By Jacqueline M. Domin
When Holly Montgomery read in a newsletter from the Albany City School District that senior volunteers were needed for an intergenerational tutoring program, she was intrigued.
`I’m interested in the city schools, and I know there’s a need,` she said.
Montgomery had tutored her own children and helped them read, but she didn’t have any professional teaching experience. That didn’t matter. The tutoring program is run through the Capital Region OASIS Program and the Capital Region RSVP Program and provides training to any seniors who want to take part.
Montgomery was part of the initial class of volunteers, who went through two days of training and started visiting schools in the fall. The program is looking to recruit more senior volunteers for the coming school year.
Montgomery encourages fellow seniors to look into it.
`It’s a marvelous use of your time,` she said. `The children need the extra assistance. Sometimes you can see the breakthrough. That is rewarding. It will just open you up to a whole new world.`
OASIS is a national program and implemented its intergenerational tutoring program elsewhere about 20 years ago. Seeing a need locally, the Capital Region OASIS Program decided to try out the program here. It paired with the Albany City School District and decided on three schools where tutors would work: Sheridan Prep, Schuyler Achievement and Arbor Hill School.
`We picked those three schools because we knew there was a need there, and we wanted to start small and solid,` said Kathy Schoolcraft, the program coordinator of the Capital Region RSVP Program.
The superintendent was on board, and just as importantly, so were the teachers, said Jane Poklemba, another volunteer. That makes a difference, because the volunteers are able to coordinate with the instructors to come up with meaningful lessons for the students.
Montgomery said making up the lessons each week was one of her favorite parts of the program. She found it fun, working flash cards and word games into her approach.
Tutors and students work one-on-one. So for the entire school year, Montgomery had one student she worked with at Sheridan Prep, while Poklemba had one she worked with at Arbor Hill. The same was true of the roughly 15 other volunteers, who each devoted one hour, one day a week to the program.
Poklemba said it was rewarding not only to see her student’s reading skills improve, but to bond with her.
`You do naturally as a human being get a little satisfaction out of building a relationship,` she said. `It’s really nice to become an important person in that child’s life.`
A retired school administrator, Poklemba early in her career was a third-grade teacher in New York City. She thought her days in the classroom were over, but when she heard about the tutoring program through OASIS, she reconsidered.
`I thought that was a really good thing,` she said.
Her weekly lesson included a writing component, which could be drawn from something she and her student read together or from something that the student knows about or is excited about. All of the writing is put in a journal that the student gets to take home. There’s space for drawings to accompany the writing, but Poklemba said she and her student had so many other things they did that she never actually got around to putting pictures in the book.
`The hour goes really, really quickly,` Poklemba said.
She was so impressed by the program that she offered to be one of the volunteer coordinators, meeting with fellow coordinators from the other two schools to `put our heads together, problem solve, brainstorm` to make the program as effective as possible. She thinks collecting and implementing that kind of feedback pays dividends.
`A lot of tutoring programs, they just set them up and say, ‘Good luck,’` she said. `I don’t think you get the most bang for your buck that way.`
Poklemba said she and the other coordinators have received positive feedback from the seniors taking part, a sentiment echoed by Schoolcraft.
`Every tutor is having a great time,` she said. `Ninety percent of them are coming back.`
The program has also gotten high marks from administrators in the school district, and `teachers are delighted,` she said.
Seniors who are interested in joining the program need to be able to commit for the entire school year, meaning this isn’t a good fit for snowbirds who spend their winters down south. Schoolcraft is hoping the program will be able to add an additional day in the coming year, meaning volunteers would visit twice a week. Down the road, more schools and maybe even more districts could be added.
For information, contact the RSVP/OASIS Program at 442-5585 or [email protected].