College students, retirees, business people, even Mormon missionaries are taking advantage of an opportunity to volunteer and help children learn at a junior high school here.
The Learning and Enrichment Center at Lakeridge Junior High School is turning out to be a positive effort. "It's wonderful. It's great for the student and the tutor," said Kelleen Donovan, 15, a ninth-grade student at Lakeridge and a peer tutor for special education students.The program started in January after David Gullino, a business student from neighboring Utah Valley State College, volunteered to come to the school and tutor struggling students of a teacher who was his friend. George Rosenthal, a special education teacher at the school, caught on to the concept and approached UVSC volunteer services last fall with the idea for a full-fledged volunteer program using the resources of both schools.
Lakeridge school officials then went to Alpine School District for financial help and won a grant to hire two part-time supervisors for the program until the end of May. However, Principal Randy Honaker has committed some of the Centennial grant fund to the project for two years.
Gullino was one of those hired. So was Nadine Corral, who also prepared the grant for district funds.
Getting students into the tutoring program is easy. Supervisors simply track students' grades and pull them in. Teachers also may suggest that students take advantage of the help, said Gullino. Students show up during school hours and at lunch time to get help.
Although not designed to replace teachers, the Learning and Enrichment Center is a resource teachers may use for children who may need individual coaching.
"The lab is an extension of the teacher," said Rosenthal. "It extends the teachers' ability to help students."
Rosenthal said a seventh-grade teacher referred 37 students to the learning center who were getting C-minuses, D's and F's. Now 20 of those students have brought those grades to A's, B's and C's, he said.
For students Tyler Olson, Lindsay Bullock and Jon Larson, getting help with their lessons has brought their grades up.
"It's helped me a lot," said Olson. "I'm getting my grades up and catching up. I don't come here a lot, only when I need to."
Bullock was having trouble with her science class but now is learning how to find the answers, she said. "The tutor works with you one on one," she said. "It helps a lot because they give you clues where you can find the answers." Teachers, she said, aren't able to spend enough individual time with students.
Larson found a willing tutor who helped him bring his English grades up. He's now getting B's and C's, where before he was near failing, he said.
Volunteer tutor Bonnie Carlson just graduated from UVSC and will be attending Brigham Young University this summer. She started tutoring at Lakeridge to fill a requirement for her biology class, she said. The class assignment was to give two hours of volunteer service a week.
"Once the assignment was through I kept coming," she said. "I just love helping the kids and letting them know that someone does care about their education." She's now looking into a special education major at BYU.
Elders Jared Babcock and David Steed, full-time missionaries for the LDS Church, find that tutoring helps them fill their service requirement of four hours a week. "It helps the kids out quite a bit, from what I gather," said Babcock. "It's more individualized."
"I love it. It's fun," added Steed.
As many as 60 children a day, on average, are tutored by volunteers. At its peak, before UVSC ended its last semester in April, about 75 tutors were helping out, most of them UVSC students. Mike Jensen, UVSC Volunteer Services director, worked with Lora Smith with Volunteers in Service to America to recruit the UVSC students.