Virtual tutoring builds confidence, one student at a time

WorldTutors began with books. In 2012 Alison Barry founded Wonderland BookSavers, a youth-driven 501(c)(3) that has since delivered more than 1.2 million books, along with educational and humanitarian resources, to communities from the Oglala Lakota reservations in South Dakota to rural villages in Uganda. Then one of its partners in Uganda asked for something new: virtual tutoring and mentoring for his students. At first that seemed impossible. After Covid, connecting students and tutors from across the globe suddenly seemed entirely possible, and in 2023 WorldTutors: Virtually Everywhere was born. The program is free for every student who would not otherwise have access to quality tutoring. Each student is paired one-on-one with the same trained tutor, session after session, across math, reading, writing and more, so the relationship can grow alongside the skills. Every student and every tutor is personally recommended by their school. Because WorldTutors connects people with one another, it wants each of them to have a personal connection to the organization. It is not a dry tutoring program. Tutors are trained through the Talented Tutors Academy and supported by its Tutor Toolkit, and they use their own ingenuity to design lessons that resonate with their students, drawing on WorldTutors' own programs such as LightUp Literacy, a complete grammar foundation in 60 lessons, and FrogHop Multiplication. The relationships students and tutors build are the basis of the WorldTutors Mentorship Model. WorldTutors also developed its own way to measure progress. Star Student Success gives tutors, parents and schools an ongoing picture of exactly where a student places academically and moves them forward reliably, so there is continuous data on improvement without waiting for annual testing. On its website, 98% of students report academic improvement and 99.5% say they enjoyed their session. Alison Barry is a homeschooling mother of eight, a former President of the Pequot Library Association and a recipient of the Hoyt O. Perry, Jr. Lifetime Service Award. The Free Access Model is funded by donors, grants and community partnerships, and schools can also bring WorldTutors in through a Premium Partnership Model aligned to their own curriculum.