A Plano Independent School District student who found a way to help himself and his peers study ended up helping over 100 other students.
During the pandemic, Gautam Penna saw a documentary about the number of students failing.
“I was watching a news documentary online during the pandemic,” explained Penna. “I saw that 70% of high schoolers were failing at least one class. I thought, ‘What could I do?'”
When he decided it was time to do something about it, Penna invited classmates to a study session. Surprisingly, 150 students showed up to the first session.
Penna’s study sessions were different from traditional programs offered at school because, in this instance, the students were doing the teaching.
Ninth-grader Louisa Xu told NBC 5 DFW, “It helps students learn, grow, and get help from older people, such as sophomores, who already have experience in these subjects.”
Penna’s non-curricular organization is called Student Organized Academic Refinement (SOAR). So far, over 500 students at Plano East Senior High have participated in the program.
“I wanted to see how the study session would be and how my friends could teach other people,” said Parameshwar Chamarthi, a 10th-grade student.
The number of student leaders willing to help out rapidly increased, allowing the program to expand.
It is now a non-profit volunteer organization that facilitates learning with “original practice questions, notes pages, and presentations” created by the student instructors.
Now traveling across Plano ISD, SOAR is making this opportunity accessible to all district students, resulting in hundreds of students improving test scores and refining their academic achievement.
A large proportion of Dallas ISD students might benefit from similar peer-study organizations, especially considering the district’s poor performance on achievement tests for years. Nearly 20% of the graduating class of 2022 failed to graduate on time, and 59% of students failed to score at grade level on last year’s STAAR exam, even as Dallas teachers work hard with limited resources and support to provide quality education for their students.
DISD had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.