In April, rising 10th grader Amira Jackson was mulling over what to do after school ended when she overheard her dad, the director of co-curricular assessment at Georgia Gwinnett College, talking about a summer program that needed tutors.
Gwinnett County Public Schools’ Summer Enrichment and Acceleration classes give elementary and middle schoolers a jump start on the fall with 15 days of learning. Teachers are assisted by student tutors from GGC, but this year, with the enrollment close to 6,000, the college’s 300 tutors weren’t enough to fill the need.
“When I found that out, I wanted to get involved,” said Jackson. “I started talking with my friends at Brookwood High, emailed class directors, talked to my counselors and put the info on a shared student website to push the word out. Kids were able to sign up for the subjects they were comfortable tutoring.”
The Snellville resident’s efforts resulted in 21 students volunteering to tutor half or full days at six schools. Jackson herself, who had never tutored before, worked every day with a sixth grade math teacher, a theater instructor and individual students.
“The program worked well, and the tutors got high reviews,” she said. “It is definitely something we plan to work on to get more students next year. Our goal now is one tutor per classroom for next summer.”
Steven Li, a rising junior at Brookwood, heard about the need for tutors through his math club and signed on to work with students at Head Elementary, his former school.
“I didn’t have anything planned for the summer, and I thought I could help out with math,” he said. “The best part was going back to the school I went to and working with the same teacher who managed our robotics team. We ran a program with the same robots, and it was really cool to help the students with something I’d done as well. I hadn’t been back to that school since I left, so being where I spent hours working on robotics was really nice but a little surreal.”
Together, the high school tutors put in more than 700 hours of work, said Rudy Jackson, who along with his job at GGC, is the parents’ council president at Crews Middle School in the Brookwood cluster.
“I saw an opportunity for Brookwood High students to serve as tutors, support the teachers and get community service hours,” he said. “Amira took the initiative to do the groundwork of recruiting and signing up students. Now we have aspirations for next year: We’d like to do a tutoring boot camp and bring students to the GGC campus to do that.”
Having the GGC students as part of the program serves a dual purpose, he added.
“The district hopes that the experience will show these college students that Gwinnett County Public Schools is a great place to work,” he said. “And at the high school level, we hope to inspire more students to think about teaching as they go to college and prepare for their careers.”
Information about the Summer Enrichment and Acceleration program is online at gcpsk12.org/SEA.
SEND US YOUR STORIES. Each week we look at programs, projects and successful endeavors at area schools, from pre-K to grad school. To suggest a story, contact H.M. Cauley at hm_cauley@yahoo.com or 770-744-3042.
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