Monday, July 26, 2010

“Tutoring center nearing 1st 5-week session finish” plus 3 more

“Tutoring center nearing 1st 5-week session finish” plus 3 more

Tutoring center nearing 1st 5-week session finish

Posted: 26 Jul 2010 04:44 AM PDT

BY JESSICA GOFF / THE DAILY IBERIAN
Published/Last Modified on Thursday, July 15, 2010 2:07 PM CDT

A fledgling tutoring center is gearing up to service Iberia Parish high school students during the coming school year.

The West End Tutoring and Skill Center, at 524 Hopkins St., will finish up its first five-week tutoring session with seven high school students and three students in a GED program.

Center executive director Will Berry said the center is preparing to take in "as many students as it can" when the facility reopens on Sept. 7.

"We will not turn away a single student," Berry said.

Berry began working on a blueprint for the tutoring program in January, which is housed in the Com-munity Outreach Center owned by the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Office.

The program works with local high schools to help improve reading, writing and math skills. Keyboarding skills and basics to a foreign language are also taught during sessions, Berry said. The center's schedule will run parallel with the Iberia Parish school district's calendar.

Iberia Parish Superin-tendent of Schools Dale Henderson encouraged students to take advantage of the program.

"This is a wonderful opportunity for our students who need a little extra help," Henderson said. "As a school system, we want to do everything we can to support the efforts of this program. They have a very noble cause."

Cornell Nezzet, a 17-year-old Westgate High School football player, has been studying in the program throughout the summer. He said language arts is his favorite subject, next to physical education, he added jokingly.

His day at the center begins at 4 p.m. with journal writing. Then he's on to Spanish class, which is followed by a math lesson taught by 25-year teaching veteran Michael Daye. The days ends at 7:30 p.m.

Berry said he was a teacher for 35 years and dubs himself the "biggest cheerleader for education."

He said the tutoring center is meant for high school students who are either behind in school or just want to enhance their learning skills. He calls it "catching up, getting even or getting ahead."

He said constant support is the key to inspiring teens to be open to education. He hopes the center will curb the parish's high school drop-out rate.

"I think students respond when they see that there is a genuine interest on part of the instructor and there is a perception that teachers really care," Berry said.

The center is funded through United Way and federal grants. The sessions are free to students, and Berry anticipates expanding the teaching staff for the fall tutoring session.

Part of the West End Tutoring and Skill Center's mission statement is not only to "provide each student with the skills to learn," but to "recognize value in self and others."

The center plans to provide mentors to advise students along with enhancing curriculum skills.

The center will hold a "Welcome Back to School" night, which will include a hot dog cookout on Sept. 7. All parish students and their families are invited to attend. For more information on the tutoring center, call 577-6275.

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KnowledgePoints gears up workshops, tutoring in Florham Park

Posted: 26 Jul 2010 04:28 AM PDT

FLORHAM PARK – The KnowledgePoints Learning Center, with locations in Regency Plaza, 186 Columbia Turnpike, next to Trader Joe's, and at Lifetime Fitness, 14 Fernwood Road, both in Florham Park, is now enrolling students for its summer tutoring programs and workshops.

In addition to its regular tutoring programs in math, reading, language arts, and "SAT/ACT Prep," KnowledgePoints is offering a series of noontime workshops that combine education, skills development, and fun.

July is featuring two separate writing workshops, for grades 3-5 and grades 6-8, that will help students develop writing competencies and styles.

In August, a study skills workshop and a "Getting Ready for Algebra Tune-Up" will prepare students for a smooth transition into the new school year.

The summer tutoring hours are 10 a.m. to noon and 4 to 6 p.m. weekdays, and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday. Noontime workshops run to 2 p.m.

For information about KnowledgePoints summer programs, call (973) 593-0050 or visit www.knowledgepointslearning.com.

 

The following are comments from the readers. In no way do they represent the view of recordernewspapers.com.

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I Teach store offers teaching aides, tutoring

Posted: 26 Jul 2010 08:57 AM PDT

No lesson seems too difficult for educators Shelley Dominguez and Cindy Krause to teach.

Dominguez and Krause opened I Teach at 123 State Hwy. 35 N. in June 2009. Not only has the duo tutored children in all subjects, but they have helped adults with their technology questions, and even helped one woman program her iPhone.

In addition to tutoring, I Teach is a gift shop and an educational supplies store. Customers enter the gift shop first, where Yankee and Skinny Dip candles, jewelry, purses, home décor and homemade fudge are sold. The second half of the store is where the school supplies are housed.

"It's like a secret society back here," Krause said of the transition between gift shop to school supply area.

Tutoring is done in the room in the very back.

"Both of us are educators who have worked for Calhoun County Independent School District. We both work outside of CCISD now, but we have a desire to see others achieve academically," Dominguez said.

Krause lives in Olivia and teaches fifth grade reading and language arts at East Side Intermediate School within Palacios ISD. Dominguez lives in Port Lavaca and is an elementary school principal for Industrial ISD.

The educational supplies are not only for teachers, either, Dominguez said.

"Parents want to see their children strive academically, so we wanted to provide a place for parents, students and teachers to come for supplies in Calhoun County and not have to go to Houston or Victoria," she said.

Krause said it is hard to plan out the whole school year in one shopping trip to Victoria or Houston and not be able to find those things that also refresh you as a teacher. If a teacher forgets something or runs out, it is too far to drive all that way to replace it.

"We want to make sure we have products available that aren't just gifts, but educational. Parents come in with questions or are looking for ideas and we share ideas with educators and parents," Krause said.

Once they opened I Teach, word spread quickly within the community, particularly among its teachers.

"Teachers begged us to stay open," Dominguez said.

"We have awesome conversations in here," Krause said. "People share their ideas with us, like during science fair time. We want to carry things that are new, but not cater just to the trends, either."

The women also provide tutoring services.

"We tutor all subjects. We don't require that parents sign a long contract. We schedule tutoring on an as-needed basis. We charge $20 an hour plus any extra materials the child may use," Krause said.

The majority of the children they tutor are elementary to junior high students. They do have some high school students and students seeking a GED. The women also tutor adults in technology.

"We have helped clients with Microsoft, Excel and Photoshop," Krause said. "No job is too small or too insignificant. It all applies to teaching."

"It's about giving back," she said. "Parents want to know how they can help their kid. They identify the problem and they want guidance."

Krause said help does not have to be expensive. A $3-supply from their shop can last a child the whole summer, but the women can also order specialized products and have it in the shop within a week.

With school starting up again soon, Dominguez said teachers want their classrooms to look great.

In the future, the educators hope their store will serve as a networking hub for other educators.

"We know of ideas from teachers to pass on to other teachers. We are still involved in the educational community without teaching within CCISD," Krause said.

People they like to help the most are new teachers, Dominguez said.

"We can say, 'You really don't need that yet, but you will need this.' They can get overwhelmed. We help them narrow it down and spend the least amount of money," she said.

I Teach summer hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday.

The following are comments from the readers. In no way do they represent the view of portlavacawave.com.

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Equity of Test Is Debated as Children Compete for Gifted Kindergarten

Posted: 25 Jul 2010 05:13 PM PDT

Yana Paskova for The New York Times

From left, Laisha Mendez, 5, Amaya Taylor, 4, and Kellie Pierre, 4, at the Bloomingdale Head Start program in Manhattan.

Teachers at the Bloomingdale Head Start program in Manhattan tell Alexis Stewart that her 4-year-old son, Chase, is bright.

"He knows about different fish, different birds, different species," Ms. Stewart said. "He's on it."

Chase took the city test for the public schools' gifted and talented kindergarten program, but missed the 90th-percentile cutoff, she said.

Ms. Stewart, a single mom working two jobs, didn't think the process was fair. She had heard widespread reports of wealthy families preparing their children for the kindergarten gifted test with $90 workbooks, $145-an-hour tutoring and weekend "boot camps."

The owner of one Manhattan tutoring company, Bright Kids NYC, says the parents of the 120 children her staff tutored spent an average of $1,000 on test prep for their 4-year-olds.

Ms. Stewart used a booklet the city provided and reviewed the 16 sample questions with Chase. "I was online trying to find sample tests," she said. "But everything was $50 or more. I couldn't afford that."

She understands why wealthier families pay for test prep. "They want to help their kids," she said. "If I could buy it, I would, too."

Another Bloomingdale Head Start parent, Lawanna Gillespie, a medical aide who said her son Zion also missed the 90th-percentile cutoff, was surprised to hear that prep materials existed for a kindergarten test.

"There are books you can buy with sample questions?" she said. "I never knew that."

Delores Mims, an education director at the Head Start, said, "Our parents are at a disadvantage."

Bloomingdale, with headquarters at West 109th Street, is a highly regarded Head Start, and Ms. Mims says she has several 4-year-olds who she feels would do well in a gifted kindergarten program.

Founded as a preschool in 1960 even before the federal Head Start program was established, Bloomingdale became a national prototype. To this day, it's considered a model, and educators worldwide visit it — recently from Iceland, Indonesia and the Netherlands.

An early 4-year-old graduate, Patrick Gaspard, who grew up to become a White House political adviser, thinks so highly of Bloomingdale that he took one of its founders, Susan Feingold, to meet President Obama.

This week, Bloomingdale marks its 50th year by graduating 100 4-year-olds, 98 percent of them black and Hispanic and all poor (to qualify, a family of three must earn less than $18,300).

Not one of the 100 will be attending one of the city's gifted kindergarten programs in the fall, according to Bloomingdale officials.

In contrast, in 2007, Ms. Mims says, when she was a teacher, she knew of a half-dozen who were accepted. Back then, under a decentralized selection process, teacher assessment, classroom observation and interviews all played a role.

That approach was criticized as vulnerable to political manipulation and racial favoritism, since districts could take into account increasing diversity in making selections.

"The process was fractured and inconsistent, and programs were too often gifted in name only," the city education chancellor, Joel I. Klein, said in an e-mail message.

In 2008, Mr. Klein made the score on a citywide standardized test the sole criteria for admission. Mr. Klein is a leading testing proponent for everything from grading schools to rating teachers, and he predicted that a citywide test would be a more equitable solution.

Since then, there have been two major developments, neither looking much more equitable than the old system. Blacks and Hispanics in gifted kindergarten programs dropped to 27 percent this year under the test-only system, from 46 percent under the old system (66 percent of city kindergartners are black or Hispanic).

And a test-prep industry for 4-year-olds has burgeoned. Bige Doruk opened Bright Kids NYC in 2009, and there is so much demand that she says she's opening a second site this month. She runs a two-month "boot camp" for the gifted test in the fall that includes eight one-on-one 45-minute sessions and two test-prep books for $1,075.

It's already half-booked, Ms. Doruk said, "and I haven't even publicly announced it."

Last year, of 120 children she prepared for the city test, she says 80 percent scored at least 90. "Prepping makes a difference," she said. "Prep brings anxiety down; children get used to an adult giving them the test and the format.

"A lot of middle- and upper-middle-class families rely on this," she added.

E-mail: oneducation@nytimes.
com

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