Participant Roles - School

We believe the school needs to take the initiative in establishing a program of this sort. The first task for the school is therefore to determine what kind of assistance they would like. The tutoring program described here is only one sort of business/school relationship. This and other types of business/education partnerships are described in depth in the The School-to-Work Resource Guide: An Experiential Learning Activity Handbook for Teachers, Employers, Students and Parents (see resources list).

To establish a tutoring program the school needs to:

• Designate a coordinator to:
  • Receive lists of volunteers from business(es) and link up students with tutors, or pass requests, or
  • Communicate requests to coordinators at participating businesses
  • Keep in contact with coordinators at participating businesses to keep volunteer lists up to date.
  • Iron out the problems which will inevitably occur.
  • Act as an advocate for the program within the school.

  One concern we have seen in our pilot program is that a few people get called repeatedly while others are never called. The school coordinator should try to spread the requests around, for example, by rotating through the entire volunteer list rather than always starting from the top.

  In some cases there have been problems with school coordinators passing out lists of volunteers, resulting in volunteers getting calls directly from parents demanding tutoring for their children. To prevent this, the school coordinator should never give out the tutor list. Some businesses have chosen to do the matching of volunteers to requests to avoid these problems.

• Decide on the types of assistance they would like to ask for. This can include remedial and/or enrichment tutoring. It may be in specific subject areas or may cover all classes in the school. And it may include in-class assistance and tutoring and/or tutoring outside of class time.

• Provide a place and time(s) where students and tutors can meet. For protection of both students and tutors, we feel that tutoring should occur at school. This can be before or after school, during study halls, etc.

• Communicate to students and teachers that volunteer tutors are available.

• Decide on an appropriate security policy. Depending on the level of supervision provided during tutoring sessions, the school may need to do some screening of potential tutors. One advantage of working with an area business is that this screening may piggyback on a security screening already performed by the tutor's employer.