Abstract:

Many Hispanic high school students in the southwestern state of Arizona in the United States, are failing their core content classes and at risk of not graduating adding to the number of Hispanic dropouts in the state and thus curtailing their opportunities to go to college or engage in a professional career.

According to the State of Arizona Department of Education (2019) of Arizona's 1.1-million public school students, Hispanics represented the largest group at 45%. The largest school district in southern Arizona is the Tucson Unified School District. As of October 2018, the demographics of the district were composed of 63.8% Hispanics, primarily Mexican American. Arizona rates fell short of national graduation rates across the board. It had 75.7% of Hispanic students graduating which was below the national rate of 81%. The county ranked 13th out of 15 counties in the state for graduating all students on time in 2018.

Finding community resources to help these students can be difficult. However, when the students are familiar with a known environment it makes it easier for them to trust and not feel embarrassed about their weaknesses in core subject areas. An example would be the church where the students and their families attend service. Retired professionals (senior citizens) also attend the same church. The students are Hispanic but most of the retirees are not. How do we get these two groups to collaborate with the same purposes: success for the students in school, added community awareness and involvement, and involving the church as the bridge for these groups to work together?

As a community engagement project I proposed, planned, and developed a free tutoring center. The center was to be housed at the church with retired church members as tutors. These included retired attorneys, doctors, accountants, engineers, teachers, and professors among others. I have been engaged in helping high schools as part of service to my community and being familiar with this particular church and as a person with tutoring experience, I identified and recruited the potential retiree tutors. I found them to be willing and eager to be involved and engaged in an educational activity that would help and provide educational support to the students who were struggling in school and who were members of the same church. They not only wanted to help the students graduate from high school but provide them with the opportunity of being ready for college or have the opportunity to engage in a professional career.

This presentation will present not only the steps that are needed to be incorporated in the development and approval of the tutoring center. These include the ways to approach church guidelines since minors were involved. Parents were also included and specific guidelines for their involvement had to be followed.

Ideas on how to engage the community of Hispanic parents, students, retired professionals and the church will be presented as a service educational support activity and as a way to involve the community in the academic success of the Hispanic students which represent the success of all involved. This endeavor also created some challenges since most of the retirees are non-Hispanic and were non-educators. Ideas to support student educational success including proposal and curriculum development, recruitment, advertising, funding, and challenging obstacles among others, will also be discussed.

Keywords:

Community engagement, Hispanic academic success, college readiness, youth engagement, community learning center development, retiree professionals as tutors.