Public Tutoring Corps for Inner City Proposed

State Sens. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) and Hilda Solis (D-El Monte) said Friday they will introduce legislation next week to create a “public school service corps of tutors.”

At an East Los Angeles news conference, the senators said they hope to enlist 3,000 college students as after-school tutors at public schools in Los Angeles’ inner-city neighborhoods by the year 2000.

The proposal would cost an estimated $2 million a year. It would create a work-study program in which college students would have their tuition reduced in exchange for tutoring at-risk youth 10 hours a week.

“There are a lot of [college] students with latent ideals and they are stuck with heavy course loads and high fees and many have two part-time jobs, so they can’t put their ideals into practice very easily,” said Hayden. “That’s where the discount off of fees would come in.”