April is National Volunteer Month and as an AmeriCorps member with Math Corps, Maggie Purinton has focused on providing Dodge Center students extra practice and support to improve their math skills. Over the past four years, she has contributed 3,600 hours to helping students succeed!
Maggie has been a resident of Dodge Center for 20 years and lives here with her husband of almost nineteen years. They have two children, which attend Triton. Maggie loves to bake and go one road trips as a family.
When COVID hit, Maggie was a stay at home mom and had the ability to have her children stay home and do online learning through the district. Her son happened to be in 2nd grade, and with being home, she was able to help him with his school work and found great joy in helping him with that work. This inspired her to join MathCorps, so she could help more students in my community. She has been with AmeriCorps, specifically MathCorps for 4 years.
Maggie currently tutors students from Kindergarten through 3rd grade. Every school day, she meets with pairs of students for 20 minutes of math practice to help them build their skills. On her current caseload, she tutors 14 students. She does have some repeated students, but she has told them, “As you get older, the work gets harder and if they are able to come see me, we can work on that harder work together and grow.”
Some of the biggest challenges for her personally, Maggie comments is, “I love helping the students and I want to help all of them but our day is limited and I sometimes am not able to reach all of the students that I wish I could teach”.
One of her biggest rewards is watching a student who may have struggled in a process, all of a sudden understand what we have been working on, kind of like the saying, watching the lightbulb light up.
Tutors work one on one or in small groups with students who need extra help in building their skills. With volunteers like Maggie supplementing the teachers work in the classroom, students have seen remarkable growth. She’s been invaluable to our community, and the students have fun working with her.
With the school year drawing to a close it is good acknowledge volunteers such as Maggie and all she’s done to support our students – They play an incredible role as part of the school community. We’re looking for more great people like Maggie to join our team as tutors. If you’re interested, please visit join.readingandmath.org.
