Pitt students tutor high schoolers

When Jennifer Grayson goes to a Pitt class to promote the College After School Team (CAST),… When Jennifer Grayson goes to a Pitt class to promote the College After School Team (CAST), she leaves them with a parting question.

She tells fellow student that these are people from their communities, and then she asks, “What are you going to do to help?”

CAST sends Pitt students once a week to Peabody High School to serve as tutors, mentors and teaching assistants.

This year, CAST hopes to have 100 Pitt students participate. Sixty have signed up so far.

Peabody’s new principal, John Vater, believes that CAST played a key part in the increased student performance on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests last year – tests required by the No Child Left Behind Act.

The PSSA tests measure if a school has improved the quality of its education over the past year.

Physician Robbie Ali, originally from Pittsburgh, returned to work at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health. Now the director of Pitt’s Center for Healthy Environments and Communities, he said that Peabody High School, “is a low performing school, mostly low income, mostly African-American and has had a declining enrollment,” since the time he attended it.

Ali founded CAST in the spring of 2004 as an experiment. It quickly evolved from an after-school program to a process where Pitt students come during the day to help teach Peabody students. Simultaneously, CAST’s role in Pitt students’ lives has changed from independent study to student initiative.

“My goal is to institutionalize it