Students to Tutor Birmingham Youth

"Human, rather than civil rights" will be at issue this summer when 20 Harvard and Miles College students begin a cooperative, pioneer program to tutor Birmingham elementary school pupils, Jen W. Clifton '63 said yesterday.

Clifton, director of the PBH Birmingham Volunteer Teaching Project, said that ten Harvard volunteers and ten students from Miles, Birmingham's municipal Negro college, will receive one or two hours a week of training in teaching remedial reading between now and June. Transcribed tapes of weekly Harvard classes will be sent to Miles to insure uniform preparation.

"It's an alternative to demonstrations and a progressive achievement that can't be lost," Clifton said. He predicted that the 200 fourth-graders selected for the project would make several years of progress in verbal skills.

Clifton explained that students entering fourth grade were selected for the project because reading deficiencies are first apparent when formal verbal instruction stops. "The minute you stop teaching them how to read, the kids start falling behind," he said.

Estimated cost of the program is $12,366. The group will appeal to several grand foundations, and those volunteers who can, afford it will not be paid for their work.

Miles College will probably cut tuition for its own ten volunteers. Clifton reported that the college is "extremely enthusiastic" about the project, as are those students who participated in the voter registration effort. An honors group, which already tutors fellow Miles students, has also offered to aid the summer project.

The Birmingham white community will not present a problem, according to Clifton. The superintendents of several schools have already offered teaching program was "set up to teach, not to equipment and visual aid materials.

No Birmingham white will be affected, since "we're not planning to work in their neighborhoods, or teach in their schools--or change their lives," Clifton asserted. He said the purpose of the program is educational, and that it aims at problems that are the same in any low income area.

Although the program is affiliated with PBH, volunteers will be sought outside the service organization. They will practice teaching in several Cambridge institutions, after their training in teaching remedial reading.