Get involved
A Find An Hour orientation session will be held at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Big Brothers & Big Sisters, 2107 S. 12th St., Tacoma. Tacoma has reached a “tipping point” in public education. Following Malcolm Gladwell’s 2002 best-seller of the same name, we see a city on the verge of educational greatness.
But greatness isn’t free, and it isn’t easy. And educational greatness depends on how well we all come through for all of our children.
Imagine if we all found just one hour a week to give to the Tacoma’s children. We know that high-quality, one-on-one tutoring for one hour a week during the school year can result in great leaps in learning for a student. Just one hour a week.
Six out of 10 of Tacoma’s schoolchildren live in poverty. Students of color also are experiencing a widening achievement gap in public education. These students are our neighbors and our children’s classmates and friends. Tacoma Public Schools has acknowledged that there is an achievement gap for students of color and has pledged to reduce this gap each year by 10 percent.
In a 2008 News Tribune interview, Superintendent Art Jarvis stated, “My focus and our focus really has been: How do we move further down that path of closing the achievement gap.” The Find An Hour coalition is ready to help the school district walk “down that path” to eliminate the achievement gap.
Our town’s most successful educational programs, particularly those with the greatest promise for closing the gap, require longer school days and Saturday work from teachers. Intense involvement with students who doubt their own academic abilities can lead easily to depletion of our teaching pool as people burn out. Just how many years of 12-hour days and Saturday half-days can one person endure?
Help is on the way. We can all play a major role in that help. According to the National Education Association, students struggling academically can learn to “master the skills necessary for success” from one-on-one tutoring and mentoring.
Research demonstrates that 35 to 40 hours a year of one-on-one academic work with a caring adult can improve a student’s reading level by a whole year. One hour a week can help a child develop the skills needed for academic success.
Tacoma is a generous community; individuals and organizations give money and time to help make the city better. We believe many people can Find An Hour in their lives to work with a student.
We are a coalition of educators in K-12 and higher education, organizations dedicated to serving children, and individual mentors and tutors who know from their experiences that “1 great kid + 1 caring adult = 2 changed lives.”
A caring adult can improve a child’s self-confidence, develop a student’s resiliency in the face of major life challenges, and lessen a young person’s vulnerability to the tyranny of poverty and its consequences – drugs, crime, disease and despair.
Increasing the educational achievements of our children will improve Tacoma for all of us. Each high school dropout will cost us $260,000 during his or her lifetime. It costs $22,600 to house a prison inmate for a year; it costs $9,600 each year to educate a child.
If the percentage of college graduates in our community were to rise by 1 percent, we would see an increase in people’s annual income in our town of over $150 million dollars!
Recognizing the difference a caring adult can make in a student’s life, and appreciating the value of an educated citizenry for Tacoma, Mayor Marilyn Strickland and the City Council have proclaimed October “Find An Hour” month.
To learn more about how you can answer this call, please visit our website findanhour.org or call 253-242-2463. You can learn more about this movement by coming to an orientation session Wednesday (see box).
Our children are waiting for you. Will you reach out to them for the sake of our town?
Carmetrus Parker is the director of community relations at Trinity Presbyterian Church. David Droge is a professor emeritus at the University of Puget Sound and a graduation adviser at Lincoln High School.
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