The creation of the new Peer and Academic Resource Center in Lassen Hall has been officially announced by Joseph Sheley, provost and vice president of academic affairs. The mission of the center is to create a support system in which students are in collaboration for academic success.

The center plans to offer tutoring, peer advising and workshops run by students. Sheley said he hopes this center would be fully launched when the spring semester begins.

“It is more than a tutoring center,” Sheley said. “The goal is to increase our capacity to make sure students are making progress toward graduation.”

Sheley said he heard about the success of other institutions implementing peer advising and tutoring that he hopes he can bring to Sacramento State.

This center is an experiment for Sac State to acquire answers from the student body about their needs.

“I guess in theory we could get 30 students or 3,000 students. Nobody knows yet,” Sheley said. “We don’t have a marker yet.”

The center’s creation has been in the works since August of this year.

The center is associated with the Student Academic Success and Educational Equity Program at Sacramento State. Student Academic Success and Educational Equity’s goal is to improve retention and graduation rates of diverse student populations at Sac State.

“It was their director, Marcellene Watson-Derbigny, who said now that we are changing Learning Skills ‘Why don’t we take the opportunity to try something new here?'” Sheley said. “She came up with the acronym PARC.”

The Peer and Academic Resource Center program has taken over the room in Lassen Hall of the now defunct Learning Skills Center.

The Learning Skills Center housed the remedial program for students studying English and math.

“When a freshman comes in they are given some assessment of his or her skill sets either in reading or writing in English or math. We have had a number of retirements in that area,” Sheley said. “We don’t have the resources to immediately to go out and start that up again. So what we did was we moved the English side of that over to the English department. We moved the math side over to teacher education.”

Sheley said there are some peer-tutors and counselors on this campus but not many.

One of those peer-based tutorial programs at Sac State is the College Assistance Migrant Program.

This educational program assists students who come from migrant worker upbringings. This program gives support and skills to first-year students from these backgrounds to help them with the rest of their college career. Julio Ramirez, engineering major, is a math peer mentor for this program.

In the beginning of the semester, Ramirez as well as his other co-mentors worked on a drop-in basis. As the semester progressed, there were contact forms the professors sent out to show whether these students are passing their classes within the program.

If not, they get referred to the program’s tutors and counselors.

“If they are in danger of failing or close to failing that is when we come into play,” Ramirez said.

There is a minimum of five hours a week the referred students have to complete with the program’s tutors.

During those hours at the College Assistant Migrant Program, these students must be reading, studying or researching.

Ramirez said he sees the value of peer counselors based on his own experience.

“When I was a freshman in college, most of my tutors were students who were almost at the graduation point in college,” Ramirez said.

Ramirez felt a shared experience with the tutors and himself so it made it easier to approach them.

As a tutor, Ramirez said he does not want to be seen as a teacher, but as a student who is helping out.

There are regular to one-time visits by students that Ramirez deals with at the program.

The College Assistance Migrant Program is going through some changes designed to help the program supervise its members more adequately through the creation of an electronic database of its students.

A peer-based group, which has a focus within a major, is through the College of Business. Nathan Leo, accounting and finance major, co-leads the peer-tutoring group in Tahoe Hall.

“As a tutor here at the College of Business Administration, we have limited resources,” Leo said. “We used them to the best of our ability. However, I feel additional services are always better. There are more students who could benefit from additional tutoring or peer reviews services here on campus.”

Leo said being a peer-based tutor within the business program not only helps the student, but also helps the tutor gain a better understanding of the subject matter.

“Overall, the experience of being a tutor has been extremely rewarding,” Leo said. “Getting to play a role in the success of the students here at the College of Business has been one of the highlights of my upper-division course work.”

Sheley said he has seen some good and bad in retention and probation rates with Sac State students.

“We are in pretty good shape with freshmen. They come in and we tend to retain them at fairly high numbers,” Sheley said. “We tend to have more challenges in the second year.”

Sheley said he would like to focus on the sophomore troubles and help any other person who is having problems in college.

“This is a really common issue throughout the U.S. What happens in most schools is that freshmen come in and most universities, including Sac State, really are attentive,” Sheley said. “They get through and then we don’t pay as much attention to them in the second year.”

An added benefit to this center is it could serve as an indicator to areas in academic advising needing a little help in assisting students.

“Part of that effort is to make sure to get advising on better footing or more even footing across all the colleges and majors,” Sheley said. “We need now to get back to those majors, those departments and begin to do this, which would provide some relief.”

Sheley said he wants the center to be accommodating to all students across all majors.

“What I hope in the short run is this is a model that works here. I assume that it will, but I would be foolish to say that for sure,” Sheley said. “So for me, it’s one of many experiments to try to find the best combination of realistic and practical advising strategies that don’t assume one size fits all.”

Colin McAteer can be reached at [email protected]