For 73-year-old Rosetta Handy, and the second-graders who dote on her, it’s a 50/50 proposition, with winners all around.
“They help me as much as I help them,” Handy said of her volunteer work as a tutor at Belmont Elementary School in a low-income West Baltimore neighborhood. “They give you energy. You learn psychology all over again.”
Recent research indicates that Handy knows of what she is talking about — documenting significant health benefits for the tutors.
Handy, who worked many years for the Social Security Administration, is in her fifth year with the Experience Corps, a program operating in 22 US cities that trains volunteers over 55 to tutor and mentor elementary school students.
Roughly 2,000 volunteers currently work with about 20,000 students, but the Experience Corps — buoyed by positive feedback and encouraging research — hopes to double its scope within five years.
The program’s concepts have seemed promising ever since it was founded as a pilot project in 1995, but new academic studies have validated the optimism that it is a boon for the volunteers as well as the students.
A two-year, US$2 million study completed last year by researchers at Washington University in St Louis, involving 881 second and third-graders in three cities, found that students with Experience Corps tutors made better than 60 percent more progress with reading comprehension and sounding out new words than comparable students not in the program. Separate studies by Washington University and by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that the tutoring led to measurable improvements for the volunteers, compared with adults of similar age and demographics, in physical activity and mental health.
One small-scale study reported last year in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences included sophisticated neuroimaging of 17 study members more than 60 years old, including eight Experience Corps volunteers in Baltimore. Its findings suggested that tutoring young children in reading and math could delay or even reverse brain aging.
The lead researcher, professor Michelle Carlson of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is launching a far larger, multi-year study to pursue these preliminary findings. The study focuses on the same population that makes up a majority of the tutors in Baltimore — predominantly African-American women, with modest incomes and an above-average risk of various health problems.
“Ideally, we’d like to see if this mentoring program reduces the risk for dementia and other costly diseases,” Carlson said. “We’ll be looking at whether we can recalibrate their rate of aging and show that people at the greatest health risk are the ones who can benefit most immediately.”
There has been extensive research in recent years suggesting that mental exercises such as crossword puzzles could help elderly people slow the deterioration of their brain, but Carlson said it was possible that tutoring children might be even more effective by integrating cognitive, physical and social activity.
“How many crossword puzzles can you do before you get bored with them?” she asked. “This tutoring gets people engaged in doing what the brain is supposed to do; the brain is a social organ.”
“The message to them is to take all their accumulated wisdom of a lifetime and give it back to help other people,” Carlson said. “They get out of bed in the morning, even when they don’t feel great, because they have a social contract with the kids at school. They know a child is waiting for them.”
“They get out of bed in the morning, even when they don’t feel great, because they have a social contract with the kids at school. They know a child is waiting for them.”
Minnie Broady, a 62-year-old volunteer, does not need any research findings to know that the tutoring has rejuvenated her. A former teacher at Baltimore City Community College, she was sidelined by a heart attack and deeply depressed at what might lie ahead. But now she feels better than she has in years.
“This has saved my life — I’m not going to lie to you,” she said, her voice briefly breaking with emotion. “Some of the children are a challenge, but it has been a great help to me.”
She is no pushover. Some of the pupils call her “sarge,” and she preaches the need for self-respect and responsibility.
“They need that,” she said. “They feel that they can do whatever they want to do, and there’s no repercussions.”
The Baltimore tutors generally work 15 hours a week, receiving an annual stipend of about US$2,800 that helps cover transportation costs, school lunches and occasional treats for the kids.
In the classrooms, the tutors generally work with one or two students at a time, giving them extra practice on math or reading.
If a child is acting up, the tutor can take him or her aside for a quiet discussion while the regular teacher proceeds uninterrupted with the other pupils.
“You can imagine the difference having 15 extra mature adults around the school,” said Sylvia McGill, director of Experience Corps’ Baltimore operation. “The principals tell us it’s a more teachable, calmer environment, and a lot of young, first-year teachers say they wouldn’t have made it without their volunteer.”
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