University student from Vaughan gets 500 volunteers to tutor 130 pupils for free

‘We've largely been targeting low income families, particularly because a lot of people have lost their jobs’

Yorkregion.com
May 8, 2020
Dina Al-Shibeeb

The COVID-19 pandemic is stifling some people, especially families who have lost jobs and businesses that are scrambling to earn some dwindling profits, but there are others who are stepping up to lift others.

Backed by her two friends, Mindy Lu and Ayesha Hassan, Anna Tran --a graduating student from Vaughan studying at McMaster University --is one of those who is stepping up.

On March 29, Tran launched an initiative to Canadian students from grades 1-12 to access free online tutoring to help ease the transition to online learning during the pandemic.

“We've largely been targeting low income families, particularly because a lot of people have lost their jobs during this time,” Tran said.

“We have some parents who have emailed us, thanking us for the program, indicating that they've lost their jobs and that this has been very useful for them.”

Tran initially contacted school boards and principals, but the soon-to-be graduating student realized that “some kind of approval from the Ministry of Education” was needed. So Tran instead opted to lend help from the social media world, specifically Facebook, where parent and mom groups thrive.

“Amazingly, as soon as I made my Facebook post, in less than 24 hours, really, I managed to get over 50 volunteers who were willing to tutor, and so that's when I started with marketing,” she said.

And that’s also when she recruited some of her friends to join her team.

Zoom forward to the month of May 7: “We are now at over 500 volunteers and over 130 students.” The students are mostly in the Greater Toronto Area; however, there are others who are receiving free tutoring as far away as Vancouver.

Initially there was an “oversupply of tutors,” including international teachers as far as Egypt who wanted to help, but then Tran said, “slowly as we started getting the word out, the demand seemed to increase and especially since now students seem to be bombarded with a lot more work at home.”

The free tutoring and the “in-person” attention is proving to be a great help.

Tran is tutoring a Grade 2 student enrolled at a Toronto school board school, who “didn't have any sort of in-person (online) classes.”

“I was told that this was due to some kind of privacy reasons. So really, the tutoring sessions are the only opportunities that she's exposed to an educator of any sort,” she said.

Interacting with different people is also a good change from the routine students are experiencing as they are “being stuck in a home all day all week,” she said. “It can be tiring to have to work with your parents all week. So having a tutor really helps to relieve some of that.

“Just looking at the forums, a lot of them indicated simply that they could not afford tutors, and so they found our service as helpful for them,” Tran said.

Lu, the program director, is in charge of the database and “manually” matches each student to tutors according to subject availability.

“Usually, if it's a family of siblings who sign up, we will assign several tutors because of the changes in the subject,” she said, adding some families want one tutor for “all of their kids.”

“So that's fine too,” she added. “We can make the accommodations that way. But essentially it is, yes, one tutor per student.”

The initiative falls under a small non-profit Tran co-founded in 2015, the Parsec Youth Network (PYN), which is a student-led organization entirely dependent on volunteers. It was founded with Vaughan Coun. Mario Ferri as the Vaughan Youth Network.

For more information on the PYN: www.parsecyouthnet.weebly.com.