Earlier this month, the Edina Education Fund and Edina Community Education program partnered with Edina High School and Valley View Middle School (VVMS) to begin a literacy and tutoring program between the two schools. Twice a week, EHS student tutor volunteers head to VVMS during the 7/8 block to connect with the students and help seventh and eighth graders with their schoolwork and organizational skills.

Although the program is just beginning, Youth Development and Community Ed specialist Alan Hendrickson began generating ideas last school year. “Ed Fund approached me last winter with the idea, wondering if it’d be possible to have a program where we’d have high school volunteers help out at Valley View,” Hendrickson said. “So we started meeting last winter/spring about it and started coming up with ideas of [what the program] would look like.”

Junior Juliet Heffelbower serves as a tutor to fulfill her volunteer hours for the volunteer service letter. “I looked on the Schoology page for service letter and I was looking through the opportunities, and it had the [volunteer tutor] option on there,” Heffelbower said.

Once tutors joined the program, the partnership between the two schools started to flesh out. “We’ve been doing training and getting to know the students for a while,” Heffelbower said. “If you’re doing volunteer work [in the district], you have to go through specific training, like listening to a presentation to [learn to] work with kids.”

For Hendrickson, the program’s success is most reflected in the student relationships. “One of the things that we’ve seen in the past is that with older students we’ve noticed is really effective is when students teach students. It’s one of the things that we’ve been promoting, and especially when it comes to middle schoolers compared to high schoolers, the middle schoolers tend to listen and look up to the high schoolers quite a bit,” Hendrickson said.

For junior Sylvia VanNorman, the opportunity allows her to help other students. “It’s nice to know that they have another person in their life who can support them and that they can go to someone who isn’t a teacher for help,” VanNorman said. 

Although the window to become a tutor is closed because training sessions have concluded, the program will open for new tutors for the 2025–26 school year.

This piece was originally published in Zephyrus’ print edition on Dec. 19, 2024