Hong An Truong (’17) is tutoring Sebastian Gonzalez (’20), by helping him with his math homework. Photo by John Le.by Anju Ito & Elise Tran, Staff Writers
Starting this school year, Fountain Valley High School (FVHS) is replacing its homework club with a new system known as After-school Academic Assistance Program (AAAP), which allows students to get help more effectively on a subject that they don’t understand.
Along with the student tutors available through the library, the AAAP program plans on implementing a program where members of organizations such as California Scholarship Federation (CSF), Math Olympiad and others can help out other students. Furthermore, the school has also incorporated another system known as tutor.com available for the students.
Tutor.com was introduced to FVHS by the president of Baron Academic Foundation (BAF), Belinda Brine. It is a website where students can receive help at any time on any subject from kindergarten to grade 12 through devices such as mobile phones and computers. There, they can get help from a professional tutor one-on-one in less than a minute. Through a whiteboard screen, students have access to multiple resources such as uploading images of homework problems.
“The good thing about how [homework club] complements with tutor.com is that tutor.com is there twenty-four seven, all the time. So let’s say if you go to tutor club during the day, and then help you with this problem, but when you go back home, another problem presents itself in another subject and whatnot. You can’t really get the physical help, tutor.com is there. So any time of the day you can access somebody who is knowledgeable in that,” said Brine.
If an individual tried to use tutor.com, it would usually cost them $39.99 per hour, but due to a huge license that BAF bought from tutor.com, students are now able to access all of the resources for $65 for the whole year with the membership fee of $10. In addition, students from other schools can also use this resource for $95 per school year.
Administration called for a change with the homework club system in order to create an all-in-one multi-tiered system. In the past, homework club used to be a place where students went to a classroom a few times per week, often after school, and worked on their homework with limited resources to refer to. Now, with the AAAP, students are able to receive a more specialized and detailed help in one place any time that they want as long as they have internet access and an electronic device.
AAAP is a program that was proposed mainly by English teacher Sean Ziebarth, economics and computer science teacher Steve Eggert, and the administrators, where they came up with a new tutoring system, tutor.com and the student tutorings. The student tutorings include the paid tutors and free tutors at the school. Tutoring offered by individual FVHS students in certain subjects is $10 per hour.
FVHS, with the help of BAF, administration, Ziebarth and Eggert, have been working on this newly generated program since the beginning of this year, allowing students to receive a more focused help on any subject any time they want, all in one place.
“It’s really a great service,” said Brine, expressing her opinions on tutor.com.
