Helping Hands Helps With Instruction

April 6, 2009 - A team of tutors are working with mentors and students in the Wake County Public School System Helping Hands program to strengthen student skills and prepare them for success on the state End-of-Grade testing in math and reading.

Listen to Maurice Moore of Helping Hands talk about the tutoring sessions provided students

9 minute mp3 file

Maurice Moore, who directs the Helping Hands mentoring program, says the tutoring sessions began in February and will continue into May.

“We’ve hired ten certified teachers to go around to 30 different sites,” said Moore. “The teachers are actually providing tutorial sessions on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays on a rotating basis. In some instances, the sites that they are visiting may serve as a host site for multiple schools. So for example, you may have three or four schools meeting at one particular site.”

For example, the tutor will be at Forestville Road Elementary on Tuesdays working with students from Forestville Road, Knightdale and Lockhart elementary schools. The tutor will be at Combs Elementary on Thursdays where she will work with mentors and students from Combs, Dillard Drive and Olds elementary schools.

The Helping Hands mentoring program is a resource and support system serving approximately 525 African American male students in grades 3-8. The mentors are African American males, mostly employees of the school system. Each mentor works with a group of students, usually five. They meet one afternoon a week reviewing ideas from the book, The Habits of Highly Effective Teens, and meet once a month on a Saturday for an enrichment activity.

For now, the tutorial sessions have replaced the weekly meetings. Students are receiving five weeks of additional math instruction and five weeks of additional reading instruction. They are receiving help from the tutors and their mentors.

The tutoring program is geared to meet the needs of individual students. Moore says the tutors have been provided a copy of the students’ test results from their last End-of-Grade testing. He says the mentors also help individualize instruction.

“The mentors’ presence really makes a difference with the tutors knowing that there’s someone there they can reach out to and lean on as it pertains to any questions centered around a particular student,” said Moore. “They know that they have a mentor who can actually serve as a liaison between the teacher and the tutor to help them to identify areas of development for that particular student.”

Moore says the program is making a difference for students.

“The session that I’ve had an opportunity to observe, we are seeing that the students are really engaged. They are having a lot of fun,” said Moore. “We feel as though we are going in the right direction. We’re excited about what we’re doing and we’ll know at the end of the year based upon the test results as to whether we were effective.”

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