PACOIMA : Student Tutors Get a Taste of Teaching

Ten-year-old Cristina Copado could spend her free time having fun in the sun.

But the aspiring teacher prefers to work in Room 38 at Telfair Elementary School in Pacoima teaching her peers lessons in grammar.

“I’d rather be helping,” said the fifth-grader, who sat before an easel going over the parts of speech with third-grade students. “I get to help to correct some papers. I get to read for kids. It’s fun.”

Cristina is one of about 80 current and former Telfair students who signed up during their school break this summer to tutor or assist kindergarten to third-grade students under a career awareness program called TOPS (Telfair Off-Track Pupil Student Teachers).

The program, started in December, 1991, is designed to give elementary and middle school students a taste of the teaching profession as well as experience in tasks such as teaching children to read and write. Students can also work in the main office, the nurse’s office or the school library.

Assistant Principal Sunny Vasquez McMullen believes that students are never too young to focus on career plans.

“It helps them to start thinking about it,” she said.

To participate in the program, students in fourth grade and above must fill out applications and interview for the tutoring positions. The students also sign a contract, in which they promise to follow the rules and sign in and out each workday.

Sally Coughlin, a region superintendent for Los Angeles Unified School District elementary schools in the San Fernando Valley, said many schools have student tutoring programs but none are as formal as the TOPS program.

“We have less formal cross-age tutoring. The interviews make it unique,” Coughlin said.

Most of the school’s 57 teachers request a student tutor because it provides them with an extra pair of hands and eyes in their classrooms.

Language resource teacher Ellen Nathan, who receives assistance from two students in the library, likes the program.

“I really don’t know how to get along without them. They really pick up the slack for me,” she said.