senior volunteers.
“The knowledge that they are able to share is so much more beneficial not only to the child but to the teachers in that classroom,” Wiggins said. “They’re so supportive of us with everything they have to give, the love and care and the attention and the kind words, things we miss out on sometimes these days because we’re so focused on meeting benchmarks.”
Greene Lamp leadership believed contributions of senior adults were so critical to the success of Head Start that when another regional agency made the decision to no longer administer the program, Greene Lamp decided it would take on that responsibility.
“Every single one of our (Head Start) classrooms had a foster grandparent,” Wiggins said. “So when the Caswell Center relinquished its grant, we were like, ‘We cannot lose our foster grandparents,’ so we decided to write for the grant.”
That was in 2017. Today foster grandparents participants in Greene and Lenoir counties volunteer thousands of hours each month.
From 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, Corbitt helps prepare the children for kindergarten, showing them how to form a line and helping them learn to share with others. When children begin to act out, Corbitt talks to them to help them calm down.
“I think they listen to the older (adults) better than they do the young ones,” she said. “You get more patient when you get older. You understand them better. They’ve all got different personalities.
“I try to give them confidence,” Corbitt said. “I want them to grow up to be good boys and girls, so I try to instill something good in them, talk to them. … I let them all know that I love them.”
The feeling appears to be mutual. The children cling to Corbitt in the classroom and are excited to talk to her when they see her in the community.
“They build strong relationships with their foster grandparents,” Wiggins said. “The relationship definitely goes beyond the classroom.”
She recalls a Head Start parent telling her that her child spied a foster grandparent in the grocery store and yelled, “There’s Grandma!”
Corbitt still occasionally hears this greeting from children who finished Head Start years ago.
“Some that I worked with 10 or 12 years ago, some of them have graduated from high school already, they still call me Grandma Mary,” she said. “They remember.”
Even her own grandchildren, who range in age from 28 to 4, have taken a liking to the nickname.
“My grandchildren hear the kids in school call me Grandma Mary and sometimes they call me Grandma Mary,” she said, laughing. “They hear it so much, they call me that sometimes.”
Foster grandparents volunteers do not need formal experience in tutoring or mentoring; training is provided. For more information, call 523-7770, Ext. 101 or Ext. 102. Greene Lamp’s website is greenelamp.org.
Contact Kim Grizzard at kgrizzard@reflector.com or call 329-9578.
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