May 2025 The Close of our 21st Year ...Still Adapting and Supporting Students Deb Everson Borofka

It is hard to believe we are coming to the close of our twenty-first year of Reading Writing Center services here at Reedley College. We continue to try to find ways to best support our students every semester. In addition to our regular weekly hours of service, we have been placing tutors in all entry level English classes since 2020-21, both online and in face-to-face classes. The goal is to make tutors more familiar to their peers and to encourage the idea of peer collaboration on a regular basis. We know that regular weekly study groups helps to support motivation, persistence and success. We also know that even single visits with a peer tutor can have have effects beyond the immediate writing project at hand. College is about opening doors, horizons, and minds to new experiences, information, and people.

I want to give a shout out to two particular students from Instructor Julie Thurber's classes. Cade and Stephen have been in the RWC twice a week since the beginning of the semester. Neither one of them is an English major, and both of them have spent hours talking about the books they have read and what they have learned. One of the very real benefits of utilizing support in our Academic Success Centers is sense of community and connection we build with each other over time. These two students come from completely different family, geographic, and career focus backgrounds, but they have spent time together for the past 16 weeks at a table in the RWC, talking about what they are experiencing as students who share an ENGLISH 1A class. They have hung in there. They have a new appreciation for what it means to be able to express themselves clearly and effectively in writing. They have made friends.

The smiles on their faces whenever I see them reminds me that our places in the circle matter. We will continue to be the change the world needs to be one interaction at a time.

Some of our tutors will be leaving us this year.

My own place in this annual cycle of education reminds me about why I am here and what I value. Education changes lives. Skills have been acquired, knowledge explored, goals completed, and now it is time for them, and all of our graduates, to take next steps out into the world. I am both grateful and humbled to bear witness when Graduation arrives. It is a reminder that hope is alive and there are so many possibilities waiting out there for our students. I will miss each of the familiar faces and personalities I have grown to love and admire, but I know they are going to do the best they can with the opportunities they have been given here in their time here at Reedley College.

I will look forward to future postcards and emails because I know they are going to have amazing adventures in the years ahead!