Enrollment is up and local non-profit The Youth Center in Los Alamitos is looking for more volunteer tutors for their new Rossmoor After School Club and Academic Learning Services (R.A.S.C.A.L.S), for children ages pre-kindergarten to 5th grade.
Elementary school children from the Los Alamitos Unified School District are provided homework help along with outdoor sports and competitions, obstacle courses, arts & crafts at R.A.S.C.A.L.S. Currently the program has 18 students and space is limited to 25 per day.
When one young student, Alistair Wu, 5, of Los Alamitos started the program a few months ago, he was not fluent in English since he primarily lived in a Dutch and Chinese language environment in the past four years, said his mother Yuping Mao, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach.
“The tutors and children at R.A.S.C.A.L.S. have been extremely helpful to provide extra English learning and practicing opportunities for him,” she added.
The R.A.S.C.A.L.S. tutors accomplished this by reading books to Alistair every day, and helping him with his homework. “Now he is much more comfortable with speaking English and is more confident in interacting with other children,” said Mao. “He’s doing better at school academically and socially.”
“We’ve definitely seen his improvement in leaps and bounds,” said R.A.S.C.A.L.S. Staff Member Allison McCabe, who is one of Alistair’s tutors. “It’s rewarding to see how in just a short time, we helped him to read and write better. I’m studying to be a teacher, and it makes me happy to see his improvement, and hopefully my helping him is beneficial to the both of us.”
“We highly appreciate the effort that all the staff members in R.A.S.C.A.L.S. program made to help Alistair grow, and all the supporters of Youth Center to make this program happen,” added his mother.
