The Neighborhood Tutoring Program

The purpose of this book is to provide a guide for establishing a volunteer-based tutoring center in your neighborhood...Each program a customer establishes should be tailored to meet the specific objectives and needs of the community being served and the desires of those establishing the program. There are, however, many topics that will likely come up while planning any tutoring center. This guide will reduce your learning curve in these relatively common areas…
1. Philosophy Behind the Neighborhood Tutoring Program (NTP) Concept
A. Take the Assistance to the Student
There may be several free or for-pay tutoring programs available in a community. In many cases, however, students living in lower-income neighborhoods may not have access to these resources due to limited funds, lack of transportation, and other factors. The NTP is based on the premise that tutoring support needs to be taken to the students in economically depressed neighborhoods rather than to expect students to come to the source of tutoring.
B. Academic Goal
The academic goal for the NTP is twofold: 1. Assist students with homework and review, and reinforce skills currently being addressed in the regular classroom. 2. Once the first goal is met during a tutoring session, shift to review and reinforcement of skills addressed earlier in the academic year or to skills for which the student requires reinforcement.
C. Volunteer Staffing
Another premise is that the NTP will be staffed by volunteers. Therefore, the program must be structured in a manner that meets volunteer needs for flexibility while still supporting program goals and meeting student needs.
D. NTP Supplements and Reinforces Other Schools
It must be understood that a tutoring center is not a school. The neighborhood tutoring center will support a much larger educational effort within a student’s life. It is very important to keep this relationship in mind as you plan and build your NTP. If you structure your tutoring center to be an island unto itself, it will likely become just that, and probably to the detriment of your students!
E. Funding
Funding for the NTP is not dictated or even discussed in depth in this guide. In some cases, the tutoring center might be funded by grant monies. In other cases, the sponsoring organization or donations will fund the center. Regardless of how your center is funded, it is important you include funding in your planning process.
2. Sponsorship and Purpose of Your Program
It is important to identify the purpose of your tutoring program and who will sponsor the program. This might seem like a simple matter; after all, we just want to tutor students! However, I suggest you slow down and think it through.
A. Sponsorship
As I discuss development of tutoring centers, I will use the term sponsorship to identify the organization that develops and operates the tutoring center. In other words, it is the organization that causes tutoring to occur in an organized manner by pulling together all the needed resources, identifying and training volunteers, attracting students to partake in the services offered, and finally, guiding and directing operations of the tutoring center. Many different organizations can fulfill the roles just outlined. The type of organization that steps forward will, to some degree, impact center operations. I make this statement with the knowledge that tutoring centers sponsored by the NTP have three basic parts: a character-building opening session, homework assistance, and some form of remedial and reinforcement assistance. The first of these will be most affected by the organization that sponsors the center. For example, if your sponsor is a church, emphasis during your character-building sessions might be on various issues encountered in the Christian faith. If a parent-teacher association (PTA) sponsors a tutoring center, the focus of the character-building session might be oriented toward good citizenship, proper behavior and attitudes in school, and so forth. If the sponsor is a community service organization, such as a Lion’s Club or Rotary Club, the character-building session might emphasize values of their respective programs they believe worthy of being passed on to the students.
B. Purpose
So what is the purpose of your program? This may seem like a very simple question. But I suggest you give this question careful consideration. Carefully consider what services to focus your efforts on and realize that this decision will affect all your planning and organizational efforts. Without adequate focus, resources for the tutoring center program might quickly be dissipated on useful activities that, unfortunately, do not help to accomplish the primary purpose of the program. For example, without focus, a new tutoring program might emphasize mentoring, which is admirable but also clearly different than tutoring. As another example, you might be asked to provide English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction within your center, which would be admirable, but will you have the necessary resources to support both a tutoring and an ESL program? I believe it is far wiser to focus your resources on the primary purpose established for the center than to provide several services, none of which are adequately resourced or delivered. If you start out with a clear and limited focus, you always have the option of expanding your services to other areas in the future. It’s better to be good at your main thing than to be mediocre at several services, impressing no one in the process!