This coming Wednesday will be our last regular tutoring night. On May 4th we'll have a cookout party. South Bend schools will still be going for awhile, but since so many of our tutors are Bethel students, we'll be ending our tutoring school year a little earlier than the SBCSC school year.
Truth be told, the last few weeks of tutoring have been quite troubling from a behavior standpoint. It's hard to know how to address this problem since acceptable behavior is our baseline for doing anything at Wednesday Night Tutoring. When behavior is as bad as it was last week, we can't really do anything with the kids. We dismissed half an hour early and struggled to keep fistfights from breaking out on the way home. It's disappointing how these recent troubles can overshadow some of the progress that we've noticed over the school year. I share this not in the spirit of complaining but in the spirit of reporting what's actually happening.
On the constructive side, we have plans next year to make firmer connection with our kids' families in the hopes that this will help out with some of these behavior issues. I hope with this firmer connection that we can better support and guide the KP kids who attend tutoring and that we can involve families in the educational, moral, and social development that takes place at Wednesday Night Tutoring. In short, I think we can do better next year by expanding our focus to include families, not just individual KP kiddos.
In the midst of trials and triumphs, the tutors we've had this year have been tremendous. They've given of their lives and their schedules to provide something that all kids need and crave, one-to-one attention from a loving adult. This is what makes Wednesday Night Tutoring work.
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