Floor-to-ceiling windows, wooden buttresses and old-fashioned chandeliers are all a part of the newly restored architectural heart of Palo Alto High School’s historic Tower Building.
That heart — what’s being called the Tower Learning Center — will be available for tutoring and studying starting Monday for students and teachers alike. The TLC will be accessible from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. throughout the school week.
According to intervention specialist and math teacher YJ Lee, staff members are still working on who will be supervising the area and how the space will be used.
“We are trying to be super intentional with the space,” Lee said. “It’s not really going to be a place to come and lounge and hang around. We really want the transition to be as smooth as possible, and that’s part of my job.”
Lee said the Paly administration hopes the TLC will offer more than just peer tutoring by providing adult experts to help students in more challenging subjects.
“We’re expanding beyond peer tutors,” Lee said. “We want to bring in adult volunteers or even have students from Stanford or other college campuses come in.”
According to Assistant Principal Jerry Berkson, the new tutoring system will not necessarily replace the previous peer tutoring practices students might be familiar with but instead modify them.
“It’s like an expanded version of the old peer tutor system with eventually adult tutors,” Berkson said. “We hope the center will be a kind of student hub in connection with Wellness [Center] and with safe people including a lot of academic and non-academic support.”
The TLC is intended to assist students who struggle with any type of subject. According to Lee, the future goal of the Tutoring Center is to also provide assistance to students for non-Paly classes.
“I’ve been talking to a lot of teachers on campus and the hope is, for example, to have volunteers who are fluent in higher levels of a foreign language or maybe teachers in higher math,” Lee said.
The new TLC was Paly’s old library a century ago, and after phases that didn’t highlight the space’s beauty, the new renovation has restored the room to how it was originally, according to Berkson.
“We tried to replicate the tutoring center to the way it looked back then,” Berkson said.
