Homework help available for students, parents

When textbook availability to students after school hours dwindled last year, parents were left up in arms.

Superintendent John Bourque said that was among the biggest complaints when Common Core was fully implemented in schools last year.

Now in year two of implementation, despite the limbo-esque nature of it this year, the Acadia Parish school district is doing everything it can to help parents help their children with homework. That started with workbooks students could bring home for math, but other subjects as well as math itself, have continued to give parents and students problems.

The district’s supervisor of media/technology/textbooks, Darla LeJeune, has gotten that dialogue going by presenting several options for families, including one that is provided by the Louisiana Library Association through funding as she explained during a presentation at the Acadia Parish School Board’s Personnel, Insurance and Curriculum Committee meeting earlier this week.

“Every student in the district and every teacher in the district that we’ve shared this with thinks this is an amazing resource,” she said.

The website, homeworkla.org, provides live and free one-on-on help for students on a variety of subject matter and is very user-friendly. There is also an app for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch as well as through Android devices, Tutor.com To Go. It features experts in all subject areas on hand to help students. Hours of operation for the website are Sunday through Thursday, 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. for kindergarten through college-aged students. Tutors are available on the app from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., according to LeJeune.

LeJeune, along with several teachers in the parish and students, demonstrated how the website and app works to the board members.

“We’re going to show you what they can do to get the help they need and become independent learners,” she said. “When (the students) need help and no one can help them, they have an avenue.”

As she and several of the board members later pointed out, the tutor does not just give an answer to a math problem or English sentence, but instead tries to get the student to come up with the answer on his or her own with guided steps. LeJeune added that by teaching younger students about this website now, when they no longer look to parents for homework help but are stuck, they will already be well aware of the tutoring website.

For more information, visit homeworkla.org, contact the Acadia Parish Library or the Acadia Parish School Board.