These Are Kids Anyone Can Look Up To!

For more than 15 years, students at the Jared Eliot Middle School have been volunteering to help other students through a program called the Eliot Peer Tutor program.

Every October, Eliot School Guidance Counselors Cheryl Hill and Kris Mantzaris put on their recruiter hats and plug the program to seventh and eighth grade students.

There are actually two different (albeit related) programs that go on in the school.

Hill explains, “On Tuesdays and Thursdays during our Enrichment Period (which is like a study hall), we have seventh and eighth graders work with other sixth and seventh graders – they help them with their homework or if they’re having difficulty in math, etc. That’s the number one program that the Peer Tutors do.”

Peer Tutors volunteer and are trained to help others. From this group of students the guidance counselors pull for the second program –  Eliot Pals.

“The Eliot Pals is a group of the Eliot Peer Tutors and they go to Joel every Wednesday. They leave at 1:50pm, which means they miss their enrichment period at Eliot. They don’t miss classes but they do miss time when they could get extra help,” Hill says.

The Pals are picked up by bus and dropped off at Joel School by 2pm.  Joel students get out just after 3pm, so Eliot Pals are paired with a teacher and work in a Joel classroom from 2pm to 3pm every Wednesday.

“We have seven right now, but it all depends on how many Joel teachers will take a student,” explains Hill.

The liaison at Joel, school psychologist Jacquie Bonner, sends out emails every fall asking teachers whether they would like to have an Eliot Pal assist them.

According to Bonner, “They are trained at Eliot before they come here; they are trained to be mentors, tutors or teachers assistants so they can help in any way.”

The teachers, she says, “love the Eliot Pals. There have been no complaints whatsoever.”

When a teacher has something crop up such as a field trip, for example, and if there’s an Eliot Pal on that day, there are "teachers who will ask for more than one Eliot Pal,” she said and added, “It’s really been beneficial for the students and teachers here.”

Pals help with art projects, read to the children, take small groups of children for math games and activities, and work with individuals who need extra help with reading, math facts and writing.

The program runs from the end of October through the end of May.

Over the course of the 15 years that Eliot Pals has been running, there have been as many as 15 Pals and as few as three involved. This year, there are seven students, and these seven have volunteered consistently all year long.

 “I can only send as many kids as teachers say they want to do this,” informs Hill.

She says, “The Pals just enjoy working with the younger kids. They can be in any of the grades, kindergarten through third grade."

“They pretty much do whatever the teacher asks them. Most of the time they have a certain student that they are paired up with. Sometimes they just walk through the class and have them help out with things,” she said.

When the kids train to be Peer Tutors, they have a sheet to check off what days they are available and what days they are interested in.  Eighth graders get first dibs, and once guidance figures out how many students can volunteer, she calls on the seventh graders.

Of course, kids are super busy. “A lot of the students who volunteer to be Peer Tutors are also the same kids that are in chorus and band and also have all this other stuff on their plate, so they don’t also have much free time.”

They also have to keep up with their own work before helping others.

The program is open to all students. An informational meeting is held in which Hill explains the programs and what it means to be a peer tutor.

“There’s also a period where we sit down and talk with them about how you can help kids and the appropriate way to act and what you can do if you need help with somebody,” Hill said.