News
SHINE volunteers tutoring at sites in Utica, new and old
By Haley Lynch ’17
February 2, 2017
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Opportunities for Hamilton College students are opening up in Utica this semester. After a brief hiatus the Madison-Oneida Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) Adult and Continuing Education program in Utica, which offers a range of educational and support services to agencies throughout the city as needed, is readmitting volunteers to work with adults. These will include several Project SHINE tutors from Hamilton College. Also this semester, SHINE will help expand Hamilton’s presence, which began last spring, at the Utica Academy of Science Charter School (UASCS), by contributing English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) volunteer tutors to a Saturday morning program that will help ESOL students at the charter school with their homework.
These relationships in Utica are particularly important in the wake of a change in what had been Hamilton’s accustomed volunteer sites of more than 10 years in the Utica City School District and in connection with the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees (MVRCR). Last spring, when The Spectator interviewed the Director of Community Outreach Amy James about these changes, she noted that the changes in Hamilton’s programming were a result of shifts in volunteering protocols at Utica schools—not decisions made by Hamilton.
Sources connected to the SHINE program, which had been sending volunteers to those locations, indicate that much of the change was related to discontentment in the wake of the publication of an unauthorized project by a Hamilton College student who had been volunteering as a SHINE tutor through the MVRCR. Since that time, both the MVRCR Volunteer Contract and the Levitt Center SHINE Volunteer Expectations Agreement forms have been updated to include stipulations against “unauthorized research.”With these updates, relationships with the MVRCR have been improving, according to one of the teachers in the program Professor John Bartle, and Hamilton volunteers are now involved with several sites in Utica.
BOCES underwent a variety of institutional changes that resulted in a “moratorium on all volunteer work” last year, according to the Director of Continuing Education at the local BOCES ACCESS site in Utica, Kathleen Rinaldo, who went on to explain that after considering several other options, the BOCES program in Utica will be bringing in volunteers to help tutor adults in their ESOL classrooms again starting this semester. “We have always had a very good experience with SHINE students,” she commented, “and we’re happy to continue the relationship between BOCES Adult Education division and Hamilton College.” Professor Bartle confirmed that three students will volunteer at BOCES this semester through SHINE.
Meanwhile, other tutoring volunteer opportunities are opening up for Hamilton College students in Utica. Amy James of the COOP explained that the Young People’s Project started coordinating math tutoring services last spring, and that other programs have been expanding since then to include tutoring in reading. James is “hoping to get the science students at Hamilton involved in helping out soon, too.”
The UASCS opened for grades 6-9 in 2013 and added a high school division four years ago, so 2017 will bring their first graduating class. Last semester, Barbara Britt-Hysell, the coordinator of the ESOL program at Hamilton as well as a course instructor who helps train students in ESOL tutoring, sent several students from her class to help tutor some of the senior ESOL students at UASCS who needed help passing State Regents Exams in order to graduate this year.
The tutors were eager to praise the students they worked with as well as the teachers in the ESOL program at UASCS. “The teachers were committed to them [the students] and the students were committed to the school,” said Sarah Hogoboom ’17. “I will always think of my experience at UASCS positively, and hope that the students gained as much as I did.” Jonna Dowling, one of the ESOL teachers at the school, added that “with 50 [ESOL students] at the high school, and 15 in the middle school, all with such varying needs, it’s really hard to have them all in one classroom. I’m so excited that we will have more college students to make sure that these kids get all the help they need.” This semester, at least 12 students will be working at the UASCS site. Professor Bartle commented: “We’re really looking forward to growing this nascent relationship between Hamilton and the charter school.”
While these opportunities are wonderful, overall volunteering numbers in Utica are still down compared to former years as a result of the rift between Hamilton College and the Utica City School District, a fact which many familiar with the situation hope can be changed in the future.
Correction:
The Spectator reported that “Sources connected to the SHINE program... indicate that much of the change was related to discontentment in the wake of the publication of an unauthorized project by a Hamilton College student who had been volunteering as a SHINE tutor through the MVRCR.” The Spectator has since obtained documents indicating that the project was approved by the then-Chair of the Institutional Review Board at Hamilton College.