Feature Family

Meet Letycia Lopez

Letycia can believe in herself and have confidence again!

Those that know Letycia Lopez will tell you that she is a confident, hard-working, loving, and helpful eight-year-old. She has a drive to learn and is passionately curious about the world around her. She loves math and natural science. That love of nature leads her to read animal books–especially ones about pandas–and paint nature scenes.

Letycia has had a love of learning and confidence in herself since she was a little girl. However, during the pandemic, Espi, Letycia’s mom, saw those qualities slowly slip away. Letycia’s reading level wasn’t anywhere near where it should have been, and she slowly started to lose her natural curiosity. Espi shared, “I saw a change in her, and I knew we needed to do something. All kids are different and learn differently.” She and Letycia decided to make a change and home educate.

“All kids are different and learn differently.”

After making the brave decision to home educate, Espi discovered Venture Upward through a friend. Immediately she knew Venture Upward would be a great program that would help her family attain their educational goals. With home education so new to them and feeling unfamiliar, Letycia’s family did not reach out for support as much as needed. However, with guidance from their Venture Mentor, Letycia started her journey with the Student Success Team. This is a Venture Upward program that gives additional support to students by a highly qualified support team that creates a plan tailored to the individual student’s needs and goals.

This extra support has made all the difference for Letycia. To avoid learning loss, she was even allowed access to the SST team throughout summer. Her SST team was also able to connect her with an amazing interventionist through Venture’s partnership with Sequoia, and she currently meets with her interventionist three times a week. Espi said that her daughter just takes in everything like a sponge and has an insatiable desire to learn. Espi explained further, “I knew I could get her progress going, I just didn’t know how to go about it.”

“They have just given me all the right tools that are working for her.” 

Letycia shared she can believe in herself and have confidence in herself again because, as she stated, “I have help now! My teachers are so nice. I know I can ask them anything.” Espi also added that, “Bringing her home was the best thing I could have ever done. I won’t ever regret it.”

“We are excited to work with you and your students and to inspire everyone’s love of learning. We’ve spent thousands of hours sending surveys and doing focus groups to receive feedback from our families in an effort to continually better our program. We have also trained our teachers to connect weekly with our families and support their needs. We have received hundreds of wonderful stories from our teachers about the amazing successes of our families and their students. I’ll share one of those success stories that delighted me to hear.”

~Jon Funes, CEO and Founder of Venture Upward