DECA Begins New Tutoring Program

A new DECA project based on tutoring and community outreach was started at East this year; it is something that gets kids that aren’t part of DECA or the marketing classes involved in the project, and helps the community. Seniors Alex Maday, Claire Gilman and Maddie Hise have teamed up with SHARE to start a project they hope will continue on into the future, called School Buddies.

School Buddies is a program where every Thursday, 10 East students go to Comanche Elementary, who’s students eventually feed into Shawnee Mission West, during seminar and work with the kids on reading, math, spelling or anything else the students are struggling with.

“I think it’s a great way to help out people who are in our community and a great way to give back,” senior Faith Connelly said.

Former East administrator Steve Loe is now the principal at Comanche, and felt that with the larger class sizes they were dealing with, his students needed more specialized attention than they were getting.

“Mr. Loe brought this up to [Principal] McKinney, who then went and talked to Pat and Leslie, the SHARE leaders about it.” Senior Alex Maday said. “The seven SHARE executives decided that it was too big of a project to take on since we already were doing a lot, so we decided to take it on as our DECA project for the year.”

Since this is the first year, Maday, Hise and Gilman are trying to continue to improve the program so that it can become a SHARE project after this year.

“I wasn’t sure what it was going to be like at first and wasn’t sure if I would be any good with the kids,” junior Sam Pottenger said, “but once I was in the classroom and got comfortable, it was a lot more fun than I expected.”