Positive PEOPLE in Pinecrest – Logan Kraus

Positive PEOPLE in Pinecrest - Logan Kraus
Positive PEOPLE in Pinecrest - Logan Kraus
Logan Kraus

Palmetto High School junior Logan Kraus is an incredibly busy teenager. He is part of Tutoring for Tomorrow, a successful tutoring program started by Joseph Shomar.

“We are expanding to Coral Reef High,” he says. “We take half the money from the tutors and donate half to Palmetto and various research funds.”

Kraus was not involved in the original founding of the tutoring program, but he expects to take it over when Shomar goes off to college. The program has enough volume that they hired a person to take in the calls and match them to tutors. Kraus averages 20 student tutoring sessions a week.

“Most of our clients are from Palmetto High, but we get a lot from Palmetto Middle, some from Killian, some from Coral Reef and all the surrounding middle and high schools.”

On his own, Kraus goes to Frank C. Martin Middle School and tutors kids in Algebra and geometry for free. Kraus attended the International Baccalaureate program there.

“I started that up just this year. It was initially more a matter of who needed tutoring and now it’s a consistent 20 students each week,” he says.

He began tutoring at F.C. Martin because he believes the school gave him a great start on the academic track that he is on now.

“I wanted to give back to the school,” Kraus says. “We have almost exhausted the subject of geometry. I’m introducing them to the Mu Alpha Theta geometry tests.”

Through the math honor society, Kraus participates in math competitions. His competition agenda includes going to the state level in a calculus contest.

“Math is definitely my strongest subject; that and science,” he says. “I do enjoy calculus, it’s a lot of problem solving.” This year he is taking Advanced Placement Calculus.

This summer he plans to take multivariable calculus at Miami-Dade College because he will have completed the work for all the math classes available to him at Palmetto.

Kraus is involved in the National Honor Society and competes for the Science National Honor Society. He’s participated in Envirothon and is particularly proud that his team received first place in the soil and land use category because that’s his area of expertise.

“The other big competition was the Astronaut Challenge. It was the first time that we’ve done it,” he says. “Our team was in the top five.”

While he’s good at math and science, he’s also very good at writing.

“I like to write science-based poems,” he says. “Every other line is a chemical equation. I wrote one that was entirely computerbased code.”

Kraus received two first place Silver Key Awards and three honorable mentions for poetry and short stories in the Scholastic contest. He is a member of the Creative Writing Club and is responsible for coming up with the writing prompts they use from week to week. “We do a lot of poetry based prompts and a lot of collaboration type prompts,” he says. Since he was in the sixth grade, he has been a member of a rock ensemble playing electric bass. The group plays four shows a year.

“We played at FIU and at Tobacco Road. Our next show is probably going to be at the Stage Club,” he says.

“We used to focus on classic rock, but lately it’s more modern.”

There is still time for Kraus to decide on a college and finalize a major, but at this point he thinks he may go into environmental engineering with a focus on energy.

By Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld


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