When Gerald Lopez found out Sul Ross Middle School might replace its in-person student tutoring program with a virtual option due to funding cuts, he immediately jumped into action.
Using his connections as a current Alamo Community Colleges District trustee, a former Northside Independent School District board member and a mentor for students at Sul Ross, he picked up the phone to ask around.
“We don’t need a computer system to tutor our students. We need real people,” he recalled thinking when he heard the news. “We need young, energetic students wanting to better themselves and also better their community.”
Lopez found a solution: community work-study through Alamo Colleges, a way for students eligible for work-study under the federal student aid program to work off-campus, benefitting employers who can’t afford to hire them on their own.
Now, Sul Ross has two student tutors from Northwest Vista College and is still hiring for a couple more.
A high-needs school
Nestled between Loop 410 and Stotzer Freeway on the West Side, Sul Ross is one of Northside ISD’s most economically disadvantaged schools, with 84.4% of its students fitting in that group. Across the entire district, 49.9% of students are considered economically on average.
The campus has a C-rating of 78 from the state, and several Sul Ross students will likely be the first in their families to go to college, said principal Mahntie Reeves.
That’s why Sul Ross leaders prize their Advancement Via Individual Determination elective, aka AVID. The college preparedness elective, offered at every middle school and high school in NISD, targets the “middle” students who show drive but who may not be scoring at the top of their classes.
Jennifer Cantu oversees AVID programs across Northside ISD and said Sul Ross’s is one of the district’s strongest.
Used across the nation, most school districts offer some version of AVID, teaching students about things like grade point averages, schedule-building, resumes and college applications.
“We teach them skills like note-taking, organization — a lot of those soft skills that will help them be successful here and even beyond high school,” said Carolyn Moreno, an AVID coordinator and teacher at Sul Ross.
Before recent funding cuts at the district level, Moreno used to hire a handful of student tutors every semester to give her AVID students extra support. She said it was important for her middle schoolers to interact with someone like them in a college setting.
Sul Ross serves around 800 students and about 250 are enrolled in AVID. The program serves about 4,000 students across the entire district.
NISD cut 10% of its budget across the board last year — and the cuts hit every department, including the office of advanced academics, which contains AVID.
Having to spend their limited funds on essentials, all NISD campuses that hired in-person tutors were directed to use a virtual option starting this semester.
Moreno and Reeves said virtual tutoring wouldn’t work for their students.
“We looked at what happened during the COVID years,” Reeves said, recalling the way the 2020 pandemic forced school to move learning online. “The effectiveness of the program — the kids’ interaction with the program — was not the same as we were on an online platform.”
NISD is likely to keep reducing its budget, like most school districts in San Antonio, as it faces a $35 million deficit and undergoes an “optimization” process.
A homecoming
On a Thursday afternoon in March, Ximena Elizondo leads a group of three seventh-grade girls through a grade point average calculation exercise. The girls reflect on their grades, Elizondo helps them when get stuck, and sixth period at Sul Ross zips by.
Elizondo is a familiar face in this classroom. She’s been tutoring AVID students since 2024, and was once an AVID student herself at Sul Ross. Her mom works in the school’s cafeteria.
“If I wasn’t in AVID, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “I didn’t see college as an option. Like, I just thought I was going to go straight to work after high school.”
After graduating, Elizondo enrolled in a nursing program and started tutoring at Sul Ross for extra cash. But working with students changed her mind, and now, she’s getting ready to transfer from Northwest Vista College to a four-year university to get a teaching degree.
Elizondo said she wants to have her own middle school classroom someday. When the district cut in-person tutoring, Elizondo probably would’ve had to find a job outside her field of study, but it was a happy coincidence that she was work-study eligible and an Alamo Colleges student.
Now, she has her tutoring job back and gets to keep putting hands-on experience under her belt.
Luis Campos, 19, tells a similar story. An NISD graduate, Campos said he’s always known he wants to go into education. When he found out about the opportunity at Sul Ross, he jumped on it.
The Sul Ross students like having Elizondo and Campos in the class, often asking them questions about their college lives and making easy conversation.
It’s a dynamic officials at Alamo Colleges said they saw the value in when visiting the campus last year to observe student tutors work in AVID classrooms. Leonard Bass, who is assistant vice chancellor and oversees career development at Alamo Colleges, said the program would fit nicely with a student’s “life cycle,” including hands-on experience and job placement.
It’s also not the first time Northside ISD has partnered with Alamo Colleges for work-study positions. During COVID, Northside hired Alamo College students to support its IT department as families and students shifted learning online.
Through its community work-study program, Alamo Colleges is used to working with school districts, nonprofits and government agencies that don’t have the resources to hire some staff on their own. Offered since 2015, the program currently has around 600 available positions for financially eligible Alamo Colleges students to pick from.
“The objective is number one to provide or put money into the pockets of students,” said Martha Treviño, who oversees the community-based work-study program. “The second objective is to ensure that students get career relevant work experience while they’re students.”
Treviño is also the one who checked Elizondo’s work-study eligibility once she found out she was tutoring at Sul Ross before NISD cut budgets.
“It’s almost like was meant to be,” Treviño said.
