Our Online School: One-on-One, Wherever You Are

At Pacific Preparatory School, we continue to offer the same stellar, one-on-one, customized education experience to our students online.

In the early days of Tutor Corps (circa 2002), our founder, Jesse Roselin, began this company when he recognized the emerging need for in-home tutors in the San Francisco Bay Area. Soon thereafter, he began offering one-on-one homeschool instruction to students throughout the region. While we’ve been offering homeschool services since then, we’ve recently renamed our program with the launch of our private school: Pacific Preparatory. With Pacific Preparatory School, we continue to offer the same stellar customized education experience to our students but, in addition to the name, a lot has changed since our founding.

Beginnings:

When Jesse speaks about the first student he worked with in this capacity, he does so with great pride and fondness. He was working with a student named Brad* during the spring semester of his 7th grade year. Brad had been expelled and Jesse stepped in to homeschool him for the rest of the school year. They worked together on Brad’s core courses Monday through Thursday. On Fridays, Jesse and Brad loaded up into Jesse’s trusty 1986 Ford Escort and traveled all around the Bay Area, participating in a wide variety of educational field trips. In their time together, Jesse acted as a teacher and mentor. Brad was soon able to identify and harness his passion for the arts, photography, and music and turn it into an inherent motivation to learn. They read Rule of the Bone together, a coming-of-age story about a 14 year-old who had dropped out of school. In a telling moment, Brad said to Jesse, “I did not know they wrote books like this.” 

Expanding Our Reach

Jesse’s experience with Brad has been replicated many times over throughout our history of offering one-on-one in-home instruction. That said, we have evolved a lot since Jesse’s early days with Brad. First of all, we’ve launched Pacific Preparatory and expanded rapidly. Jesse’s team now includes six administrative faculty members who curate stellar curriculum and ensure that each and every family is supported at every stage of the schooling process. We also have a sizable fleet of Pacific Preparatory teachers and students throughout the United States. In addition to our students in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, our current roster includes students living in the East Coast, Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. This is because technology has completely revolutionized the educational landscape. 

While we still love supporting students like Brad and fully embrace the transformative power of in-home private education, technology has allowed us to bring this experience to students, no matter where they live. It is thus with pride and excitement that Pacific Preparatory now enrolls online students.

With our online platform, students and teachers use a trackpad and stylus to work together on an interactive whiteboard. They also collaborate via screen, audio, and video sharing. We ship materials directly to students and teachers so that students still have a “hands-on” experience. Of note, we recently sent a couple of our elementary students science kits and lab coats so that they could conduct at-home science experiments overseen by our teacher!

With Pacific Preparatory Online, students still get access to what has always worked so well with one-on-one in-home education: amazing mentors who build meaningful relationships and help students unlock their full potential. Now, our teachers can be more easily available wherever and whenever students need them! Is your child often traveling for sports? Does your family wish to live outside of a major city? Is your child immunocompromised? Does your student benefit from periodic check-ins between classes? We’re here to help!  With online private education, Pacific Preparatory adapts its offerings to the ever-changing technological landscape in which it first found its feet. Now, we can also provide our services to families outside of the Bay Area and L.A. Further, we can now recruit the best-of-the-best teachers from all over the country.

Why We Love Online Learning

People sometimes ask: what’s the difference between in-person and online teaching?

To them, I always say: virtually nothing. What is often difficult about distance learning is the impersonal nature of recorded lectures and faceless discussion boards. Pacific Preparatory’s one-on-one model avoids this pitfall because our very premise prioritizes a personalized education based on discussion and exploration. When conversation and mentorship are at the heart of a student/teacher interaction, there is no significant difference between the results achieved with in person versus online education.

In fact, students with online teachers gain digital literacy and improve their ability to express themselves in writing, a vital skill in today’s economy. The number one factor in educational success (in person or online) is the selection of a fantastic teacher with superior communication skills. In this arena, Pacific Preparatory excels. We rigorously hire the most competent, warm, and engaging teachers. Students’ success directly results from their teachers’ ability to encourage discussion, promote reflection, and provide emotional support. With more accessible online check ins and full-length classes, the opportunities for this type of mentorship are ten-fold. 

Jesse’s days of personally escorting students on field trips around bay area might be behind us, but the future (like our students!) is bright! 

To learn more about online learning at Pacific Preparatory, please contact us for more information. 

*The student’s name has been changed for his privacy. 

This article has been written by Staci Stutsman.