Getting Ready for Some Zoom Coaching
It’s just a matter of days now before the Washoe County District starts its most chaotic school year on record and Wooster high school senior Hannah Branch, 17, is getting ready to zoom coach some pro bono teenage tutors. She describes the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as a health, educational, and economic crisis and felt a calling to step up.
A few weeks ago, Branch set up an ingenious program called R.A.F.T, an acronym for Reno Alliance for Free Tutoring. The fully remote service has enlisted 50 plus local high school students who will help elementary and middle school students with 45-minute sessions in math, history, English, biology, chemistry, physics and social studies.
“I call it an Alliance because I think it's genuinely a mutually beneficial relationship for high school students to be helping elementary and middle school students. It's really caught on as an opportunity for my peers to lend their time at a really critical moment for education,” she told us in a phone interview.
The program is reaching out specifically to low income students, who, she fears “won’t be given the resources they need.” She says pre-pandemic there were problems in Washoe County schools such as a lack of sanitary products, which does not instill confidence for the current reopening.
“I've had frequent experiences of not having soap and not having toilet paper in school bathrooms,” she said. “The fact that we don't even have the funding or the infrastructure to have those materials in place for students before a health crisis makes me very concerned about the ability of schools to reopen safely.”
But she says she understands the reasoning behind the hybrid reopening model taking place, “given the fact that so many families in our community do use school as childcare. I recognize the fact that as dangerous and as morbid as it is, some families do need to send their students back in order to maintain their livelihood in order to go to work every day. So from a broader perspective, of course, I'd prefer a world in which that kind of inequality and that kind of forcing the students to go back before it's safe was not at all necessary, but I recognize the reasoning behind having a hybrid model as well.”
Branch has already set up a slick Squarespace website with an About page: “We aim to make distance learning navigable for all learners in Reno”, Core Values : “Education. Equity. Service”, as well as volunteer resources.
No Shortcuts while Reaching Out
Branch is putting extensive research into organizing the tutoring, looking closely at best practice models from publicly available tutoring resources such as universities and expert blogs.
“The training itself is going to be twofold,” she said. “The first objective of the training is to establish essentially common sense policies and guiding values just to make sure everyone's on the same page about the goals of our organization, specifically our core values of education, equity, and service. The second goal of the training is to give our tutors essentially tools in their toolbox to be effective at what we do. So we're really just providing them a crash course in how to be an effective tutor with the limited experience we do have as teens,” Branch said of organizing coaching sessions for her team of volunteers.
The tutoring will be available via Zoom, but also phone lines, FaceTime or any technology a student can access. It will be flexible in terms of hours as well, from mornings to evenings, to increase flexibility.
“The pros of doing this online in this specific historical moment are obviously safety. We're providing our students with the opportunity to get education and educational resources without risking their health, which an in person model would not. We do recognize that it's going to be a lot different than an in person tutoring session, just in terms of the dynamic that's created by an online relationship, at least initially,” she said.
She has also started fundraising efforts and reaching out to families who could use this tutoring help. “We've heard a lot of people saying this is something that they haven't seen before and that they'd really enjoy having present in their families and their learning and their community,” she said.
She also reached out to the Food Bank of Northern Nevada to increase awareness. “We are discussing reaching the same populations they serve to the extent possible, whether that's through handing out flyers or doing outreach efforts at their various locations that serve Nevada's youth. We hope to expand those outreach efforts in the coming weeks, because it really is our goal to be reaching students who actually need this program.”
“We're aware that education gaps only get wider because students who can pay for additional economic resources, specifically paid tutoring or other similar models, can more easily stay afloat and even get ahead, while other students are often left behind. So, we modeled our organization off of the idea of service, because we feel that it's important to mitigate the effects of the crisis on traditionally disadvantaged communities. A lot of my peers saw that need as well and wanted to be a resource to younger students because we truly believe that there's absolutely no reason that certain students should have access to educational health and mentorship while others shouldn't.”
Adjusting to School at Home
Branch who calls herself an English nerd will be staying at home herself as school resumes, as the IB program she’s in at Wooster High is allowing students to “work fully remotely.” Her younger teenage sister will also start the school year at home.
“It's certainly been an adjustment,” Branch said of homes now also becoming makeshift pandemic era schools and offices. “I know my parents were concerned at least last semester about making sure that my sister and I were receiving quality education when we were planning our own time. I know that that was a pretty big concern within our family that even if we wanted to learn and we're capable of learning that just the time management aspect is self-paced. What students need, especially younger students is to just have someone sit down and help them structure their time effectively so they can complete the material they've been given.”
She also has tips on setting up an ideal learning space. “You need a cozy space for learning because now your house is also your school. My advice would be to set up somewhere you're comfortable and somewhere you can be for awhile.”
“I think I want to give back to my community because I'm so fortunate to be in a place of having the energy, and the ability to do so,” Branch said. She has also used her own Instagram feed for promotion and posting videos and photos. “It's also not lost on me that I've been very fortunate to have the resources that I've had throughout my education. When I needed tutoring, I was able to get tutoring in middle school. And, I've had access to consistently really strong educational programs throughout my academic career.”
Staying on Message as a Budding Organizer
Branch, who lives in the Caughlin Ranch area but grew up “way up north as a wilderness baby,” says she’s thinking of her own future, including going to university for a political science degree and then moving on to law school. “I hope to be either a politician or a campaign manager or something along those lines. I'm really passionate about organizing,” she said.
While times are dire, she believes the opportunity is also here for positive change, both individually and collectively.
“COVID has really illuminated inequalities and areas of concern in our education system and in our community that have been present for a long time that had never been this extreme. So the need for free tutoring isn't new, but the sort of space to launch such an idea is. The ground is ripe for new ideas like this because we're in a time of such dire need. And I think that when viewed through that lens, we can really see this moment as a moment for progress.”
Always on message, and not wanting to talk about herself too much, when asked if she had anything to add, Branch gave us her new organization’s elevator pitch. “The Reno Alliance for Free tutoring or R.A.F.T is a fully remote student led volunteer tutoring organization. We aim to connect local elementary and middle school students with high school age mentors in their community for regular 45 minute lessons in core subjects. So they can stay afloat and stay home. “