By Jackson Koptiz
Contributing Writer
Despite heavy work loads and various extracurricular activities, some Mira Costa students are choosing to become tutors in the Student Academic Support program, or SAS. These self-selected students become the tutor every day during one period and the would tutor the class along with assisting with the teacher’s lesson plan.
Teachers and counselors are recruiting students of the Mira Costa Chapter of the National Honor Society, or NHS, to become tutors in Mira Costa’s Student Academic Support Program. Counselors would place students in a period of SAS and students would then earn community service hours for tutoring students and helping the advising teacher run the class.
“The SAS program will allow NHS members to double hours, helping as mentors and continuing to the honor society,” NHS president Sarah Kennedy said. “They will have a positive impact on the school the through their mentorship and leadership in the program.”
SAS is an on-campus program run by academic support counselors Keshia Fields and Eliza Santarosa dedicated to giving students that struggle in their classes help. SAS is a period once a day, like any other class, for students who do not qualify for learning center but still need assistance. SAS aims to keeps students successful by helping them meet grade requirements, making sure they graduate and assisting students who want to attend four-year colleges.
“Our SAS program has been in need in good tutors and people that want to come in and help,” NHS advisor and SAS teacher Stacy Cabrera said. “We are hoping that it [recruiting NHS students] will give us a good pool of people that want to come in and actually really make a difference for the students that we have in this program.”
There are currently six periods of SAS taught by six different english teachers, Cabrera, Cook, Goulding, Howerton, Owen and Sieker. Each class has between 15 and 20 students with between one and three tutors. Tutors are responsible for tutoring students during the period, helping them with homework and assisting the teacher with running the class.
“It [being an SAS tutor] would be like TA-ing for a period except you are doing a lot more than TA-ing. You would be the tutor in the class,” Cabrera said. “You would be facilitating homework help and lessons.”
Members of Costa’s chapter of NHS are required to complete ten hours of community service hours per year to remain in the chapter. Because students are admitted to NHS based on GPA, character and leadership, they are expected to do their community service utilizing one of these traits.
“NHS hopes to encourage NHS members to participate in this program as a way from them to grow as mentors to those that need support,” NHS secretary Danielle Wenger said. “We, as NHS, hope to become a support group for those who need that extra guidance in their academic.”
To become an SAS tutor, students must fill out an application. This application is mainly a self assessment of the student’s interest in the program, his or her skills that make a good tutor and his or her grades.
“We mainly wanted to give NHS students, who have strong academic skills and are dedicated to helping the community, an opportunity to help their fellow classmates succeed at costa by giving them the necessary academic support,” Wenger said. “NHS is focused on not only bettering the community on the outside, but bettering the community on the inside as well.”
In addition to NHS students, SAS tutor applications will be distributed to CSF students, given out by english teachers, and offered to students will good grades. SAS is only offered to seniors. Seniors that become tutors will have SAS as a period in their schedule once a day and it will show up on their transcript as an academic support tutor.
“As NHS students, we want to share our skills to other students so that everyone has the opportunity to succeed,” said Wenger. “We encourage our students to give back by sharing our skills of support and guidance to those that need it.”
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