Seeing a need in the community, a group of Foothill High School students launched a free tutoring program to support the academic needs of elementary school children.
A team of four freshmen — Sanjay Adhikesaven, Abyan Das, Milan Suresh and Monish Muralicharan — created Sailors Learning in March after speaking to a local parent, who expressed their child was struggling to adjust to distance learning.
“We support all grades from kindergarten through eighth grade for one-on-one tutoring, and we support grades two through eight for our extracurricular group lessons,” said Sanjay. “This program extends throughout the Tri-Valley, and we hope to expand it further later on.”
Extracurricular classes offer a deeper dive for students interested in science, math, coding and history. Signups have already rolled in, and the four expanded the tutoring team to include a total of 15 tutors. They hope to grow the effort in order to serve more children.
Monish explained the program started off as free and will always remain free, in order to make it accessible to people of any socioeconomic background.
“We get satisfaction out of helping out children because we provide resources that are unavailable to them otherwise,” Abyan said. “It feels great to set up children for success in school subjects, their interests and future life endeavors.”
The high school students teach children over Zoom, an online video conference service, which many children already use in regular schooling.
“I personally think that besides providing crucial support to these students, we teach them the skills that they need to succeed on their own in the future,” Milan said.
For more information, visit www.sailorslearning.com.
