Lending Hand to Younger Students : Teen-Age Tutors Reap Unique Rewards

The high school students asked the lawyer if she had to punch a time clock. They wanted to know how the editor of Sassy magazine felt about being in such a job at age 25.

They asked Mel Blount, a Pittsburgh Steelers’ cornerback when they won four Super Bowls, when he knew that he was going to become a professional football player.

The students are part of the East Harlem Tutorial Program, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. They were in an enrichment program in which they conducted their own interviews after hearing reporters from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Associated Press talk about the basics of interviewing.

Twenty students took part in the program. They were all encouraged to choose the person they most wanted to interview. Rock stars and famous athletes, including Mike Tyson, all ranked high on their lists, but there were some surprises. One student asked to interview the curator of the Museum of Natural History.

Reward for Tutoring

This was their reward for a year of tutoring younger students as part of the Tutorial Internship Program (TIP) students. They also got a $110-a-week stipend.

The lawyer told the students that punching a time clock was not part of lawyering.

The editor of Sassy explained how she studied hard, worked hard and it was OK to be that young.

Blount, now director of player relations for the National Football League, stressed the importance of getting a good education and pointed out how few football players make it to the NFL.

But perhaps the star of the show was the anonymous assistant of a top fashion photographer, Douglas Doubler.

The students had come to interview Doubler, but the assistant was assigned to show them around first. They asked him how he got his job.

He reported that he took a job sweeping the floors to get a toehold into the glitzy world of high fashion photography. He worked hard, was noticed and soon he was being asked to do other things. Now he is Doubler’s assistant.

The East Harlem Tutorial Project (EHTP), is an unusual mom-and-pop operation that began in an East Harlem living room and gets little governmental aid. It provides 1-on-1 help to students most at risk of dropping out. Volunteers range from these neighborhood high school students to Wall Street yuppies, prep school students, retirees and grandmothers.

Susan Ingalls, a member of the EHTP staff, says these minority tutors are often the first black role models the youngsters have ever had.

“The youngster may have an older brother or sister the same age as the tutor, but the older sibling doesn’t sit down and help with homework or show that he or she cares about them,” Ingalls says.

But the volunteers from the prep schools, who are mostly white, are important to the program, too, she says.

“Often what happens, especially with the prep school students, is that they get very involved with one child and remain in the program for years working with that one student. That’s probably when it works best,” said Julia C. Schieffelin, a former president of the organization’s board of directors.

Julie Bailey, who became a volunteer after her daughter became a tutor while in prep school, said the students usually went in groups of three or four to the interviews.

“In a couple of cases they were struck dumb, but they recovered enough to go on with the interviews,” she said. “For some, it was their first experience in looking at the work world, in hearing what it was like to deal with supervisors and authority.

“These were million-dollar interviews for these kids, and we ran the whole program on $750.”

Glenn Hopkins, director of Project Discovery at Columbia University, said the East Harlem project is unusual in that “it’s not very bureaucratic. It’s warm, inviting, accessible and you can get involved in a very personal way. You can get in there with a minimum of formality and touch a kid, help a kid.”

EHTP has a $375,000 budget this year, of which only $15,000 comes from the government. So it has not been affected by federal cutbacks.

It puts on a fund-raiser each year featuring Manhattan’s literati. Calvin and Alice Trilling--he’s a writer for The New Yorker--recruit many of the celebrities, such as Maya Angelou, George Plimpton and Eli Wallach.