Boys and Girls Clubs of the Peninsula (BGCP) and virtual nonprofit Pandemic Professors recently launched a partnership aimed at helping BGCP students who have fallen behind academically both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of the collaboration, a pilot group of students in East Palo Alto and Redwood City is receiving free, online 1:1 tutoring services for an eight-week period throughout May.
“During this pandemic, our goals are to help students ‘stay in the game’ academically and to mitigate a widening opportunity gap during this incredibly challenging school year,” said Jenny Obiaya, BGCP’s chief program officer. “The research shows that one of the highest impact ways to support our kids is through consistent and targeted 1:1 tutoring, so we are excited to partner with Pandemic Professors!”
Created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pandemic Professors is a volunteer-based organization that offers free online tutoring to low-income communities, making it well-paired with BGCP’s K-8 students, who face substantial barriers to graduating high school and preparing for post-secondary school. Compounded by the added challenges presented by COVID-19, it’s ever more important that students lagging behind the academic requirements of their grade level receive the necessary intervention, per Pandemic Professors.
“This partnership allows us to target the highest risk students in the area and grow our operations with the support of BGCP program staff,” said Sara Ellis, director of program services and development at Pandemic Professors. “We are able to use this opportunity to measure the impact of our tutoring and continuously improve our services based on measurements of academic growth and socioemotional skills of the students using human-centered design.”
According to Pandemic Professors, the partnership’s pilot period of eight weeks of tutoring services throughout May, might be extended indefinitely to continue providing BGCP students with expanded learning opportunities.
