Tutoring business helps kids catch up

BROOKINGS — School is almost finished for the year for most kids — but for those who need some extra help, it can be the trickiest time of the year.

Scientific research has identified a summer slide for students with long summer breaks, with children losing, on average, a month’s instruction during the time away from school — with more loss in math than reading.

The research also shows the effect can be more pronounced in students who are already behind, compounding an already tricky problem.

Which is part of the reason why Cindy Williams has set up her tutoring programs to run over the summer months.

“I actually have two summer camps that will be going, two in June and two in July. And those are all on my website at cindystutoringservices.com — and all those dates, and all the information is on the website for the summer camps,” Williams said. “And then I’ll still be doing regular services. So if students and parents want to make sure that their kids don’t have that summer slide, yes, I will have services.”

Williams started her tutoring service five years ago and recently upgraded to a larger space, in the basement of The Old Sanctuary on Medary Ave. in Brookings.

She had started tutoring kids who needed help in math and reading online.

“And after a year of tutoring them, I thought, I would like it if I could do some kids here in Brookings instead of just doing the online kiddos. So I decided to put my name out there, on the mom sites and different things on Facebook and stuff, and started slowly gathering people.”

She began tutoring students from Kindergarten to eighth grade in math and reading, first starting at the Brookings Public Library.

Now, she has her own dedicated space at the Old Sanctuary and 11 students enrolled — Nine in person and a pair online.

“I will tutor any subject, but math and reading are the ones that I mainly like to stick to. But I do help with science and social studies if kids need it. I also help with homework completion if the parents want that. So like one of my kids, we finally got him to his grade level in his language arts part. So now his mom just wants me to help him stay on task and get homework done.”

For some students, simply a structured time to focus on work outside of class is a huge help. And Williams tries to focus on making learning fun.

“We do a lot of games in my room,” she said. “So we play board games, we play other types of games that incorporate the lessons that they’re trying to learn. So that way they don’t think they’re learning — they’re just playing a game.”

Williams said she sees students for a variety of different reasons.

“Right now I’ve got a lot of second- and third-grade kids, and so I’m thinking a lot of that is because of the state testing that was getting ready to start. Parents are wanting to make sure that they’re reading at grade level and they’re being able to do the math at grade level. And so a lot of it is parents are getting the report cards or the information from the school saying, Hey, your child is falling a little bit behind.”

For her full-time job, Williams teaches in Flandreau and specifically intervenes with students who are below grade level, making tutoring a natural fit for her. But with the COVID years hitting different age cohorts in different ways, research shows students nationwide have a lot of catching up to do.

“It’s a big chunk of kids,” Williams said. “They just may be missing certain skills, and I focus on what skills they miss. Same here at the tutoring, I give them an assessment, I find out exactly what skills they are missing, and we focus on those missing skills, because there’s no reason to focus on the whole broad thing of math or the whole broad field of reading. Focus on the skills they’re missing and work on those ones. So with the intervention, I also do reading intervention at my school. So I do both math and reading. So the reading intervention I had like 19 or 20 kids at the beginning of the school year, and now I only have eight.”

“We’ve got a good reading curriculum at the school where I can find the exact skill that they’re missing. Here at tutoring, I have a dyslexia program that I’ve been using, so it hones into the exact skills that they’re missing, because it all goes on that science of reading, which is a big thing in South Dakota right now,” she continued.

Williams is also offering four camps this summer — two in STEM in two in nature — that run four days a week and four hours a day. Signup for tutoring and all the camps is available on her website at cindystutoringservices.com

She also said she’s happy to work with folks who are on a tight budget but want to make sure their kids can get caught up.

”I have affordable rates. In some cases I only charge 40 bucks. I want to make sure every child that needs the help, the parents can afford it. Because a lot of places, they charge way, way, way more. And I don’t want a child not to be able to come to tutoring because their parents can’t afford it. And I’ll even work with people if they need to — I give discounts to parents who have more than one kid that they want to have tutored, so that we can make sure that they get the help they need.”

Linehan is the Beacon’s managing editor and welcomes story tips and comments at BrookingsBeacon@gmail.com