As early as the 1960s, the Brockton Public Schools offered evening classes for adults needing citizenship preparation and for immigrants wishing to learn and improve their English.
In July of 1972, Brockton received a federal grant to develop an adult learning center for English-speaking adults who needed literacy instruction and assistance preparing for the GED High School Equivalency Exam.
In January of 1973 the Adult Learning Center, then referred to as "Open House," was established to provide opportunities for adult learners to study at their convenience anytime between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.
The program's original service structure consisted of a combination of one-to-one tutoring and individualized instruction. The ALC was open year-round and included summer hours with reduced staffing. As the demand for English language instruction surpassed the service capacity of the public schools' evening program, the Adult Learning Center added classes for speakers of other languages in the late 1970s.
Brockton's Adult Learning Center has provided adult basic education and related services for more than forty years, and English language classes for more than thirty years. Our volunteer tutor program that began in 1977 is now more than thirty years old. Originally modeled after the Literacy Volunteers of America tutoring program, our volunteer training and support model was later modified to become a Commonwealth Literacy Corps Volunteer Program in the late 1980s.
Since its establishment in the early 1970s, Brockton's Adult Learning Center has provided services to thousands of adults from the Brockton area. Hundreds of adults have successfully completed the General Education Development Test (GED). From an initial enrollment of eighty-eight adult learners, the annual enrollment continued to grow. When the Massachusetts Department of Education required program reorganization to increase and intensify services in the late 1980s the annual ALC enrollment stabilized at approximately 450 to 550 adult learners. The program was then structured around a series of classes that would allow adults to progress from beginning to advanced levels of both English language and literacy instruction.
From 1985 until 1994, the Adult Learning Center provided workplace education classes to employees from seven companies and one college. A different contextualized workplace curriculum was developed for each worksite. Some of these organizations privately funded their classes, while others provided classes with support from grants. Three companies continued to offer their classes even after grant funding had expired.
The Brockton Adult Learning Center established one of Massachusetts' first family literacy programs in February of 1988. Fifteen families attend adult classes while their children attend early childhood classes.
In FY 2006 the Adult Learning Center enrolled more than 650 adult learners in its daytime and evening classes. The ALC presently offers more than forty classes in which students develop literacy and ESOL skills. In addition to our main facility at the Paine School, the Adult Learning Center has offered satellite classes at various locations which have included Brockton High School and numerous Brockton elementary schools (Arnone, Huntington, Goddard, Angelo, Plouffe, and Raymond), the local Head Start program, St. Patrick's Church, as well as MainSpring House, Brockton's shelter for the homeless.
With over 650 adults actively enrolled on an annual basis, the Adult Learning Center addresses the educational needs of many adult learners, and yet more than 1,000 Brockton area adults remain on a waiting list for adult basic education classes and services.
