We all likely received a little help at some point in our education. If you didn’t, you were either a child prodigy or, more likely, you weren’t being challenged enough in the first place.
On the other hand, what if you were being challenged but by things that went beyond—way beyond—the material itself? What if your challenges stemmed from drug abuse, gang involvement, homelessness, extreme poverty and habitual truancy? For a tutor, reaching a kid like that is a lot tougher than merely drilling them on multiplication tables or demonstrating how to conjugate a verb.
Enter PESA’s Jennifer Sanchez, a tutor who brings to her students at Antelope Valley’s Challenger Middle School her experience working with youth facing precisely those challenges. “I’m considered a tutor, but I would say I’m more of a mentor,” she says. “I have to gain a relationship with these kids before they want to do their work with me.”
It was while pursuing a bachelor degree in criminology from California State University Northridge that Sanchez had the opportunity to work with CSUN’s Mentoring to Overcome Struggles and Inspire Courage (MOSAIC) program, whose mission is to mentor at-risk youth in the San Fernando Valley. “These are marginalized, court-involved youth who are often caught up in the gang lifestyle, drugs, and tagging,” says Sanchez. In other words, not students who just need a little help in history or science to boost them from a B to an A. And neither are the Challenger Middle School “high-profile” students Sanchez works with currently.
“A high-profile student is someone with behavior issues, a student who is defiant, who is on the verge of going on probation,” says Sanchez. “I feel like I have a more heart-to-heart connection with those students because of my experience with MOSAIC.”
Her personal history also factors into her empathy for her students. “My parents immigrated from Mexico, so we were looked at as low class. I was born and raised in Antelope Valley. I was around high-profile kids. I had friends from elementary school who are now gang-bangers or they’re on the streets because of drug use, so I thought, ‘O.K., what can I do to help prevent this in my community?’ which is why I chose to stay in Antelope Valley.”
Sanchez has a history of community involvement, having participated in the Teen Court program throughout all four years of high school. Then, after college, she joined PESA and has worked with Challenger Middle School students since February.
“[Through Teen Court], I learned about transformative justice," says Sanchez, emphasizing the importance of that framework, but she adds, that through tutoring and mentoring she hopes to preemptively "reach the students early and keep them out of the system.”
It seems to be working. For example, one of her students struggles with substance abuse and is on probation. “When I first met him, he wanted nothing to do with me,” she says. So eventually she asked him straight out: “What can I do to help you?” That’s where their relationship began to take a positive turn, and he finally started to open up. “He was an F student with a lot of behavior problems,” says Sanchez, who wanted to guide him to make different choices with better results. “I told him, ‘Let’s stay out of trouble and let’s bring our grades up, and you will feel good about yourself.’ So we worked together every day.” By the end of the semester, he had an A, a B and a few Cs.
"She makes learning fun for students, and the students have responded," says Rudy Martinez, PESA Assistant Director of Internships. "Her passion for education has helped increase their self-esteem and life functioning.
“There is mentorship behind it. You’ve got to get to know them,” says Sanchez, rather than getting straight down to the business of tutoring. “Our job at PESA is to give them the support that they need.” ■
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