It’s a weekday afternoon at Sylvan Learning Center, and students large and small hover on cushioned chairs around little tables.
One group of high school students is going over math problems, while a trio of middle schoolers do English lessons with their tutor. Painted in a sunny yellow, the roomy space, lined with posters and shelves crammed with books, looks like a typical classroom. Rebecca Johnson, owner of this tutoring franchise in Coventry and another in Cumberland, jokes these hourlong sessions are quiet chaos.
This is where 80 kids from K-12 get after-school and Saturday help with subjects ranging from math, reading and writing to science and foreign languages. There’s also prep work for tests, including SATs and GEDs.
In addition, the service helps adult learners, such as the woman in her 60s who wanted to improve her reading. Most of the tutors have day jobs as teachers. According to the company website, students in their personalized programs achieve up to three times more growth in math and reading scores than their peers. “We complement what they’re learning in school,” Johnson said.
Johnson grew up in Burrillville. Her father was a screen printer and her mom was a purchasing clerk. “We were in the snow band with no school Foster-Glocester. Everything was a hike. We had to drive more than 15 minutes to get anywhere. When other Rhode Islanders say they can’t do that, we just roll our eyes,” she said. “We were about family and community there.”
School was always her thing. “I knew in first grade I wanted to be a teacher,” Johnson said. “I loved the environment. The idea of education and working with students and adults, sharing with and being inspired by them intrigued me. “
In high school, she was a good student and went on to Rhode Island College, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and psychology in 2000, the first in her family to get a college degree.
After graduation, she was a substitute teacher when a friend got her a part-time job at the Sylvan facility in Cumberland. Within a year, she was the center’s education director. “I never left,” she said. Then in 2005, her boss, who owned the franchise, took on the Coventry operation as well. Johnson moved up and ran that. When the owner retired in 2019, Johnson bought both centers, now called Sylvan Learning of Rhode Island, months before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We shut down for a short time in 2020, but with [videoconferencing], we were up and running within days,” she said. “Our programs are adaptive; we uploaded them to a digital platform. The biggest thing was communicating with kids and their parents. I saw it with my own son, Matthew, who was 8. He wasn’t getting what he needed with virtual tutoring.”
The center reopened in person in June 2020.
The pandemic may have passed, but it still casts a long shadow. Some kids excelled academically during that time, but many didn’t. And working online can result in brain and eye strain, Johnson says. There are other longer-term effects, as well.
“The new normal we see with students going into 12th grade is that they’re performing as ninth graders. We use achievement tests that provide comparisons to kids across the U.S. There are some huge gaps to fill. Some parents come here because they don’t want that for their kids,” she said.
One approach to tackling these challenges is to boost students’ confidence, easing their anxiety about math or English. Some kids are avid test takers, she says. Others struggle with tests.
“Having a coach helps,” Johnson said. “We go back and fill in the gaps. It may mean starting from scratch. Some need that rote learning over and over. Building confidence is half the battle when a kid thinks, ‘I’m no good at math.’ ”
Johnson says it’s gratifying when a student who’s been feeling discouraged sees results. She had a student who earned a 90 on a test and a postcard from the school telling him his improved effort hadn’t gone unnoticed. Another student didn’t look like he was even going to finish high school. “I love that kid who worked so hard and graduated,” she said.
Being a small-business owner can be scary, and it’s hard to put everything on pause at the end of the day. “I wake up thinking about it,” Johnson said. “Luckily my husband, Matthew, has a schedule where he can get our son off the bus in the afternoon. You need support from your family and staff to keep your life going.”
She also loves to read, from historical and contemporary fiction to “chick lit.” It started when she was a child. “I emphasize to kids who aren’t readers that it takes you away into someone else’s life,” she said.
Then again, she realizes she was lucky. School was easy for her. “I had inspiring teachers. It was logical for me,” she said.
And every kid is different, Johnson acknowledges. “I’m so blessed to do what I do and to work on that with each child,” she said.
