|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The summer before his junior year, Westminster Christian School senior Landon Glavach decided to start a math tutoring program for kids in the Westminster Elementary School.
“I met with the elementary school principal and the tech teacher,” he says.
He then lined up students from the high school to go to the elementary school to tutor the students. They matched a student and a tutor for the weekly sessions so there would be continuity.
Generally, they had between seven and eleven elementary children participating.
Math was the priority for the tutoring, however, if the math homework only took 30 minutes, the rest of the hour could be used to work on other homework.
The program ran from Sept. 2019 to March 2020 when schools went from in-person to online.
“We met around 18 times last school year,” he says.
COVID concerns kept the program from starting when school began in August with target start dates of after Thanksgiving or after Christmas break.
If he’s able to restart the program, his mom, the librarian at the elementary school, has a request. She’d love for him to provide reading tutors.
While at Westminster, Glavach participated on two mission trips to Colombia. He planned on going on another trip last November but it was cancelled for safety concerns. Glavach says FARC took over the jungle and it was deemed unsafe to take high school students into a potentially volatile situation. This year COVID kept the Westminster students home.
“We went down there and built a church building,” he says.
His freshman year, the teens helped pour concrete for the floor of the building. The next year, they created the foundation for another section of the church.
“We had a group of 15. The first year me and two of my friends went down together,” he says. “We enjoyed going on the trip and spending time with the people there.”
They talked up their experiences and the next year more friends signed up.
Glavach volunteered at several summer camps through his four years of high school. He worked at the Vacation Bible School at his church, Old Cutler Presbyterian, for a couple of years. He also volunteered at the Westminster Summer Fun Camp.
He also volunteered at the Robotics Summer Camp, to help out his friend’s mom and because he’s a member of the Robotics Club.
The teams usually have students who are programmers, someone to document the process and mechanics. His specialty is mechanics.
At Westminster, he’s been in leadership all four years, from being treasurer his freshman year to now being on the executive board.
Last spring, he helped found a sports statistic program. The participants go to practices and sporting events and write down all the statistics for the game. He recruited students who were then assigned by the athletics director to attend the practices and the games.
Last year he was placed with the baseball team but games and practices were almost immediately halted because of COVID. This fall he was assigned to the girls’ volleyball team.
He plotted each shot by players on both teams. He rated the passes and gave the information to the coach. They used the charts to see which players they should aim toward when making hits.
In the future, he would like to be a sports statistic guy – like a Nate Silver of the 538.
He plans on double majoring in Economics and Statistics depending on which school he attends.
Glavach has applied to the University of Florida, Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, Wheaton College and Pomona College.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
