Santa Clara’s Gupta brothers, Rishab, 15, and Ayush, 13, believe that students learn much better in the classroom than with distance learning. So Rishab, a student at Santa Clara High School, founded an online tutoring service called YouTutor so learners can get extra academic help outside of school.
“I initially started this in late April.” Rishab said. “I needed some administrative help as we had an increase of tutors and students at the same time. That’s when I asked Ethan Buriel, also a student at Santa Clara High School, to join my team as the Director of Operations. I asked my brother Ayush, the Director of Marketing, to create media and flyers. So, we created a promotional video to recruit tutors and students.”
Because of sheltering-in-place due to COVID-19, the founding team members of YouTutor wanted students to have more opportunities for enriched learning. This tutoring service aims to work with students as young as the kindergarten-aged and as old as high school juniors and seniors who are studying for their standardized tests.
What distinguishes YouTutor from other tutoring services is that YouTutor’s services are free.
“Our tutoring is completely free,” Ayush said. “We aren’t asking students to pay during this stressful time.”
“We accept optional donations and we are donating these funds to Feeding America. This organization provides food around the nation to those who are hungry,” Rishab said. “All our tutors are working as volunteers, and we understand that it’s for the benefit of the community. We are not officially a non-profit organization yet, but we are going through the paper work to make YouTutor a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization.”
“We offer a wide variety of regular classes taught in public school, such as math, science, English and history,” Ayush said. “We also teach Spanish and Chinese. We also offer non-traditional courses. We have tutors teaching calligraphy, video editing and theater. We want our courses to offer variety. For the higher demand classes, like math or science, we teach actual classes to small groups. For classes that require more attention between the tutor and student, we offer these classes with a one to one teacher to student ratio.”
According to Ayush, most of YouTutor’s tutors are high school students from all grades though one tutor so far is a college student in Europe. While a few tutors come from outside of California, most of the high school tutors attend Santa Clara High School.
“The most important thing for a tutor to have is patience,” Rishab said. “Since we’re doing everything online, you have to be patient with your student and understand that everyone learns at a different pace. Recently, what we started doing was reaching out to ESL and special needs students because we realize that kids who have a language barrier or need extra help might benefit from tutoring. We’ve recruited about 10 ESL and special needs students who are getting good help with us.”
Visit www.yoututorba.org for more information about YouTutor.
