Berry’s Honors Program, Greater Christ Temple join to provide local youth with tutoring.

More than 30 Berry College students have partnered with Greater Christ Temple church in Rome to offer South Rome youth tutoring help.

For the past year, Berry students, most of them members of the college’s Honors Program, have volunteered to tutor students ages seven to 18 at the church each Monday night. The local students, most of whom attend Greater Christ Temple, are enrolled in elementary, middle and high schools in several different school districts around Rome.

Andre Watts, elder at Greater Christ Temple.

“It’s been exciting to see the kids improving in their work and seeing that improvement pay off in their grades,” said Andre Watts, the tutoring program’s coordinator and an elder at Greater Christ Temple. “We’ve seen great improvement in many cases. Beyond their grades, it’s so important that these kids have these Berry students to stand with them, to partner with them.”

The youth receive help in subjects such as science, math, reading, geography, Spanish, English and social studies. Berry students choose a subject area in which they have some expertise, then they are paired with a student who needs help in that area, Watts said.

Will Graham, a Berry senior, for example, has worked all year with 14-year-old Aaron Watts in the subject areas of science and math. Graham said he’s seen “definite improvement” in Watts’s academic achievement. Watts agrees.

Will Graham, left, and Aaron Watts work each week  on math and science.

“Will helps me with my assignments and homework,” Watts said. “It’s pulled up my grades. But we also just joke around sometimes and talk about things that aren’t school-related, especially if we haven’t seen each other in a while.”

Watts said his grades in math have improved more than a letter grade since tutoring began last Sepetember.

Saying ‘Yes!’ to the program

Andre Watts, Brian Carroll, associate professor of Communication and director of the Honors Program at Berry, and Chris Diller, associate professor of English and director of the Writing Center, conceived of the tutoring program during a breakfast at Landmark Diner last summer.

Brian Carroll, director of the Berry Honors Program.

“It was funny,” Carroll said. “After the breakfast, after asking me if I’d seen the TV show, Say Yes to the Dress,’ Andre asked Chris and I: ‘Are you saying, “Yes” to the tutor program?’”

Carroll said the tutor program aligns with his goals for the Honors Program, which include developing students in the areas of leadership and service, and leadership in service. But Carroll was quick to credit Watts for coming up with the idea and for being the driving force behind the program all year long.

“I missed a lot of the basics” in terms of education growing up, Watts said, explaining his decision to start the program. “I remember always saying that it would be nice to have a conducive environment for learning to be able to excel in school.”

Berry freshman Rachel Blair, who tutors 7^th-grader Toresha Millsap in math and science, said she tutors because she wanted to invest in the success of an individual student.

“I knew that it would make a big impact,” said Blair, a Communication major. “I knew that they were assigning one individual student to each of us, and I knew that that meant that I could have time to invest in one student in particular and give them my quality time.”

Tyler Kaelin, also a Berry freshman, is a science and pre-algebra tutor to Joharri Logan, a 9^th-grader at Rome High. Kaelin said he wants to be “more than a tutor” to his student.

“I want to make sure that if he has questions about anything or needs advice, I’m there,” said Kaelin, a biochemistry and math major from Milton, Fla.

Watts said he hopes that the program will expand with tutoring on more days during the week and possibly with other churches joining to help students who want or need it.

Hot meals

In addition to tutoring services, the program also offers up a hot meal each and every Monday.

After preparing and serving meals during the fall semester, the church got help for the spring semester by partnering with Seven Hills Fellowship church. Families and discipleship groups from Seven Hills Fellowship have been taking turns providing the tutors and pupils with weekly meals.

As an extension of the tutoring program, Berry’s football team partnered with Greater Christ Temple for the church’s Easter egg hunt outreach last month, one of the church’s biggest events each year. The dozen or so players helped boil, dye and hide roughly 3,000 eggs supplied by the Georgia Egg Commission for the event, which annually is attended by hundreds of youth from the community.

Football head coach Tony Kunczewski said he signed his players up to help because he wants the them to value community service.

“I think it’s important for our guys to understand how blessed and how fortunate they are,” he said. “We’ve set the expectations early on. We do expect them to help out in the community. If we want people to support us, we’ve got to go out and support others.”

The egg hunt was held March 30 at the Coosa Valley Fairgrounds.