ELPASO Partners with Boulder Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship to Provide Tutoring

​An excerpt from the The Boulder Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Newsletter:
​
Amigos 
By Pat Bulthaup

​This Fall, the Executive Director of the ELPASO program, Tere Garcia, reached out to her friend Chris Itano to ask if the Fellowship could provide tutoring for many of their students who were struggling with online learning. Chris helped Oscar Flores and ELPASO in providing the Las Posadas celebrations that took place at the Fellowship the previous three years. Chris brought the request for tutoring help to the Social Justice Council and I started coordinating it. We had a wonderful response from the Fellowship. There were a number of trainings led by Tere Garcia and Carol Pranschke helped with administering background checks.

​Now we have nineteen tutors who have been matched with a student and their family. Each tutoring pair also has a coordinator to help with communication.

​I recently reached out to our tutors to see how things are going. It sounds like all of our tutors are already forming bonds with their students, and are figuring out ways to make Zoom tutoring work. The children range in age from five to eighteen. Some of us are trying to help shy early learners grasp how to read, and others are helping older students understand assignments and polish up homework in subjects like Math and Language Arts. We are all looking for how to make it fun. These include methods like jointly writing a graphic novel to incorporating a child’s favorite animal (a dinosaur) into the lessons. One tutor has been learning about Dolphins along with her student, for a report, and helping her to win a semi-finalist position in her school wide spelling bee.

Current events have come into play for some of the tutors and their students. For example, one tutor has had discussions with her student and her mom as to why the riots happened on Capital Hill and what the Electoral College is. Another tutor viewed Amanda Gorman’s speech, “The Hill We Climb”, with her student and discussed her poise and the power of her words.

It has felt good to be forming relationships with the families in ELPASO and building bridges during this time of isolation. For the tutors, it has been a glimpse into how hard it is to be a teacher and a student right now. Hopefully when we can gather again, we will be able to have potlucks and events together, and further build connections between the Fellowship and the Latina/o communities in Lafayette, Longmont, and Boulder. One tutor shared that her child’s mother has already said their little family of three (Mom and two kids) can be her family, as well.